Chapter 1

The
Shunned House

By H. P. LOVECRAFT

_A posthumous story of immense power, written by a master of weird
fiction--a tale of a revolting horror in the cellar of an old
house in New England_

Howard Phillips Lovecraft died last March, at the height of his
career. Though only forty-six years of age, he had built up an
international reputation by the artistry and impeccable literary
craftsmanship of his weird tales; and he was regarded on both sides
of the Atlantic as probably the greatest contemporary master of
weird fiction. His ability to create and sustain a mood of brooding
dread and unnamable horror is nowhere better shown than in the
posthumous tale presented here: "The Shunned House."

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes 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 favorite walk led northward along the
same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighboring 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 unkempt
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 fantasy 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 panelling
dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one
gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward 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 door and one window above
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 gray
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 ground extended back very deeply up the hill, almost 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 between canyon-like
surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walks, 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 growths in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the drafts 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 persons
whom I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle, Doctor Elihu
Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer surmises which
formed an undercurrent of folklore 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 anemia or consumption, and sometimes a
decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness
of the building. Neighboring 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 only
at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the
eldritch atmosphere and odor 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 panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper,
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 odor 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; detestable 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 fetor-spreading windows.

We never--even in our wildest Halloween 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
mold or niter 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.

2

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data
which he had collected concerning the shunned house. Doctor Whipple was
a sane, conservative physician 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 picturesqueness 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, Captain 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 panelling, 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
the 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
honor, 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
headstones 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 honorable 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 & Company made him
master of the brig _Prudence_, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus
enabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his
marriage.

The site he had chosen--a recently straightened part of the new and
fashionable Back Street, which ran along the side of the hill above
crowded Cheapside--was all that could be wished, and the building did
justice to the location. It was the best that moderate means could
afford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child
which the family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was
still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a
century and a half.

The next April, sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and
Ruth died before the month was over. Doctor Job Ives diagnosed the
trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of a
mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be contagious;
for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following
June. Eli Lideason, the other servant, constantly complained of
weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth but
for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed
Hannah. He died the next year--a sad year indeed, since it marked the
death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of
Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods
during the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's
death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the
final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of
insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house;
her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of
the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but
her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly
devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her
only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a
sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the
other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation--or at
least, with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the
smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since
the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years'
space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumor which later
became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from
out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown
now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named
Zenas Low.

* * * * *

It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle
talk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the
Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as
now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892
an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its
heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the
public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the
same section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within a
few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and
amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and
imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became
insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors
which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg
Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy
would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as
she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with
Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence,
tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant
accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly
it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of
French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that
language, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly
of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant
Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking
delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was
laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris,
despite his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to
enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from that
time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a
captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell,
he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to
Providence upon his honorable discharge in the following year.

The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The
house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been
widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But
Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay,
so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and
disconcerting pallor--qualities shared to a singular degree by the one
remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth
to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy
Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically
unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and
closing it for ever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his
wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building
of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of
the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was
born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce
drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in
the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris
built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William
and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee
was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house
despite William's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation
to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he
concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many
changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the
house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation
when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with
sulfur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths of
four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic.
They said the place had a febrile smell.

Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a
privateersman, and served with distinction on the _Vigilant_ under
Captain Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in
1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815,
when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and
floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost
tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy,
Welcome, was a seaman's son.

Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at
Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the
shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to
rent--perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odor of unkempt old
age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in
1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity.
Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and
somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him my experience. He
had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but
after my account decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it.
Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has
gone.

3

It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of
the Harrises. In this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a
persistent evil beyond anything in nature as I had known it; an evil
clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This
impression was confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of
miscellaneous data--legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings
from the papers, copies of death certificates by fellow-physicians, and
the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a
tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house;
but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice by their
recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the
servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous
and malodorous _cellar_ of the house a vast supremacy in evil influence.
There had been servants--Ann White especially--who would not use the
cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the
queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches
of mold in that region. These latter narratives interested me
profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that
most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by
additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most
extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that
there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires--the dead
who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the
living--whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits
abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say,
exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that
organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been
prominent in bringing about her discharge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily
accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial
purposes. To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than
on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain
other things--the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith,
who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something "sucked his
breath" at night; the death-certificates of the fever victims of 1804,
issued by Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all
unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby
Harris's ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a
glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in
me an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated
newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house--one from the
_Providence Gazette and Country-Journal_ of April 12, 1815, and the
other from the _Daily Transcript and Chronicle_ of October 27,
1845--each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose
duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying
person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a
schoolteacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in
a horrible way, glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of
the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case
which put an end to the renting of the house--a series of anemia deaths
preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily
attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.

This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical
practise; and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his
elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the way
in which the victims--ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely
shunned house could now be rented to no others--would babble
maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied
to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century
before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical
data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return
from the war, to the first-hand account of Doctors Chase and Whitmarsh.
Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and
that he was glad of my own interest--an open-minded and sympathetic
interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others
would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he
felt that the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities, and
worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and
macabre.

For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound
seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to
accumulate as much more as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer
Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916;
and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an
authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected.
When, however, I asked them what connection with France or its language
the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and
ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say
was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of
might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son
Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known the
legend, but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins,
seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird
significance to the French raving of Rhoby Harris, which she had so
often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been
at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783,
and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a
somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last moments, but he had soon
forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The
granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She
and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's
son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my
experience.

* * * * *

Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could
furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a
zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shown in
the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site
from its very settlement in 1636--or even before, if any Narragansett
Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the
start, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted
originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at
the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a
line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton
lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became very
assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street
was later run. It had, as rumor indeed said, been the Throckmorton
graveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that
the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the North Burial
Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.