HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
Downtown Scranton dining room whose basement served as a 1918 flu-epidemic morgue
320 Penn Ave, Scranton, PA 18503
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Standard sit-down restaurant pricing; reservations recommended for dinner. No admission fee to dine.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Street-level downtown storefront with interior stairs to upper banquet floors
Equipment
Photos OK
1918 Influenza Epidemic Morgue · Former Undertaker and Coffin Business Site · Food Network Most Haunted Restaurant in PA (2019)
The building at 320 Penn Avenue has held several businesses over its long life on Scranton's main downtown corridor. An 1879 Scranton city directory records the address as the location of R. Schoenfield's undertaker and coffin business. The site later operated as Eisner and Sons Dry Goods and, in more recent decades, as The Banshee Pub before AV Restaurant & Lounge opened there in 2017.
The detail that gives the building its reputation is the 1918 influenza epidemic. As the pandemic overwhelmed Scranton, the building's basement was pressed into service as a temporary morgue. That fact is repeated by local news outlets and by the regional tourism office, and it anchors the venue's place on the Lackawanna Haunted Trail.
In 2019, Food Network named AV the most haunted restaurant in Pennsylvania, a designation reported by WNEP and Fox43 and one the restaurant has leaned into. The building's documented use as a morgue, and the undertaker business that preceded it by decades, give the haunted framing an unusually concrete historical footing for a dining room.
Sources
Most of the reported activity clusters around the parts of the building tied to its past: the basement that served as a 1918 morgue and the stairways connecting the dining and banquet floors. Diners and staff describe sudden cold drafts in the basement and phantom footsteps elsewhere in the building.
Two figures recur in the accounts collected by the regional tourism office and local outlets. One is a tall man in a black overcoat who is said to stand silently at the bottom of a staircase before vanishing. The other is a young girl in white, reported climbing toward the upper floors. The restaurant's general manager has said that before AV opened, staff heard what sounded like children running back and forth in the upstairs banquet room when no one was there.
None of these accounts is independently documented beyond the witnesses who report them, and the restaurant presents them as part of the building's atmosphere rather than as a paid attraction. The morgue history and the earlier undertaker business are the verified facts; the figures on the stairs are the folklore that has grown around them.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
AV is a working Italian restaurant and lounge on Penn Avenue in downtown Scranton. The building's history is part of the draw: the basement is documented as a temporary morgue during the 1918 influenza epidemic, and staff and diners have reported drafts and figures on the stairways. You can simply book a table and ask the staff about the building's past.
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