5: The Mysterious Reappearance of Mary Edens
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Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kaylin Moore. This is a podcast of heart-pounding tales, and if you've been enjoying, consider leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen. It really helps small podcasts like ours.

Last week, you heard the tragic story of the Sauter family, whose Christmas Eve house fire was the catalyst for decades of twists and turns for Jenny and George Sauter, two parents desperate to figure out what happened to their children that night. I was planning on closing out this year of Heart Starts Pounding with that story, but

This has been an amazing year that saw the launch of this podcast that wouldn't exist without you all. I thought I'd put this podcast out into the void and do it mostly for my own dark curiosity, but it found a little bit of a home in each and every one of you. And for that, I am so grateful. Anyways, that was supposed to be the last episode of the year, but nothing ever goes as planned. Isn't that part of the theme of this whole podcast?

While I was researching the Sodders, I came across another more obscure case, another heart-pounding holiday tale, and I decided I had to slip it in before the year is over. You might hear some shocking similarities to last week's deep dive. A devastating Christmas Eve fire, a missing person, a parent's quest for answers. But what happens when the answer does arrive on your doorstep?

and it leaves you with more doubt than you ever had before. Today, I'm going to take you along the twists and turns of the Babs switch fire and the story of Mary Edens, whose disappearance that night and then reappearance decades later never sat right with anyone, including her parents. It's that feeling.

When the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding. It's when your heart starts pounding.

On Christmas Eve, 1924, exactly 23 years to the night prior to the Sodder family fire, a small schoolhouse in Babswitch, a tiny rural hamlet in Oklahoma, was having a Christmas program. There were a couple of reasons why the program should have been canceled that night. For one, it was snowing sideways and the air outside was sub-zero.

But despite that, around 200 children and adults filed into the one-story schoolhouse, freshly painted with new turpentine. Another new addition to the school was the heavy wire netting that had also recently been placed over the windows. The school was near a train station, and to prevent break-ins and vandalisms from vagrants, the netting had been bolted to the side of the school over all of the windows. Was this like a single-room schoolhouse? Yeah. Yeah.

By today's standards, that's definitely a fire hazard. Uh, yeah, I'm thinking it's not up to fire code. The school was only 36 feet by 26 feet, and people were standing almost shoulder to shoulder inside, spilling from the seats into the aisles and standing against the back walls. A little girl named Mary Edens sat in her aunt Alice's lap, eagerly awaiting Santa Claus, like the rest of the children.

The program went off without a hitch, and then it was time for a 16-year-old boy named Dow Boulding, who was dressed as Santa, to pass out the Christmas gifts. Dow reached back into the tree for a gift, and he pulled down a small branch with him. As he pulled his arm out, the branch snapped back into place, hitting a lit candle in its path.

The candle toppled over onto the cotton and tinsel decorations and a fire exploded across the stage and up the Christmas tree. I don't know. In my mind, fire in the 1920s is different than fire today. Yeah. Like, I can't explain it, but I feel like it was more hot and just...

things faster. Everything was made of flint and asbestos. Yes. And everything was ready to be, to

to catch fire literally at any time like you always hear about these terrible fires that break out in the early 1900s and it's because there's no rules and regulations because there's no rules and regulations like because someone looked at this schoolhouse and was like oh all the windows are bolted shut there's only one door in and oh it's also full of flint asbestos

and paper materials. That's fine. That's fine. Let's cram 200 people in there. There was no like capacity. Like there's no fire marshal capacity. There was no like every couple of feet there has to be a fire extinguisher. No. Apparently the children weren't aware of what was happening at first. Look out Santa, you'll catch on fire. A child laughed at the sight.

But the parents immediately saw the threat and they jumped into action. Some immediately ran for the one door of the schoolhouse. But that door only opened inward. And as the pressure of the building crowd intensified, the door could only be opened partly. Just enough for one person to escape at a time.

If you've ever seen a firehouse demonstration of how fast a fire can grow from a dry Christmas tree, you know that it only takes minutes, sometimes less, for a room to be completely full of black smoke. Another group tended to the tree fire, but in the process of trying to smother it with their coats, they knocked it over. The fire accelerated at an even more devastating rate, and within two minutes, the entire schoolhouse was full of smoke.

