From even the greatest of horrors
irony is seldom absent. Sometimes
it enters directly into the composition
of the events, while sometimes it
relates only to their fortuitous position
among persons and places. The latter
sort is splendidly exemplified by a case
in the ancient city of Providence, where
in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used
to sojourn often during his unsuccessful
wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman.
Poe generally stopped at the Mansion
House in Benefit Street—the renamed
Golden Ball Inn whose roof has
sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and
Lafayette—and his favorite walk led
northward along the same street to Mrs.
Whitman's home and the neighboring
hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose
hidden expanse of Eighteenth Century
gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.
Now the irony is this. In this walk, so
many times repeated, the world's greatest
master of the terrible and the bizarre
was obliged to pass a particular house
on the eastern side of the street; a dingy,
antiquated structure perched on the
abruptly rising side hill, with a great
unkempt yard dating from a time when
the region was partly open country. It
does not appear that he ever wrote or
spoke of it, nor is there any evidence
that he even noticed it. And yet that
house, to the two persons in possession
of certain information, equals or outranks
in horror the wildest fantasy of the
genius who so often passed it unknowingly,
and stands starkly leering as a
symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.
The house was—and for that matter
still is—of a kind to attract the attention
of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm
building, it followed the average
New England colonial lines of the middle
Eighteenth Century—the prosperous
peaked-roof sort, with two stories and
dormerless attic, and with the Georgian
doorway and interior panelling dictated
by the progress of taste at that time. It
faced south, with one gable end buried
to the lower windows in the eastward
rising hill, and the other exposed to the
foundations toward the street. Its construction,
over a century and a half ago,
had followed the grading and straightening
of the road in that especial vicinity;
for Benefit Street—at first called Back
Street—was laid out as a lane winding
amongst the graveyards of the first settlers,
and straightened only when the
removal of the bodies to the North Burial
Ground made it decently possible to cut
through the old family plots.
At the start, the western wall had lain
some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn
from the roadway; but a widening of the
street at about the time of the Revolution
sheared off most of the intervening space,
exposing the foundations so that a brick
basement wall had to be made, giving
the deep cellar a street frontage with door
and one window above ground, close to
the new line of public travel. When
the sidewalk was laid out a century ago
the last of the intervening space was
removed; and Poe in his walks must
have seen only a sheer ascent of dull gray
brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted
at a height of ten feet by the
antique shingled bulk of the house
proper.
The farm-like ground extended back
very deeply up the hill, almost to
Wheaton Street. The space south of the
house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of
course greatly above the existing sidewalk
level, forming a terrace bounded by
a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone
pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps
which led inward between canyon-like
surfaces to the upper region of mangy
lawn, rheumy brick walks, and neglected
gardens whose dismantled cement urns,
rusted kettles fallen from tripods of
knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia
set off the weather-beaten front door with
its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters,
and wormy triangular pediment.
What I heard in my youth about
the shunned house was merely that
people died there in alarmingly great
numbers. That, I was told, was why the
original owners had moved out some
twenty years after building the place. It
was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because
of the dampness and fungous growths in
the cellar, the general sickish smell, the
drafts of the hallways, or the quality of
the well and pump water. These things
were bad enough, and these were all that
gained belief among the persons whom
I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian
uncle, Doctor Elihu Whipple, revealed
to me at length the darker, vaguer
surmises which formed an undercurrent
of folklore among old-time servants and
humble folk; surmises which never travelled
far, and which were largely forgotten
when Providence grew to be a
metropolis with a shifting modern population.
The general fact is, that the house was
never regarded by the solid part of the
community as in any real sense "haunted."
There were no widespread tales of rattling
chains, cold currents of air, extinguished
lights, or faces at the window. Extremists
sometimes said the house was "unlucky,"
but that is as far as even they
went. What was really beyond dispute
is that a frightful proportion of persons
died there; or more accurately, had died
there, since after some peculiar happenings
over sixty years ago the building
had become deserted through the sheer
impossibility of renting it. These persons
were not all cut off suddenly by any one
cause; rather did it seem that their vitality
was insidiously sapped, so that each one
died the sooner from whatever tendency
to weakness he may have naturally had.
And those who did not die displayed in
varying degree a type of anemia or consumption,
and sometimes a decline of the
mental faculties, which spoke ill for the
salubriousness of the building. Neighboring
houses, it must be added, seemed
entirely free from the noxious quality.
This much I knew before my insistent
questioning led my uncle to show me the
notes which finally embarked us both on
our hideous investigation. 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.
To read more visit Project Gutenberg.
Ciao!
The Lonely Alchemist
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