There’s a seller door in the mountains of West Virginia that hasn’t been opened in over a century. The locals won’t go near it. They won’t talk about what happened there. But if you dig deep enough into the county records from 1889, you’ll find something that was deliberately buried. Not bodies, something worse, a pattern.

And at the center of it all were two sisters who smiled at strangers and invited them down into the dark. Hello everyone. Before we start, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave a comment with where you’re from and what time you’re watching. That way, YouTube will keep showing you stories just like this one.

This is the story of the Frost Sisters. And if their name sounds familiar, it shouldn’t because after what happened in the winter of 1889, every record of them was systematically erased. Their house was burned. Their names were scratched out of the church registry. The town they lived in changed its name twice. But I found them. And what I found doesn’t just disturb me as a historian, it disturbs me as a human being.

The Appalachian Mountains in the late 1800s were a place where people disappeared and nobody asked questions. Remote homesteads, harsh winters, families that kept to themselves for generations. The Frost sisters understood this geography of silence better than anyone. They used it. They weaponized it. And for at least 7 years, maybe longer, they turn their family home into something that still doesn’t have a proper name in criminal psychology. This isn’t a ghost story.

This is about what real people are capable of when they’re isolated enough, damaged enough, and convinced enough that what they’re doing is necessary. By the time you finish watching this, you’re going to understand why some doors stay closed, why some sellers are better left sealed, and why sometimes the most terrifying thing about history isn’t what we remember.

It’s what we’ve worked so hard to forget. The Frost Homestead sat 3 mi up a logging road that barely deserved the name in what was then called Hollow Creek, West Virginia. The house itself was unremarkable. two stories, stone foundation, a root cellar that had been dug deep into the hillside by their grandfather sometime in the 1850s.

What made it valuable wasn’t the structure, it was the location. The house sat at the only crossroads for 20 m. If you were traveling between the mining camps to the east and the trading posts to the west, you passed the Frost property. There was no other route, not in winter, not if you wanted to survive.

Margaret Frost was 31 years old in 1889. Her sister Catherine was 27. They’d lived alone in that house since their father died in 1883. No husbands, no children, just the two of them, and a property that should have been impossible for two women to maintain without help. But they managed. They always managed.

Neighbors would later say the sisters were pleasant enough. Quiet. Margaret was the talker, the one who’d sell you eggs or trade for supplies. Catherine rarely came into town. When she did, people remembered her eyes. Not because they were unusual, because they never seemed to blink. The sisters ran what they called a traveler’s rest.

In that era, it was common. Remote homesteads would offer a warm meal and a place to sleep for a small fee. The Appalachian hospitality tradition was real. It kept people alive, but the Frost sisters offered something else. They offered their cellar. They told travelers “it was warmer down there, protected from the wind.” “They’d set up CS,” they said.

Blankets. “It was safer than sleeping in the main house where the fire might go out in the night.” And here’s the thing that makes my skin crawl. People believed them. Because Margaret smiled when she said it. Because in 1889, you trusted a woman’s hospitality. You trusted it with your life. The first disappearance that we can verify happened in November of 1882, a surveyor named Thomas Wickham.

He was mapping mineral deposits for a mining company out of Pennsylvania. His last known location was the Frost homestead. His last known action was paying Margaret Frost $2 for a hot meal and a place to sleep. His body was never found. His equipment was never recovered. The mining company sent inquiries. The local sheriff rode out to the Frost property twice.

Margaret told him the surveyor had left early in the morning, seemed in good spirits, “headed west toward the trading posts,” the sheriff wrote it down, and that was the end of it. Between 1882 and 1889, at least 14 people vanished along that stretch of Appalachian Passage. We know this because I cross-referenced mining company records, postal delivery logs, and family inquiries sent to three different county sheriffs, 14 verified names.

But the real number is almost certainly higher because in the 1880s, a lot of people traveling through Appalachia were running from something. They didn’t have families sending inquiries. They didn’t have employers filing reports. They were ghosts before they ever reached the frost cellar. They just didn’t know it yet. The pattern was specific, almost ritualistic.

The victims were always traveling alone, always men. Ages ranging from early 20s to late 50s. They always stopped at the Frost Homestead at dusk or later when continuing on would mean traveling mountain roads in darkness. Margaret would greet them, offer food. Catherine would appear briefly, then retreat upstairs. The traveler would eat.

