In Brief
AV Restaurant & Lounge serves handmade pasta at 320 Penn Avenue in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Its basement held the overflow of the dead during the 1918 flu pandemic. Staff still report a man in a black overcoat at the foot of the stairs.
The Full Story
At AV Restaurant & Lounge in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the staff keep seeing a tall man in a long black overcoat. He stands silently at the bottom of the staircase, then he isn't there. They describe him the same way, and they don't bother arguing with the guests who ask outright whether the place is haunted.
The restaurant is an Italian one, seasonal, known for handmade agnolotti. The name is short for *altra volta*, "another time," which turns out to be doing a lot of work. The address at 320 Penn Avenue has carried death for a long while. An 1879 city directory lists it as the shop of R. Schoenfield, an undertaker and coffin-maker.
Then came the worst of it. When the 1918 influenza pandemic overran Scranton, the basement took the overflow of bodies. The flu killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, and Pennsylvania was among the hardest hit. The dead came down the stairs faster than they could be buried, and the building held them.
A dry-goods store followed, and then an Irish bar called The Banshee. One account from the pub years has an employee coming up from the basement with what looked like a human bite mark on the shoulder, though that one rests on a single retelling. The Italian restaurant opened in the space in 2017. In October 2019 the Food Network named it the most haunted restaurant in Pennsylvania, and the staff accounts kept stacking up.
The man in the overcoat is one of several. Guests and staff report shadows, sudden cold spots, and footsteps from rooms that are empty; some have also described lights flickering and objects sliding off tables, though the staff are careful about which stories they stand behind. A young girl in white is said to climb the stairs toward the third floor. Julie Thomas, the general manager, says that before the restaurant even opened, she and others stayed late finishing prep and heard what sounded like children running back and forth in the upstairs banquet room, when no one was up there at all.
No record names the man on the stairs or the girl in white. No investigation has pinned them to anyone, and no one can say who they're supposed to be. The basement morgue itself survives mostly as the restaurant's own retelling, carried by the people who work above it; there's no archived scan, no certificate, just the account passed down with the building. They serve dinner four nights a week over a room that once held the overflow of an epidemic, and they call the dead by a phrase that means *another time*.
