The Shunned House
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fireplace of the basement kitchen.Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblanceto 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 phenomenallystrong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin,yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern towardthe yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiledat this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged withreminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some ofthe wild ancient tales of the common folk--a notion likewise alluding toghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, andqueer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrusttheir way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.
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Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and datawhich he had collected concerning the shunned house. Doctor Whipple wasa sane, conservative physician of the old school, and for all hisinterest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts towardthe abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a building and locationof markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality;but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his owninterest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesomeimaginative associations.
The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashionedgentleman, and a local historian of note, who had often broken a lancewith such controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider andThomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one man-servant in a Georgianhomestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on thesteep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court andcolony house where his grandfather--a cousin of that celebratedprivateersman, Captain Whipple, who burnt His Majesty's armed schooner_Gaspee_ in 1772--had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for theindependence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp,low-ceiled library with the musty white panelling, heavy carvedovermantel and small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics andrecords of his ancient family, among which were many dubious allusionsto the shunned house in Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not fardistant--for Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court house along theprecipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.
When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked frommy uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enoughchronicle. Long-winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical as someof the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding,tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me evenmore than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fittedtogether uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines ofhideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me, comparedto which my boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate.
The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to thatshuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For atthe last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced, andafter a certain night in that house he did not come away with me. I amlonely without that gentle soul whose long years were filled only withhonor, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning. I have reared amarble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard--the place that Poeloved--the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs andheadstones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and thehouses and bank walls of Benefit Street.
The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed notrace of the sinister either about its construction or about theprosperous and honorable family who built it. Yet from the first a taintof calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was apparent. Myuncle's carefully compiled record began with the building of thestructure in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount ofdetail. The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by WilliamHarris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah, born in1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, bornin 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West Indiatrade, connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. AfterBrown's death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Company made himmaster of the brig _Prudence_, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thusenabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since hismarriage.
The site he had chosen--a recently straightened part of the new andfashionable Back Street, which ran along the side of the hill abovecrowded Cheapside--was all that could be wished, and the building didjustice to the location. It was the best that moderate means couldafford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth childwhich the family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but wasstill-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for acentury and a half.
The next April, sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail andRuth died before the month was over. Doctor Job Ives diagnosed thetrouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of amere 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 followingJune. Eli Lideason, the other servant, constantly complained ofweakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth butfor a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeedHannah. He died the next year--a sad year indeed, since it marked thedeath of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate ofMartinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periodsduring the preceding decade.
The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband'sdeath, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was thefinal blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form ofinsanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house;her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge ofthe family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; buther health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatlydevoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for heronly surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become asickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and theother servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation--or atleast, with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked thesmell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, sincethe seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years'space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumor which laterbecame so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants fromout of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstownnow set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man namedZenas Low.
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It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idletalk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from theNooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, asnow, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt itsheart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to thepublic health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of thesame section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within afew months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful andamiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.
Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams andimaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams becameinsupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrorswhich necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, PelegHarris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boywould seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise asshe was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently withPeleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence,tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagantaccounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. C
ertainlyit sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments ofFrench often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of thatlanguage, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildlyof a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servantZenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shockingdelight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and waslaid 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 toenlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from thattime on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as acaptain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell,he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought toProvidence upon his honorable discharge in the following year.
The young soldier's return was