In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and
terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen
weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used
to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only
at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the
eldritch atmosphere and odor of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked
front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned
windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round
the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper,
falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered
furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of
the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend
the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small
blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage
of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit
had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes. But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It
was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion
on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with
only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the
busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral
fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For
one thing, the bad odor of the house was strongest there; and for
another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which
occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth
floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside,
were truly horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools
and Indian-pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other situation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so
that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind
the broken panes of the fetor-spreading windows. We never--even in our wildest Halloween moods--visited this cellar
by night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the
phosphorescence, especially when the day was dark and wet. There was
also a subtler thing we often thought we detected--a very strange thing
which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of
cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor--a vague, shifting deposit of
mold or niter which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the
sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance
to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed,
and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally
strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin,
yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward
the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled
at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with
reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of
the wild ancient tales of the common folk--a notion likewise alluding to
ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and
queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust
their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones. 2

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data
which he had collected concerning the shunned house. Doctor 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 picturesqueness 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, Captain 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 panelling, 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
the 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
honor, 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
headstones 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 honorable 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.