Shunned House | Page 3

till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data
which he had collected concerning the shunned house. Dr. 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 picturesque ness 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, Capt. 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 paneling, 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 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 honour, 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 head stones 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 honourable 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 & Co. 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. Dr. 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