In the winter of 1893, a trapper named Silas Mordecai Gant lived alone in the high country of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. He had spent more than 20 years in isolation, coming down to the valley town of Ash Grove only twice a year to sell furs and buy supplies. He spoke to no one unless necessary and paid in exact coin. No one knew where his cabin was.
In early December, a traveling preacher named Amos Wendell Thorne arrived in Ash Grove. The 62-year-old had spent his life moving from town to town, and he held a particular hatred for what he called the wickedness of isolation. He believed that men who lived alone in the wilderness had turned their backs on God and community. When he was told about the trapper who had not attended church in two decades, he saw it as his mission to bring Silas Gant back to civilization.
The people of Ash Grove tried to dissuade him. They told him that Silas wanted to be left alone and that the mountains were dangerous in winter. But Amos Wendell Thorne mistook stubbornness for faith. On December 15, he set out into the mountains with a pack full of supplies and a Bible bound in black leather.
Three days passed, then a week, then two. Everyone assumed that the preacher had frozen to death somewhere in the high country. Then, on the afternoon of December 23, Silas Gant appeared in Ash Grove. It was the first time anyone could remember him coming to town outside of his usual schedule.
He walked into the general store with two large bundles wrapped in canvas and set them on the counter. The bundles smelled like fresh meat. The store owner, Raymond Pike, asked what Silas was selling. Silas said venison, saying he had had a good hunt and wanted to trade for salt, coffee, and ammunition.
His voice was flat, without inflection. Raymond asked if he had seen a preacher in the mountains. Silas said he had not. He said the mountains were empty this time of year.
Raymond bought the meat, paid Silas the fair price, and watched him leave without another word. After Silas left, Raymond unwrapped one of the bundles. The meat was butchered cleanly and professionally, but the color wasn’t quite right and the marbling was different. He wrapped it back up and sold it the next day to a family on the edge of town.
They made stew with it, and said it was tougher and stringier than usual. But meat was meat in the dead of winter. Silas came down from the mountains again in January, again in February, and again in early March, bringing more venison to sell each time. Each bundle was wrapped in canvas, and Raymond bought them without asking questions he didn’t want answered.
In late March, when the snow finally began to melt, a hunter named Curtis Ephraim Lowell went up into the high country looking for early spring turkey. He knew those mountains as well as anyone. Three days into his trip, he found Silas Gant’s cabin, built into the side of a limestone cliff, half-hidden by pine trees. Smoke rose from the chimney.
There were animal pelts hanging from the porch rafters, dozens of them. But there were other things hanging there too. A black coat. A pair of boots.
A belt with a silver buckle. And hanging from the rafters like pelts, stretched and tanned like leather, were sections of what Curtis believed was human skin. He turned and ran. Curtis ran through the mountains for two days straight.
He arrived in Ash Grove on the morning of March 28 and went directly to the sheriff, Vernon Dale Pritchard, a solid man of 55 who had kept the peace for two decades. After listening to Curtis’s story, Vernon organized a group of six armed men. They set out the next morning. It took them four days to find the cabin again.
When they reached the clearing, the cabin looked abandoned. There was no smoke from the chimney, no sound. The pelts were still hanging from the rafters, and so were the other things. Vernon forced himself to examine them closely.
They were human skin, tanned and preserved like leather, cut into sections with professional precision and stretched on frames to dry. The black coat, the boots, and the belt belonged to Amos Wendell Thorne. Inside the cabin, they found more. The interior was organized with an efficiency that made the horror worse.
There were shelves lined with jars containing things Vernon would never forget. There were hooks hanging from the ceiling beams, and on those hooks were cuts of meat aging in the cold air like beef in a smokehouse. There were barrels packed with salt, containing parts preserved for long-term storage. In the root cellar, on shelves, were more jars, more bundles wrapped in canvas, and more things that had once been part of a person.
In the back of the cellar, they found human bones cleaned and sorted by type, with skulls arranged in a row like specimens in a medical school. There were five of them. Amos Wendell Thorne was not the first. He was just the most recent.
One hundred yards into the forest, they found a waste pile that the spring thaw had exposed. There were pieces there that made strong men turn away and vomit into the snow. They found Silas three miles from the cabin in a cave system that cut deep into the mountain. He was living like an animal, sleeping on a bed of pine branches and eating raw meat by the light of a small fire.
When they found him, he looked at them with his ice-colored eyes and smiled. It was a smile that Vernon would remember most—not angry or defiant or afraid, but pleased. Like he had been waiting for this. They brought him down from the mountains in chains.
The trial was held in Ash Grove in late April. The courthouse was packed. The prosecutor, a young man named Jerome Augustus Finch who had never handled a murder case before, presented the evidence: the jars, the bones, the testimony of Curtis Lowell and Vernon Pritchard, and the identification of Amos Wendell Thorne’s belongings. Silas sat through it all without expression.
His assigned lawyer, a weary man named Howard Lyle Brennan, mounted no real defense. When asked if he had anything to say, Silas stood and spoke in that flat voice. He said he had done nothing wrong. He said he had lived off the land like he always had.
