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The Shunned House

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Title: The Shunned House

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

 
Release date: March 2, 2010 [eBook #31469]
 Most recently updated: September 11, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31469

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHUNNED HOUSE ***

 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.

[Illustration: "That awful door in Benefit Street which I had left
ajar."]

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 

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