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 & Company 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. Doctor 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 the following
June. Eli Lideason, the other servant, constantly complained of
weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth but
for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed
Hannah. He died the next year--a sad year indeed, since it marked the
death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of
Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods
during the preceding decade. The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's
death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the
final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of
insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house;
her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of
the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but
her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly
devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her
only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a
sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the
other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation--or at
least, with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the
smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since
the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years'
space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumor which later
became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from
out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown
now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named
Zenas Low. *       *       *       *       *

It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle
talk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the
Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as
now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892
an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its
heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the
public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the
same section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within a
few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and
amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins. Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and
imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became
insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors
which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg
Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy
would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as
she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with
Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence,
tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant
accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly
it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of
French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that
language, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly
of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant
Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking
delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was
laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband. Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris,
despite his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to
enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from that
time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a
captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell,
he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to
Providence upon his honorable discharge in the following year. The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The
house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been
widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But
Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay,
so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and
disconcerting pallor--qualities shared to a singular degree by the one
remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth
to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy
Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life. William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically
unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and
closing it for ever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his
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 of 1797, but Dutee
was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.