Shunned House | Page 5

leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.
William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically un
healthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and
closing it forever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and wife at
the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building of a
new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of the
town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born;
and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove
them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the
newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built
his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William
and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic in 1797, but
Dutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.
Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house
despite William's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation
to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he
concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many
changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the

house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation
when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with
sulphur, tar and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths
of four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever
epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.
Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a
privateersman, and served with distinction on the Vigilant under Capt.
Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in 1814,
and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815,
when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and
floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost
tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy,
Welcome, was a seaman's son.
Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at
Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the
shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to
rent--perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt
old age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating
in 1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity.
Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and
somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him my experience.
He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site,
but after my account, decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent
it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has
gone.
III
It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of
the Harrises. In this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a
persistent evil beyond anything in nature as I had known it; an evil
clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This
impression was confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of
miscellaneous data--legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings
from the papers, copies of death certificates by fellow-physicians, and
the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a

tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house;
but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice by their
recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example,
the servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the
fungous and malodorous cellar of the house a vast supremacy in evil
influence. There had been servants--Ann White especially--who would
not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore
upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots
and patches of mould in that region. These latter narratives interested
me profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt
that most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by
additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.
Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most
extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that
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 by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say,
exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through