Lovecraft, H P - The Shunned House

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The Shunned House

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written October 16-19, 1924

Published in The Shunned House, Athol, MA: The Recluse Press, 1928, pages 9-59.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Some times it enters directly

into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous

position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in

the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn

often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally

stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street - the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose

roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette - and his favourite walk led

northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighbouring hillside

churchyard of St. John's whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for

him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest master of

the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of

the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a

great unkept yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not

appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it.

And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or

outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly,

and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was - and for that matter still is - of a kind to attract the attention of the

curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England

colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century - the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with

two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior paneling

dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable and buried to

the lower windows in the east ward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations

toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading

and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street - at first called

Back Street - was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers,

and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it

decently possible to cut through the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the

roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most

of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be

made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with the door and two windows above

The Shunned House

ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century

ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must have seen

only a sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height

of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.

The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, al most to Wheaton Street.

The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the

existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy

stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward be tween canyon-like

surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens

whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and

similar paraphernalia set off the weather beaten front door with its broken fanlight,

rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.

What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in

alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved out

some twenty years after building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of

the dampness and fungous growth in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts of

the hallways, or the quality of the well and pump water. These things were bad enough,

and these were all that gained belief among the person whom I knew. Only the notebooks

of my antiquarian uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer

surmises which formed an undercurrent of folk-

lore among old-time servants and humble folk, surmises which never travelled far, and

which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting

modern population.

The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community

as in any real sense "haunted." There were no widespread tales of rattling chains, cold

currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the

house was "unlucky," but that is as far as even they went. What was really beyond

dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or more accurately, had died

there, since after some peculiar happenings over sixty years ago the building had become

deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all cut off

suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, so

that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may have naturally

had. And those who did not die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or

consumption, and sometimes a decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the

salubriousness of the building. Neighbouring houses, it must be added, seemed entirely

free from the noxious quality.

This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to show me the notes

which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the

shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale

grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never

lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not

The Shunned House

only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere

and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest

of shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of

desolation hung round the precarious panel ling, shaky interior shutters, peeling

wallpaper,. falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered furniture as

still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed

was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length

lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed

wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had

shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.

But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid

cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly

above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to

separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral

fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For one thing, the bad

odour of the house was strongest there; and for another thing, we did not like the white

fungous growths which occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard

earth floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside, were truly

horrible in their outlines; detest able parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes, whose like

we had never seen in any other situation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became

slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires

glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading windows.

We never - even in our wildest Hallowe'en moods - visited this cellar by night, but in

some of our daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially when the day

was dark and wet. There was also a subtler thing we often thought we detected - a very

strange thing which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy

whitish pattern on the dirt floor - a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre which we

sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths near the huge

fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an

uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship

existed, and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. .On a certain rainy afternoon

when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I

glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern

toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd

conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a

similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk - a notion

likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney,

and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust their way into

the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had

collected concerning the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane, conservative physician

The Shunned House

of the old school, and for all his interest in the place was not eager to encourage young

thoughts toward the abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a building and location

of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that

the very picturesque ness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind

take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations.

The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old- fashioned gentleman, and a

local historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such controversial guardians of

tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one man servant in a

Georgian homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on the steep

ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and colony house where his

grandfather - a cousin of that celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt His

Majesty's armed schooner Gaspee in 1772 - had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776,

for the independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp, low-ceiled

library with the musty white paneling, heavy carved overmantel and small-paned, vine-

shaded windows, were the relics and records of his ancient family, among which were

many dubious allusions to the shunned house in Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not far.

distant - for Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court house along the precipitous hill

up which the first settlement climbed.

When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the

hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-winded,

statistical, and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was, there ran through it a

continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which

impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted

together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities.

A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was

feeble and inchoate. The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that

shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at last my uncle

insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and after a certain night in that house he

did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentle soul whose long years were

filled only with honour, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning. I have reared a

marble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard - the place that Poe loved - the hidden

grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and head stones huddle quietly between

the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.

The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace of the sinister

either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family who built it.

Yet from the first a taint of calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was

apparent. My uncle's carefully compiled record began with the building of the structure in

1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount of detail. The shunned house, it

seems, was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their

children, Elkanah, born in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and

Ruth, born in 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India

trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After Brown's death

in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. made him master of the brig Prudence,

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TheShunnedHouseground,closetothenewlineofpublictravel.Whenthesidewalkwaslaidoutacenturyagothelastoftheinterveningspacewasremoved;andPoeinhiswalksmusthaveseenonlyasheerascentofdullgreybrickflushwiththesidewalkandsurmountedataheightoftenfeetbytheantiqueshingledbulkofthehouseproper.Thefarm-likegroundse...

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Lovecraft, H P - The Shunned House

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