The Shunned House - HP Lovecraft copy

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Shunned House by H. P. Lovecraft, a posthumous story
of immense power, written by a master of weird fiction.
A tale of a revolting horror in the cellar of
an old house in New England. For even the greatest
of horrors, irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly

(00:22):
into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates
only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The
latter sword is splendidly exemplified by a case in the
ancient city of Providence, where the late forties Edgar Allan
Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of
the gifted poetess Missus Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the

(00:47):
mansion house in Benefit Street, the renamed Golden Ball Inn,
whose roof is sheltered Washington, Jefferson and Lafayette, and his
favorite walk led northward along the same street to Missus
Whitman's home and the neighboring hillside churchyard of Saint John's,
whose hidden expanse of eighteenth century gravestones had for him
a peculiar fascination. Now the irony is this in this walk,

(01:12):
so many times repeated the world's greatest master of the
terrible in the bazaar was obliged to pass a peculiar
house on the eastern side of the street, a dingy,
antiquated structure purchased on the abruptly rising side hill, with
a great unkept yard, dating from a time when the
region was partly open country. It does not appear that

(01:34):
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 out ranks 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 utterably hideous.

(01:59):
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 in interior paneling dictated by

(02:22):
the progress of taste at the 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 grating and straightening of
the road in that especial vincity for benefit. Street, at

(02:45):
first called Beck 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 northern
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 line from the roadway,

(03:05):
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 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,

(03:29):
and Poe in his walks must have seen only a
sheer accent of dull gray brick flushed with a 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

(03:50):
Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level,
forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of
damp mossy stone, by a steep flight of narrow stairs
which led inward between canyon like surfaces to the upper
region of mangy lawn, roomy brick walls and neglected gardens,
whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of

(04:14):
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 learned in my youth about
the shunned house was merely that people died there in
alarmingly great numbers. That I was told was why the

(04:37):
original owners had moved out some twenty years after building
the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because the dampness
and fungus 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

(04:58):
I knew. Only My note books of my antiquarian uncle,
doctor L. Hugh 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 traveled far,
and which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be
a metropolis with a shifting modern population. The general fact

(05:23):
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

(05:43):
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

(06:04):
all cut off suddenly by any one cause, rather that
it seemed that their vitality was insiduously 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,

(06:24):
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

(06:50):
house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees,
long queerly pale grass, and nightmarishly mishappened weeds in the
high terrace 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 the

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sinister vegetation, but at the eldridge atmosphere and odor of
the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered
in quest of shutters. The small paned windows were largely broken,
and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious paneling,
shaky interior shutters, peeling wall paper, falling plaster, rickety staircases,

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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

(08:01):
infinite years of deposit had shrouded and fastened 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,

(08:23):
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 in our sanity.
For one thing, the bad odor of the house was
strongest there, and for another thing, we did not like

(08:44):
the white fungus 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 tide stools and Indian
pipes whose like we had never seen in any other situation.

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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 fetter spreading windows.
We never, even in our wildest Halloween moods, visited the
cellar by night, but in some of our daytime visits

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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

(09:51):
deposit of mold and knitter, which we sometimes thought we
could trace amidst the sparse fungus growths near the huge
fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it
struck us that this patch borne uncanny resemblance to a
doubled up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed,
and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. On a

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certain rainy afternoon, when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and
when in addition I had fancied I had 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 the odd conceit, but
it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later

(10:39):
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. Not till my adult

(11:01):
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,

(11:27):
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 shavened, old fashioned gentleman, and a local historian of

(11:48):
note who had often broken a lance with such controversial
guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknall.
He lived with one man, Sir Turban, in a Georgian
homestead with knocker and iron railed steps, balanced eerily on
the steep accent of north Court Street, beside the ancient

(12:09):
brick court and Colony house where his grandfather a cousin
of the celebrated privatesman Captain Whipple, who burnt his Majesty's
arms Schooner Gaspee in seventeen seventy two, had voted in
the legislature on May fourth, seventeen seventy six for the
independence of the Rhode Island colony. Around him, in the damp,

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low ceiling library, with the musty white paneling, heavy carved overmantled,
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

(12:54):
above the court house, along the precipitous hill 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

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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 minds of hideous possibilities.

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A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to
which my boyish curiosity was feeble and incot. The first
revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that
shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mind.
For at the last my uncle insisted on joining the

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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
Saint John's churchyard, the place that Poe loved, the hidden

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grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and
headstones huddled quietly between the hoary bulk of the church
and the houses and bank walls on Benefit Street. The
history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates,
revealed no trace of the sinister, either about its construction

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or about the prosperous and honorable family who built it.
Yet from the first a taint of calamity soon increased
to aboding significance was apparent. My uncle's carefully compiled record
began with the building of the s structure in seventeen
sixty three and followed the theme with an unusual amount
of detail. The Shunned House, it seems, was first inhabited

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by William Harris and his wife Ruby Dexter, with their children,
Ilonka born in seventeen fifty five, Abigail born in seventeen
fifty seven, William Junior born in seventeen fifty nine, and
Ruth born in seventeen sixty one. Harris was a substantial
merchant and seamen in the West India trade, connected with