He said the people who had come into his territory had been trespassing, and he had treated them like any other animal he trapped. The jury deliberated for 37 minutes. Guilty on five counts of murder. The judge sentenced him to hang.
The execution was scheduled for May 15, 1893. But Silas Gant never made it to the gallows. On the night of May 10, the guard on duty, a reliable man named Marshall Clinton Reed, was found the next morning sitting in a chair outside Silas’s cell, staring at nothing. The cell door was open.
Silas was gone. Marshall could not speak or move, and he never recovered. He spent the rest of his life in an asylum, occasionally whispering the same thing over and over: “He’s still up there. He’s waiting.
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Vernon Pritchard organized search parties that combed the mountains for weeks. They found no tracks, no sign, no trace. The cabin was burned and everything in it destroyed. The bones were buried in unmarked graves.
The people who had bought the venison were never told what they had actually eaten. The newspapers carried the story for a few weeks with sensational headlines about the cannibal trapper of West Virginia. Then other news took over, and the story faded. The trial records were sealed.
The evidence was destroyed. Within a year, most of the people involved had moved away. Vernon Pritchard resigned and moved to Ohio. Curtis Lowell went west to Colorado.
Raymond Pike closed his store and relocated to Pennsylvania. People in Ash Grove stopped going into the high country. The trails grew over, and the mountains reclaimed that territory. But over the years, there were occasional reports.
Hunters found deer carcasses butchered with professional precision. Strange sounds were heard in the night that didn’t match any known animal. There were tracks in the snow that looked almost human, but not quite. In 1907, three experienced surveyors working on a railroad route went missing in the mountains near where Silas’s cabin had been.
A search party found their equipment but no bodies. One searcher reported finding a cave with hundreds of tally marks scratched into the limestone walls. In 1923, a hunter found a skeleton in a cave deep in the mountains. The bones were laid out carefully on a flat stone like an offering, and the skull had been split open.
When authorities organized an expedition to retrieve the remains, they could not find the cave again. The hunter was certain of the location, but the cave simply wasn’t there. In 1941, the military considered using the area for training exercises. The reconnaissance team returned after two days instead of the planned five.
The team leader, a captain named Douglas Raymond Hunt, said only that the mountains were occupied and it would be unwise to disturb them. The military dropped the plan. By the 1960s, most people had forgotten the story. Everyone involved was dead, and new people had moved in who knew nothing of what had happened in 1893.
In 1968, a group of college students camped near where the cabin had stood. On their second night, they saw a tall, lean figure at the edge of the trees that stood wrong somehow, like it was wearing a body that didn’t fit anymore. It watched them, then walked into the forest without sound. The students packed up and left immediately.
One of them described the figure as old, with skin like leather and eyes that reflected the flashlight beam like an animal’s. The Forest Service keeps records of disappearances in the area, with an average of one person every three to five years going into those mountains and not coming out. The official explanations are always the same: exposure, animal attack, getting lost, falling. But the disappearances all occur in roughly the same area, a radius of about 15 miles centered on where Silas Gant’s cabin stood in 1893.
They also share certain characteristics: no bodies recovered, no signs of struggle, and equipment left behind, sometimes laid out carefully. In 2003, a historian researching Appalachian folklore came across references to the Silas Gant case and spent two years piecing together the full story. She planned to spend a week in the area for final research. She went into the mountains on a Tuesday in October.
Her car was found a week later at a trailhead, locked with her camping gear still in the trunk. Her camera was on the front seat. The last three photos on the roll showed a cave entrance, the cave interior with scratch marks on the walls, and a third photo that was completely black. They searched for her for three weeks, but found nothing.
The case is still officially open. When her car was examined more carefully, a note was found tucked under the windshield wiper. It was written on a piece of birch bark with what looked like charcoal, four words in shaky capital letters: “Should have forgotten me. ” The police kept the note quiet and sealed the case.
The last official document related to the Silas Gant case is a 1993 memo from the West Virginia State Police recommending that certain mountain areas be permanently closed to public access. The areas described in the memo form a rough circle about 15 miles in radius, centered on coordinates that correspond to the location where Silas Gant’s cabin stood in 1893. Those areas remain closed today. Rangers who work the territory report equipment that goes missing, trail cameras that malfunction, and sounds heard before dawn that don’t match any known animal.
One ranger, Patricia Helen Morse, who worked that territory for 23 years before retiring in 2015, said in her exit interview that she had once seen a tall, lean figure standing in the trees near one of the closed areas. She said it had been facing her direction for a while before she noticed it, just standing there watching her work. She said she packed up her equipment, drove straight home, and put in her retirement papers the next week. When pressed, she said, “Some things are older than we are, and some of those things have claimed territory that we’d be wise to respect.
The mountains have their own rules. ”
Silas Gant was convicted of killing five people and eating them. He lived alone in the mountains for 20 years before his first killing. After escaping in May of 1893, he was never found.
Disappearances continue in the closed area, and estimates based on the tally marks found in 1923 suggest there may be more than 60 marks now, representing people who didn’t make it back out. The official position remains that the mountains are dangerous and that there are rational explanations for everything. But the people who live in that area avoid the closed areas, and rangers hold an unofficial policy of leaving them alone.