Margaret would suggest the seller warmer, safer, more comfortable than the drafty upstairs rooms, and the traveler would agree because saying no to a woman’s hospitality in 1880s Appalachia wasn’t just rude. It suggested you thought she had ill intentions. What kind of man suspects a woman of violence? Here’s what we think happened next based on evidence that wouldn’t surface until much later.

The seller had two chambers. The first was exactly what Margaret described. CS, blankets, a small stove, normal. But there was a second chamber deeper, accessible through a root storage area that looked like nothing more than potato bins and preserves. That second chamber had no windows, no secondary exit, and most importantly, it had a door that locked from the outside.

Once a traveler was settled in that first chamber, comfortable and warm and beginning to sleep, Margaret would descend the stairs one final time. She’d bring tea, sometimes whiskey, always something the traveler would drink without suspicion. And in that drink was something that came from Catherine’s careful cultivation of water, hemlock, and gyms weed, plants that grew wild in the hills around their property.

The traveler wouldn’t die immediately. That’s important. The dosage was precise. Catherine understood plants the way some people understand mathematics. The victim would become disoriented, weak, unable to coordinate movement or cry out effectively. And then the sisters would move them from the first chamber to the second through that root storage area into the dark.

And then they’d lock the door. And here’s the part that still makes experienced investigators uncomfortable. The sisters didn’t kill them quickly. The second chamber wasn’t an execution room. It was a cage. And what the Frost sisters did with their prisoners over the days or sometimes weeks that followed is something that we’re still trying to fully understand based on what was eventually found.

What finally exposed the Frost Sisters wasn’t detective work. It wasn’t suspicious neighbors or persistent family members. It was weather. In March of 1889, the region experienced flooding that locals said “was the worst in living memory.” Snow melt combined with three days of heavy rain turned every creek into a river and every hillside into a mudslide.

The logging road that passed the frost property became impossible. But more significantly, the water undermined the stone foundation of their cellar. Part of the exterior wall collapsed outward, and what that collapse revealed brought four men from the nearby settlement running to the county seat for the sheriff. They found bones first.

Human remains scattered in the mud where the wall had given way. But it wasn’t the bones that made grown men vomit on that hillside. It was the smell, even with the flooding, even with the cold mountain air. The stench coming from inside that cellar was something that none of those men would ever be able to describe adequately in their witness statements.

The sheriff arrived 2 days later with six deputies. What they found inside the second chamber is documented in a report that was sealed by court order in 1890 and wasn’t unsealed until 1973. I’ve read that report. I’ve read it multiple times because my job requires it. And I’m going to tell you what was in there.

But I need you to understand something first. “This isn’t speculation. This isn’t folklore that got exaggerated over generations. This is what law enforcement documented in a legal proceeding.” There were three men still alive in that chamber when the sheriff opened the door. Alive in March of 1889. One had been there since late January, another since early February.

The third they couldn’t identify because he was incoherent and remained incoherent until he died 4 days later in the county doctor’s care. The conditions they were kept in defi adequate description. The chamber was approximately 12 ft by 8 ft. No light source, no heat. a bucket in the corner that hadn’t been emptied in weeks.

The men were emaciated, covered in their own waste. But the physical neglect wasn’t the worst of it. Each man had injuries that were clearly not self-inflicted and not the result of neglect. Methodical injuries, the kind that suggested someone had been coming down into that darkness regularly, bringing a lamp, spending time. The county doctor’s report uses the word systematic four times.

He uses the word deliberate seven times. The remains of at least nine other individuals were recovered from that cellar over the next week. Some were buried in the floor of the second chamber. Others had been stacked in a storage area that the sisters had excavated even deeper into the hillside. The condition of the remains suggested different time periods, different stages of decomposition.

One skeleton showed evidence of having been there for years. The forensic science of 1889 was primitive. But even then, the county coroner could tell that these men hadn’t died quickly. They died slowly. In the dark, while two women went about their daily lives in the house above, baking bread, tending chickens, smiling at the next traveler who came to the door.

Margaret and Catherine Frost were arrested on March 19th, 1889. They didn’t run. They didn’t resist. When the sheriff came to the house, Margaret answered the door the same way she’d answered it for countless travelers, with a smile, with hospitality. She offered the deputies coffee. She asked “if they’d like to sit down.”

Catherine was upstairs in her room reading. The sheriff said later that arresting them felt surreal, “like taking two school teachers into custody for overdue library books.” There was no drama, no confession, no breakdown. Margaret simply asked “if she should bring a coat.” It was still cold in March. The trial began in late May of 1889. The courthouse in the county seat had never seen anything like it.

