In October 1927, a traveling farm equipment salesman named Lysander Pritchett vanished from his normal route through northeastern Pennsylvania after taking what he believed was a shortcut between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. He was 34 years old at the time and had spent nearly a decade visiting rural communities in the Appalachian foothills. His business depended on reliable travel along roads that were often rough and poorly marked. Pritchett left Scranton expecting to reach Wilkes-Barre within four hours.
Around 2 p. m. , he turned onto a road that a customer had mentioned as a time-saver. The road was initially stable, but within about an hour it narrowed and the forest closed in around him.
By nightfall he was lost, low on fuel, and had passed no houses, barns, or signs of habitation for more than two hours. As darkness settled, he spotted a distant warm light and followed it to a large three-story building with a faded sign reading “Ashworth Sisters Lodging House. ” The structure was an older style, with peaked roofs, a wrap-around porch, and additions built at different times. A woman in her early 30s, who introduced herself as Cordelia Ashworth, answered the door and invited him inside.
Her sister Rosalind joined them for dinner. Pritchett signed the guest ledger, beneath a list of names dated over several weeks. During the meal, the sisters offered little information about themselves. Cordelia told him they had inherited the property from their parents, and Rosalind said guests had become rare since the main roads had changed.
When he asked whether other guests were staying, both women shook their heads in unison. He was given a room on the second floor. During the night, he heard slow footsteps outside his door, low voices, and at one point an unsettling form of singing he could not identify. When he tried to leave in the morning, his door was locked from the outside.
After about an hour, Cordelia arrived, unlocked the door, and blamed the old latches on the building. She insisted the roads were too dangerous in the fog and urged him to stay longer. Pritchett prepared to leave anyway. His truck would not start.
When he opened the hood, he found the distributor cap removed and the spark plugs deliberately loosened so the engine could not fire. He concluded that someone had sabotaged his vehicle during the night, and that only the two sisters were in a position to have done so. He chose a direction and walked into the fog, but soon realized he was walking in a circle. Cordelia appeared on the road behind him, warning him that no town was within reach.
Rosalind’s voice then came from the fog, saying, “He won’t get far. They never do. ” Pritchett attempted to flee on foot into the forest. No matter which way he ran, he repeatedly found himself back at the house.
He eventually came across a clearing containing the ruined foundation of an older structure. There, scattered across the stone floor, he found personal belongings: a pocket watch, a hair comb, a swollen leather journal, spectacles with cracked lenses, and dozens of other objects. Inside the journal, he found a partially legible entry in which a previous guest stated they had tried to leave twice but always returned to the house by nightfall. At that point, a group of people emerged from the forest, over a dozen men and women dressed in clothing from different eras, all moving toward him in silence with expressionless faces.
He believed these were former guests who had never left the property. He ran back toward the lodging house and entered through the unlocked front door. Inside, he opened the ledger and found his own name signed under the date. In another handwriting, the word “Accepted” had been written next to it.
He tore sheets from the book, and the house seemed to react: lamps flickered, glass broke, walls cracked, and a dark liquid seeped from the surfaces. He threw the ledger into the sitting room fireplace and watched the pages burn. According to his account, the building emitted a sound he described as a scream. The photographs on the walls faded, the figures in them dissolving into blur.
Cordelia and Rosalind appeared in the hallway, but their forms shifted between their ordinary appearance and something older and hollow, with empty eye sockets and mouths that opened too wide. One of them said, “Get out before it takes you, too. ”
Pritchett fled through the front door. On the lawn, the people who had surrounded him in the clearing were standing still, then fading into transparency and vanishing.
He found the distributor cap and spark plugs on the ground beside his truck, quickly reinstalled them, and drove away. His truck started, and the road eventually led him to a paved highway. By his own estimate, he missed all three appointments he had scheduled that week. He drove to Wilkes-Barre and checked into a hotel, then went to the local police station to report what he had experienced.
The sergeant consulted a map and said there was no lodging house on any of the roads Pritchett described. The officer told him the area was nothing but forest and suggested he might have hit his head or been confused. When Pritchett insisted, he was asked to leave and advised to see a doctor. He spent the next three days driving the back roads, retracing his route, but never found the turnoff again.
He returned to his work but became withdrawn and began drinking heavily. His sales declined, and his company eventually let him go. He moved to Philadelphia, took a factory job, and stayed in the city, avoiding travel on dark rural roads. He never again told the full story after the police dismissed it.
Before throwing the ledger into the fire, he had torn out the page bearing his own name. He kept it folded in his wallet for the rest of his life. At times, he reported that new words briefly appeared beneath his name, words like “temporary,” “reprieve,” and on one occasion “we’re still waiting. ”
Pritchett died of a heart attack at age 53.
Years later, a researcher compiling a history of Pennsylvania lodging houses found a reference to the Ashworth establishment in an 1878 newspaper article. The piece described a scandal involving two sisters, suspected of foul play after several guests disappeared over the course of a summer. No bodies were ever found, and the case was closed for lack of evidence. The article located the property on Miller’s Road, about 15 miles northeast of Scranton.
When the researcher searched modern maps, the road could not be located.