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The Shunned House
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1928
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Horror, Short Stories
Source:
http://en.wikisource.org
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About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
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(1926)
•
(1931)
•
(1916)
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(1928)
•
(1926)
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(1934)
•
(1931)
•
(1927)
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(1936)
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(1930)
Copyright:
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Chapter
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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 of-
ten during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman.
Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street - the re-
named 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 evid-
ence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in
possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wild-
est 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 at-
tention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it fol-
lowed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth
century - the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormer-
less 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
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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 precipit-
ous lawn from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the
time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space, expos-
ing 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
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 an-
tique 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 sur-
faces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neg-
lected 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 build-
ing 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 mod-
ern 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 wide-
spread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or
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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 ac-
curately, had died there, since after some peculiar happenings over sixty
years ago the building had become deserted through the sheer impossib-
ility 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 build-
ing. 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 in-
vestigation. In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with bar-
ren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and night-
marishly 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 vegeta-
tion, 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 desola-
tion hung round the precarious panel ling, shaky interior shutters, peel-
ing 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 voluntar-
ily 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 fascina-
tion, 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,
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