People traveled for days to attend, standing room only. Journalists came from as far as Philadelphia and Baltimore. This was before the era of sensationalist crime reporting as we know it now. But even then, people understood they were witnessing something extraordinary, something that would be talked about for generations.

The prosecution had physical evidence that was overwhelming. Bones, personal effects, testimony from the three survivors, though two of them could barely speak coherently about what had happened. But what everyone wanted to know, what the journalists filled their notebooks trying to capture, was the why.

Why did two women in rural Appalachia do this? What was the motive? Margaret Frost spoke for 4 hours on the witness stand. The transcript of her testimony still exists. I’ve read it. And what’s most disturbing isn’t what she said, it’s how she said it. Calm, articulate, almost professorial. She explained that their father had taught them “that men were fundamentally dangerous, that he’d protected them from men their entire lives.”

that after he died, they’d been vulnerable alone and that vulnerability had made them targets. She described three separate incidents where travelers had made advances, had touched Catherine, had suggested things that were inappropriate, had refused to leave when asked. Margaret’s voice on that witness stand never wavered.

She explained that they’d realize something important, “that the only way to be safe was to control the threat, to remove dangerous men before those men could hurt them.” If you’re still watching, you’re already braver than most. “Tell us in the comments, what would you have done if this was your bloodline,” but here’s where Margaret’s testimony becomes something that criminal psychologists still study today.

She insisted they weren’t murderers. She used that word specifically. murderers. She said “they were educators,” that the men in the cellar “were being taught something essential, being shown what it felt like to be powerless, to be at someone else’s mercy, to be treated as less than human.” She said the men who died had failed to learn, but the men who survived, she said “those men would never hurt a woman again. They’d been cured.”

The prosecutor asked her how many men they’d held in that cellar. Margaret thought about it for a long moment. Then she said “she’d lost count after 20.” Catherine never testified. She never spoke. During the entire trial, witnesses said she sat perfectly still, hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead.

Not at the jury, not at the judge, at nothing, just staring into a distance only she could see. The jury deliberated for less than 3 hours. Both sisters were found guilty on multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, and what the 1889 legal system awkwardly termed aggravated assault with intent to cause suffering.

The judge sentenced them to hang, execution date set for July 12th, 1889. Pennsylvania and Maryland newspapers ran the story on their front pages. The New York Times published a half-page article titled The Shee Devils of Appalachia. But something happened between the sentencing and the execution date. Something that was documented in official records, but never adequately explained.

Katherine Frost died in her cell on June 23rd. The county doctor ruled it a suicide. Said she’d somehow torn strips from her bedding and hanged herself from the cell bars. But three deputies who were on duty that night gave statements that contradicted each other. One said “he’d checked on her at midnight and she was asleep.” Another said “the cell was never left unattended.”

A third refused to give any statement at all and quit his position the following week. Margaret’s reaction to her sister’s death was described by witnesses as disturbing in its absence. She didn’t cry, didn’t ask questions. When informed that Catherine was gone, Margaret simply nodded once and said, “She always did finish things before me.” The execution was moved up.

Margaret Frost was hanged on June 30th, 1889 in the county courthouse yard. Approximately 200 people attended. Newspaper accounts describe her walking to the gallows without assistance, standing on the platform while the noose was fitted. The executioner asked if she had any final words.

Margaret looked out at the crowd for a long moment. Then she said something that wasn’t recorded in the official transcript, but appears in three separate newspaper accounts and one deputy’s personal diary. She said, “You think we were monsters, but we only did to them what they would have done to us. We were just faster.”

The Frost property was burned 4 days after the execution, not by official order, by towns people who decided among themselves that the house needed to be erased. They burned everything, the main structure, the outuildings. They tried to burn the cellar, but stone doesn’t burn, so they collapsed it, brought the walls down, filled it with rocks and debris. Then they planted over it.

Within 2 years, you couldn’t tell there’d ever been a structure there. The logging road was rerouted. The few families still living in what had been called Hollow Creek moved away. By 1895, maps of the region no longer showed the settlement at all. It had been administratively absorbed into a neighboring township with a different name, but erasure doesn’t mean forgotten.