Dow, the boy playing Santa, was enveloped by the tree fire almost instantly. His mother's official statement to the newspaper was, I tried to beat out the fire with a paper sack. The sheeting in front of the tree then caught fire. My boy, Dow, who was playing Santa, was enveloped in flames in a flash. I grabbed my youngest boy, Eugene, and got out on the porch. I fainted. They trampled me until I came to.

Then there was the group trying to exit through the windows, largely to no avail. The wiring was so strong that few could break through it. One of those to break out through the netting was Alice. Once she made it out, she was transferred to the Hobart Hospital with the other burn victims, where she started panicking. Where was Mary, the toddler that sat on her lap? She had passed Mary out of a window before escaping herself, but she couldn't remember who was on the receiving end of that pass.

If no one had come forward yet claiming they had picked up a child that wasn't their own, Alice feared the worst. The fire proved to be devastating. 36 people died in total, half of them children. Entire families were killed, as was the case with the Coffey family, who lost four members and a fiancé, set to marry into the family the following day.

They were found with their arms all linked together. Tom Godforth, a man who had stood up when the fire broke out, yelling for everyone to remain calm, that everything would be okay, was found in almost the exact same spot he had been calling out from. Is this story too sad for Christmas? Kaylin...

Why would you do this? This is the saddest thing I've ever heard. I know. No, it is very sad. I definitely agree. And it didn't have to happen. Like that's the saddest part is like... But it's very much a when it rains, it pours type situation. But it's just like, oh my God, their arms were linked together. Yeah, I know. It's messed up. I read that and was like...

This hurts my heart. I know. Well, it's gonna get worse, so hold on. Though the 20s predated DNA technology by decades, many of the bodies, though unrecognizable, were able to be identified. Items of clothing and jewelry were picked out of the rubble and used as definitive evidence for those who had perished. Alice was given some reassuring news.

Nothing of Mary's was found in the fire, including the distinct jewelry she had been wearing that day. In fact, after the search, Mary was the only person unaccounted for after the fire. Alice died within days from smoke inhalation, and any pieces of the memory of her handing Mary to someone died with her, leaving Mary's parents, Ethel and Louis, to wonder, what happened to Mary?

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Over the following years, Ethel and Lewis would hear rumors from the community that people had seen Mary, only to have blood tests rule out the suspect. Again, this was before DNA analysis, so their best guess in the situation was going to be someone who shared the Edens blood type. Every year, articles would run in the local paper commemorating the fire, and a few would mention the search for Mary Edens.

Some of those got picked up nationally, and in 1956, one of these stories caught the eye of Grace Reynolds. So a man by the name of Elmont Place was a Lions Club official living in California who picked up a paper one Sunday and saw the story of the Babs switch fire and the missing Mary Edens. He thought of his good friend Grace, who had confided in him at one point that she never felt like she belonged in her family.

She always had an aching feeling that she had a life before being with them. Doing some quick math in his head, he realized that Grace would have been about the same age that Mary would be. He took the paper to Grace and her eyes lit up.

That would make so much sense. She never felt at home in her family because she was taken from her real family as a child. Grace had no memories of the fire or her former family. But if Mary was only three at the time, that wouldn't be all that unusual. Okay, so it's kind of turning up. Things are kind of... How old was Mary when she disappeared? Three. Okay, so you probably wouldn't remember your life before. I have no memories before I'm like...

I have six. I have like a vague memory of like a birthday cake with a spider on it and some blue icing. That was your second birthday. Yeah, but that's like it. Yeah, we ate that in the backyard. That's crazy you remember that. Well, it feels like a dream. Yeah, right. Oh yeah, because you were obsessed with spiders when you were two years old. You psycho. I mean, it tracks. You were so obsessed with spiders that you had a spider themed party at two years old. Listen, no.

