What is the word for an innkeeper who robs then murders his guests?
A friend has been questing for this word, and now she's got us all going crazy looking for it. Please allow me to post the question in her own words:
"It's on the tip of my tongue and I cannot find the word. Googling brings up hundreds of thousands of links and my quest to find the word is growing more and more frantic as I'm beginning to believe I'm imagined it all and the word doesn't exist.
Once upon a time, I knew a word that was American in origin (I think) and which was used to refer to those early innkeepers in America who set up a tavern in the wilderness and waited for a traveler to come by so they could kill kim, take his belongings, and dispose of his body in the nearest bottless pit or whatever.
Such a place is rumored to have existed in Ohio. I think it was Pott's Tavern. The story is presumably embellished, however, as the tale about their son returning home in disguise and his father murdering him is believed to be untrue since the couple had no known children. There have been, however, other early tavern sites that have yielded bodies in places where there should not have been bodies... such as the cellar.
So the question for someone with a better memory than me is: What is it that the westward moving Americans of the 1800s would have called these people?"
Can anyone help?
"It's on the tip of my tongue and I cannot find the word. Googling brings up hundreds of thousands of links and my quest to find the word is growing more and more frantic as I'm beginning to believe I'm imagined it all and the word doesn't exist.
Once upon a time, I knew a word that was American in origin (I think) and which was used to refer to those early innkeepers in America who set up a tavern in the wilderness and waited for a traveler to come by so they could kill kim, take his belongings, and dispose of his body in the nearest bottless pit or whatever.
Such a place is rumored to have existed in Ohio. I think it was Pott's Tavern. The story is presumably embellished, however, as the tale about their son returning home in disguise and his father murdering him is believed to be untrue since the couple had no known children. There have been, however, other early tavern sites that have yielded bodies in places where there should not have been bodies... such as the cellar.
So the question for someone with a better memory than me is: What is it that the westward moving Americans of the 1800s would have called these people?"
Can anyone help?