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
sulfur, 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
Captain 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 odor 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. 3

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 mold 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 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 dovetailed with certain
other things--the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith,
who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something "sucked his
breath" at night; the death-certificates of the fever victims of 1804,
issued by Doctor 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
schoolteacher 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 anemia deaths
preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily
attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist. This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical
practise; 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 Doctors 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 profound
seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to
accumulate as much more as I could.