I.
Even in the greatest horrors, there is nearly always some irony. Sometimes the irony is part of the events themselves. Sometimes it lies only in where the events happen, and to which people. A case in the old city of Providence is a perfect example of the second kind.
In the late 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe often stayed in Providence. He was trying to win the love of the gifted poet Mrs. Whitman, but he did not succeed. Poe usually stayed at the Mansion House in Benefit Street. This was the old Golden Ball Inn with a new name. Washington, Jefferson and Lafayette had all stayed under its roof. Poe's favorite walk went north along the same street. It took him to Mrs. Whitman's home and to the churchyard of St. John's on the hillside nearby. That churchyard was full of hidden gravestones from the eighteenth century, and they fascinated him strangely.
Now, this is the irony. On this walk, which he made so many times, the world's greatest master of terror and strangeness had to pass a certain house. It stood on the eastern side of the street. It was a dirty, old-fashioned building on the steep side of the hill. It had a big, untidy yard from a time when the area was partly open country. Poe never seems to have written or spoken about it. There is no sign that he even noticed it. And yet two people know certain things about that house. To them, it is as horrible as the wildest story of the genius who walked past it without knowing. It may be even more horrible. It stands there like a cold, grinning symbol of everything too hideous to put into words.
The house was, and still is, the kind of place that curious people notice. At first it was a farm, or half a farm. It was built in the usual New England colonial style of the middle eighteenth century. It was the wealthy kind, with a pointed roof, two floors and an attic without dormer windows. It had a Georgian doorway and wooden panelling inside, as the fashion of that time demanded. The house faced south. One gable end was buried up to the lower windows in the hill, which rose to the east. The other end was open down to its foundations, on the side toward the street.
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The house was built more than a century and a half ago. Before that, the road in that area had been levelled and straightened. Benefit Street was first called Back Street. It began as a lane that wound between the graveyards of the first settlers. It was straightened only when the bodies were moved to the North Burial Ground. After that, it was decent to cut the road through the old family graves.
At first, the western wall stood about twenty feet up a steep lawn from the road. But around the time of the Revolution, the street was made wider. This cut away most of the space between the house and the road. The foundations were left open, so a brick wall had to be built for the basement. Now the deep cellar faced the street. It had a door and one window above the ground, close to the new road. A century ago a sidewalk was made, and the last of that space disappeared. So on his walks, Poe must have seen only a tall wall of dull gray brick. It rose straight up from the edge of the sidewalk. Ten feet above it sat the old house itself, covered with wooden shingles.
The farm-like land went far back up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. The ground south of the house, beside Benefit Street, was much higher than the sidewalk. It formed a terrace with a high wall of damp, mossy stone. A steep flight of narrow steps was cut into this wall. The steps went in between walls like the sides of a canyon. At the top was a poor, patchy lawn with wet brick paths and neglected gardens. There were broken cement urns there. There were rusty kettles that had fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and other old things like that. Among them stood the weather-beaten front door. Above it was a broken fanlight. Beside it were rotting Ionic pilasters, and on top was a triangular pediment full of worm holes.
When I was young, I heard only one thing about the shunned house. People died there in frighteningly large numbers. I was told that this was why the first owners moved out, about twenty years after they built it. The place was clearly unhealthy. Perhaps it was the damp and the fungi in the cellar, or the sickly smell everywhere. Perhaps it was the cold drafts in the halls, or the water from the well and the pump. These things were bad enough. The people I knew believed in nothing more than these. Much later I read the notebooks of my uncle, Doctor Elihu Whipple, who loved and studied old things. Only they showed me darker, vaguer ideas. Old servants and poor, simple people had passed these ideas on quietly among themselves. The ideas never travelled far. Most were forgotten when Providence grew into a big city, full of people who came and went.
The general truth is that the serious, solid people of the town never thought the house was really "haunted." There were no well-known stories of rattling chains, cold winds, lights going out, or faces at the window. The most extreme people sometimes said the house was "unlucky." But even they went no further than that. What nobody could deny was that a terrible number of people died there. Or, to be more exact, they had died there. Over sixty years ago some strange things happened. After that, nobody would rent the building, so it stood empty. The people who died there were not all killed suddenly by one single cause. It seemed, rather, that their strength was slowly and secretly drained away. So each one died sooner from whatever weakness he naturally had. Those who did not die showed, more or less, a kind of anemia or consumption. Sometimes their minds became weaker too. All this said nothing good about the health of the building. I must add that the houses near it seemed completely free from this harmful quality.