From the womb to the tomb, I am goth, okay? Yes. So together, they wrote a letter to a woman named Betty, who was born to the Reynolds after Mary disappeared. They explained this theory to Betty, and she wrote back to them saying that she didn't want them to contact her parents because they were still dealing with the grief of someone who came forward as Mary and then was ruled out because of a blood test.

But Mary's sister still sent photos of Mary, and Grace underwent a blood test that came back positive. She had the same blood type as all of the Edens. Then there was the scar. Betty told Grace that Mary had a very specific small scar on the arch of her foot. Grace had an identical scar.

That was all Betty needed. A reunion was set to take place on February 9th, 1957. The story of that reunion exploded nationally and was seen by Art Linklater, a popular TV host at the time. A public reunion was scheduled for the program Art Linklater's House Party. This ushered in an era of fame and recognition for Grace, and she kind of loved it.

For clarity, I'm going to continue to call her Grace Reynolds in this story, though the world, and the Edens, saw her as Mary Edens at this time. Something about this story just wasn't sitting right with people. And on February 19th, just 10 days after the family's reunion, a telegram was sent by Mel Bennett, a reporter in Stockton, California, to Al Adams, a chief editor for a paper called The Democrat Chief. It read,

Quote,

Please give additional details, means of identification, financial circumstances of Eden's. We will exchange our information for anything more you can provide on this case." Al Adams started poking around this story after he had gotten a call from a woman named Dorothy Link. Dorothy claimed she was Grace's sister. She had told Adams that she had a letter from another one of Grace's sisters expressing frustration over her falsely claiming to be Mary Eden's.

Okay, sounds like it's definitely her sister. Yeah, that's definitely some sister verbiage. Yeah, absolutely. Dorothy also mentioned that she had been married and divorced from a man named Alfred Reynolds. And six years after the divorce, Grace had married him.

The investigator from the Democrat chief paper suggested that the tension between the sisters may have caused Dorothy to call him. Adams had also received a letter from a Goldie Thomas that read, quote, I hereby certify that Grace Leona Reynolds is my lawful daughter. She was born on July 11th, 1923 on a farm near Cotton Plant, Arkansas, end quote. So

So, the Democrat chief had this bombshell story that they were going to report on about Grace's stolen identity. But the head of the paper, a man named Ransom Hancock, was friends with Louis Edens. And he showed him the story first before running it. Louis read the article and asked that it not be run. He didn't think his poor wife could handle the loss of her daughter Mary again. The story was killed. Sounds like Louis believed it, but was like...

I don't want to put my wife through that again. I'm going to keep the ruse up. No, this man literally just lied to his wife for the rest of his life. Yeah. I mean, I get it. I totally get it, but it's. Do you get it though? That's fucked up. So do you get that? Yeah, I do. Like really? It's messed up, but I get it.

Listen, you lose your toddler in a horrible, horrible fire, not because she perished in the fire, but because someone took her and didn't give her back. You would look me in the eye and be like this random adult that basically everyone who in their life who knows them has said is a fraudster trying to fraud your family. How is she frauding them though? Is she asking for money yet? Is she... She's not asking for money, but like...

She's lying. She's straight up frauding. Fraud is a verb. She's being a fraud.

I get that she's like lying. But if I thought that keeping up this lie. This is insane to me. No, I'm not letting this one die. This is insane to me because you're saying that you would go. You're so Gen Z. You go so far to not hurt someone's feelings that you would lie to them. But it's not just someone. It's my wife.

So arguably the most important person in your life. Yes. You would lie to them to not hurt their feelings about something as ginormous. It's not lying. It's withholding information. That's lying to me, though. That's the exact same thing that happened in the Sauter family fire. No. All of the. No, because.

them closure. It only hurt them. They didn't have a solution. There's a solution. The beef liver was the solution. He was like, let me bury this beef liver in the dirt and that will make everything fine. And he was crazy for that. And he was crazy for that. That was so wild. That was wild. No, in the solder case, it's like, okay, we're going to withhold this information so that they can keep

hope up that maybe one day they'll come home that's one thing this is she's home it's fine if you take that away from her you're killing her again it's like yeah it's lying and it sucks and it's bad but it's for it's so that she doesn't go through like another heartbreak again and

I just agree to disagree. I feel like it's a much more complex feeling than either of us have ever experienced. Oh, absolutely. Like, I can't imagine him being in that situation and having to make that call. And also, it's embarrassing, right, to read it in a tabloid. Like, to read it in the newspaper. And it's so public. And it's so public. Like, we can say until the cows come home how we would react, but we don't know until we're in that scenario. Yeah.

