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The
Shunned House
The
yellow colonial house set gable end to the street and built into
a steeply rising hill attracts attention. The door, at street
level, opens directly into a stone-lined cellar; the main entrance
is approached by a flight of granite steps. On the gatepost, four
signs, in neatly lettered French, direct visitors to beware of
a mad dog, then instruct them to forget the dog and heed the master.
The occult meaning of the signs is plain to those who have read "The Shunned House" (1937) by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937).
The owners of the house are sharing an inside joke with Lovecraft
devotees, who enjoy tracking down the factual places that he insinuates
into his fictional tales. Writing in the first person, Lovecraft
weaves fact and fiction into this narrative about the house, built
into a hillside on Benefit Street in Providence, where no one
would live because "people died there in alarmingly great numbers."
According to his story, William Harris built the house in 1763
for his wife, Rhoby Dexter, and their four children. But things
were bad from the beginning. A child was still-born, "Nor was
any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half,"
according to Lovecraft's text. Soon, the older children began
to die, then the servants. Harris, himself, succumbed, and the
widowed Rhoby "fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was
thereafter confined to the upper part of the house." She could
be heard shouting for hours "in a coarse and idiomatic form" of
French, and she "complained wildly of a staring thing which bit
and chewed at her." She died the next year. As the tragic years
rolled by, it became clear to people in the community that the
evil was not in the family, but in the house. Rhoby Harris muttered
of "the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence."
A servant complained that something "sucked his breath" at night.
The death certificates of fever victims of 1804 showed that "the
four deceased persons" were "all unaccountably lacking in blood."
A servant, Ann White, insisted that the cellar housed the evil.
"Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the
most extravagant and at the same time most consistent" explanation:
"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 at night."
Text © Dr. Michael Bell |
