Shunned House | Page 6

that organ;
and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been
prominent in bringing about her discharge.
Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more
readily accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for
burial purposes. To me their interest depended less on this
circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they
dove-tailed with certain other things--the complaint of the de parting
servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never heard of her,
that something "sucked his breath" at night; the death-certificates of
fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr. Chad Hopkins, and showing the
four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the
obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she
complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.
Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced
in me an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely

separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned
house--one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal of April
12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of
October 27, 1845--each of which detailed an appallingly grisly
circumstance whose duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both
instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford
and in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee,
became transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting
to bite the throat of the attending physician. Even more puzzling,
though, was the final case which put an end to the renting of the
house--a series of anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses
wherein the patient would craftily attempt the lives of his relatives by
incisions in the neck or wrists.
This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical
practice; and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his
elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the
way in which the victims--ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and
widely shunned house could now be rented to no others--would babble
maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have
studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a
century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting
historical data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his
return from the war, to the first-hand account of Drs. Chase and
Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on
the subject, and that he was glad of my own interest--an open-minded
and sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters
at which others would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so
far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare in its imaginative
potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the
grotesque and macabre.
For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with pro found
seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to
accumulate as much as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer Harris,
then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916; and
obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an

authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected.
When, however, I asked them what connection with France or its
language the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly
baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris
could say was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had
heard of might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had
survived his son Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not
himself known the legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the
ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly aware of something that might
have lent a weird significance to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris,
which she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless
woman. Maria had been at the shunned house from 1769 till the
removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once
she hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in
Mercy's last moments, but he had soon for gotten all about it save that
it was something peculiar. The grand daughter, moreover, recalled even
this much with difficulty. She and her brother were not so much
interested in the house as was Archer's son Carrington, the present
owner, with whom I talked after my experience.
Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could
furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a
zeal more penetrating than that which