Don't ever put me in that scenario. I just am wondering what else you've lied to me about for fear of hurting my feelings. In 1980, Grace Reynolds wrote a book called Mary, Child of Tragedy, where she expanded on the time after she was taken from the fire. It included the tale of how she was picked up by a vagabond after the fire and had a, quote, slave-like experience after that, end quote.

She claimed that she was once bartered for a bag of beans and was given to whoever needed a slave at the time. Grace lived a nomadic life until she was 15, when she was adopted by a woman in California that wanted to help her piece together her backstory. When the story of Mary Edens reached her, she was a dress shop owner doing quite well for herself.

Okay, this is one thing that I couldn't get behind because one, if it was snowing so hard outside that it was snowing sideways, why is there just a vagabond milling about the streets?

At that time that it doesn't sound like anyone would just like up near this going to a school and then being like, oh, there's a fire. I'm going to take this kid and just head out. Yeah, that just doesn't seem right. And then that also feels like also just like would be too much of a coincidence to happen. And it just the story sounds like we all have that coworker that just makes everything in their life up.

Or just like intensifies everything. Intensifies everything. But like her being like, oh yeah, a vagabond stole me and I was traded for a bag of beans. Like that just feels like, was this ever brought up to anybody else prior to her putting this book out? Maybe she told the family that like the stuff that had happened to her. But yeah, in the book, she was like writing this wild tale of how she was

into slavery. Then how did she end up in the family that she was in? Yeah, no, this is, this is going way too far off the rails for me. So that was one thing, like, she claims that her family wrote those letters saying, I don't want this, I don't,

Her family wrote to the papers being like, she's a fraud because she thought it made her mother look like a kidnapper. So her mom was afraid of being perceived as like someone who kidnapped a child that had been sold into slavery. So she wanted to kill the story. So she made up the fact that like she was there at the birth of her daughter because she was giving birth to her daughter.

And like the same with the sisters. Like the sisters just didn't want the mom to be painted as a kidnapper. So they were like, yeah, she's my sister. Like she's just being crazy. Oh, this is going so far off the rails. Now I'm like, yeah, I'm not...

I'm not on her side anymore. Like I was, I was kind of like, like if you're going to go so far to be like, everyone around me is lying and like, this is what happened. Yeah. And write a book and mom and like make money off of it. Yeah. Um,

I'm not buying it. I know something's up. I'm not buying it. Louis Edens passed away before the book was released, but it's believed that he always knew Grace's true identity. He just didn't want his wife to face any more devastation in her life than she already had. No, but I just... I have so many questions about her story. It just... I don't think she's Mary. Or I don't think she's Mary. It just...

Like and to take advantage of someone's pain like that. It's like not fair. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it just sucks to swindle a poor family like that and for everyone just to play along. And so the rest of her life she lived as like a full other person. That's wild. That's wild. I have so many questions and

I mean, I just am very thankful we live in a time where there's DNA evidence. Yeah. Like, so that this kind of stuff can't happen. I didn't really think of how to end this episode, and it's such a bummer. Oh, does it keep going? No, that's the end.

It just ends with the wife thought that she was married for as long as she lived. Are you serious? Happy holidays. Kaelin. I know. I thought I'm going to have to go home and like sit and stew in the sadness. I know I have to decompress after this one, too. I mean, they're all sad. So they like don't know what happened. They never find the real Mary. No, no, they don't.

Okay. Happy holidays, everyone. Happy Honda days. Happy Honda days. Love you. So happy holidays from Heart Starts Pounding. You've brought me so much joy this year with every listen, message, like, and subscribe. I'll be taking a few weeks off for the holiday, but we'll be back early next year with the rest of the season. Until next time. Woo. Woo.

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