The families of the victims never forgot. 14 confirmed dead. At least six more probable based on Margaret’s testimony and the physical evidence. 20 men who traveled into those mountains and never came out. 20 families who spent years wondering. Some of the victims were identified through personal effects found in the cellar. Pocket watches, rings, letters.

Those items were returned to families, but many of the dead were never identified at all. They’re still buried in unmarked graves in the county cemetery, listed in the death register only as unknown male Frost Property. Even in death, they were defined by the place that killed them, by the two women who decided they were guilty before they’d committed any crime at all.

The official record ends in 1889. But the story doesn’t because what the Frost sisters did created ripples that moved through Appalachin culture in ways that are still visible if you know where to look. In the decades following the executions, there was a noticeable shift in how travelers approached remote homesteads in that region.

Men became suspicious of hospitality offered by women living alone. They’d refuse offers to sleep in sellers or outbuildings. They’d insist on sleeping in main rooms or not at all. There are documented cases in the 1890s and early 1900s of women in West Virginia and Kentucky who ran legitimate travelers rests and suddenly found themselves without customers, without income.

Some lost their properties. The Frost sisters didn’t just destroy their victims, they destroyed trust. They weaponized the one thing that kept people alive in the mountains. The willingness to accept help from strangers. Psychologists and criminal historians have studied the Frost case for over a century now. It appears in textbooks on female serial killers, on Folia, shared psychosis between siblings, on trauma response and victimhood that curdles into predation.

But here’s what makes this case unique in the academic literature. Margaret and Catherine Frost weren’t killing for pleasure or profit. The few valuables taken from victims were never sold. They were found buried in jars behind the house. The sisters weren’t trying to get rich. They were trying to feel safe.

And somewhere in their damaged minds. The only way to feel safe was to have complete power over the thing they feared. They turned men into objects, into lessons, into proof that they were the ones in control. I visited the site 3 years ago. It took me 2 days of hiking because the old logging road is completely overgrown now.

But I found it. The depression in the ground where the cellar used to be. trees growing through what used to be the foundation. There’s nothing there that would tell you what happened. No marker, no memorial, just forest, just silence. I stood there for 20 minutes trying to imagine what it must have been like, trying to understand how two women could descend those stairs day after day, lamp in hand, and do what they did.

And I couldn’t. I still can’t. That’s the thing about true evil. It doesn’t make sense from the outside. It only makes sense to the people living inside it. The three men who survived that cellar never fully recovered. One died within a year. His body simply giving out from what it had endured.

Another lived until 1923, but never spoke about what happened. His family said “he’d wake up screaming, that he couldn’t be in dark rooms, that he’d check every door in his house multiple times each night to make sure they opened from the inside.” The third survivor, a man named Jacob Reinhardt, gave one interview to a journalist in 1907.

He was asked what the worst part was. the starvation, the cold, the injuries. And he said no. The worst part was hearing them upstairs, “hearing Margaret and Catherine living their normal lives, hearing footsteps, hearing them laugh occasionally, hearing the mundane sounds of domesticity while he was locked in the dark, knowing he’d been forgotten, knowing that to them he wasn’t human anymore.”

“He was just a problem they’d solved.” There’s a genealogical record that suggests the Frost family line continued through a cousin who’d moved to Ohio before the murders came to light. That cousin changed her name. Her descendants have no idea they’re connected to Margaret and Catherine Frost. And maybe that’s Mercy.

Maybe some bloodlines deserve to forget. But I’d argue we don’t. We can’t because the Frost sisters represent something that we still don’t want to acknowledge. That victims can become monsters. that trauma can be transformed into something predatory. That two women who were genuinely afraid, genuinely damaged, genuinely convinced they were protecting themselves could do things that rival any male serial killer in American history.

The cellar is still there under the trees, under the soil, under more than a century of deliberate forgetting, but stone foundations don’t rot. The bones of that place remain. And sometimes I think about travelers in 1889, cold and tired. Seeing lamplight in the windows of the Frost homestead. Seeing Margaret smile, feeling grateful for the kindness of strangers.

Not knowing that kindness was a mask. That the warmth they were being offered came with a price they’d pay in the dark. We like to think we’d know, that we’d sense the danger. But the truth is simpler and more terrifying. Evil doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it opens the door, offers you tea, and asks “if you’d like to see the seller.”

“It’s warmer down there,” they say. “Safer, more comfortable than you’d think.” And in that moment, you have to decide. Do you trust what you’re being offered? Or do you walk back into the cold? The Frost sisters made that decision for 20 men, maybe more.