(15:33):
the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After Brown's
death in seventeen sixty one, the new firm of Nicholas
Brown and Company made him master of the brig Prudence Providence,
built of one hundred and twenty tons, thus enabling him
to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since
his marriage. The sight he had chosen a recently straightened

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part of the new and fashionable backstreet 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,

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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

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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 the following June. Eli Lydison, the other servant,
constantly complained of weakness and would have returned to his

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father's farm and Rehobeth, 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 and feebled as he
was by the climate of Martinique, where his occupation had
kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade. The

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widowed Ruby Harris never recovered from the shock of her
husband's death, and the passing of her first born Elkana,
two years later was the final blow to her reason.
In seventeen sixty eight, she fell victim to a mild
form of insanity and was thereafter confined to the upper
part of the house, her elder maiden's sister, Mercy Dexter,

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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 spindled lad.

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In this year, the servant Mehetabel 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 with five years space, had begun

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to set in motion a body of fireside rumor which
later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants
from out of town, Anne White, a morose woman from
the part of North Kingston now set off as the
township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenus Lowe.

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It was Anne White who first gave definite shape of
the sinister idle talk. Mercy should have known better than
a high or anyone from the noose neck Hill country,
for that remote bit of backwards was then and now
a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as
eighteen ninety two, an Exeter community exhumed a dead body

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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 seventeen sixty eight, Anne's tongue was perniciously active, and
within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place

(19:35):
with a faithful and amiable Amazon from Newport Maria Robbins. Meanwhile,
poor Ruby 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

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cousin Peleg Harris and 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 as well meaning,
she would have let him live there permanently with Peleg
just what Missus Harris cried out for in her fits
of violence. Tradition hesitates to say, or rather presents, such

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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

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staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In seventeen
seventy two, the servant Zenis died, and when Missus 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

(21:03):
her husband. Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain
in seventeen seventy five, 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 seventeen eighty,

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as a captain in the Rhode Island Forces in New
Jersey under Colonel Angel, he met and married Phoebe 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

(21:48):
widened and changed in the name from Back Street to
Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone
a sad and curious decay. 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.

(22:12):
In the autumn of seventeen eighty two, Phoebe Harris gave
birth to a stillborn 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
that the radically unhealthy nature of his abode, now took

(22:33):
steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. 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
seventeen eighty five his son Dutee was born, and there

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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 eighteen seventy six. William and Phoebe both succumbed to
the yellow fever epidemic of seventeen ninety seven, but Dutee

(23:19):
was brought up by his cousin Rathbone. Harris Pelig's son.
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

(23:41):
of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the
house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt
only vexation when in eighteen o four 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.

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They said the place had a febrile smell. Du Tee
himself thought little of the house, for he grew up
to be a privateersman and served with distinction on the
Vigilant under Captain Cahoun in the War of eighteen twelve.
He returned unharmed, married in eighteen fourteen, and became a

(24:26):
father on the memorable night of September twenty third, eighteen fifteen,
when a great gale drove the waters of the bay
over half the town and floated a tall sloop up
Westminster Street, so that its masts almost taped the Harris windows,
and symbolic affirmation that the new boy Welcome was a
seaman's son. Welcome did not survive his father, but lived

(24:52):
to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in eighteen sixty two. Neither
he nor his son Archer knew of the Shunned House
as other than a nuisance, almost impossible to rent, perhaps
account on the mustiness and sickly odor of unkept old age. Indeed,
it never was rented. After a series of deaths culminating

(25:13):
in eighteen sixty one, which the excitement of the war
tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the
mail line, knew it only as it deserted in somewhat
picturesque center of legend, until I told him my experience.
He had meant to tear it down and build an
apartment house in the site, but after my account decided

(25:35):
to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor
has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The
horror has gone. It may well be imagined how powerfully
I was affected by the annals of the harrises and
this continuous record. There seemed to me a brood of

(25:56):
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,

(26:18):
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
reoccurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the

(26:40):
servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungus
and melodorous cellar of the house a vast supremacy and
evil influence. There had been servants and white especially, who
would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three
well defined legends bore upon the queer, quasi human or

(27:00):
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 a common stock
of local ghost lore. Anne White, with their exitter Superstition,

(27:25):
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 and their praying shapes

(27:46):
or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire, one must,
the grandmothers say, exume it and burn its heart, or
at least drive a stake through that organ. And Ann's
dug insistence on a search under the cellar had been
prominent in bringing about her discharge. Her tales, however, commanded

(28:09):
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 to the departing servant, preserved Smith,

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who had preceded Anne and never heard of her, that
something sucked his breath at night. The death certificates of
the fever victims of eighteen oh four, issued by doctor
Chad Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all unaccountably
lacking in blood. And the obscure passages of poor Ruby

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Harris's ravings, where she complained to the sharp teeth of
a glassy, eyeyed, 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 the deaths in the Shunned House, one

(29:19):
from the Providence Gazette and Country Journal of April twelfth,
eighteen fifteen, and the other from the Daily Transcript and
Chronicle of October twenty seventh, eighteen forty five, each of
which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable.
It seemed that in both instances the dying person in

(29:43):
eighteen fifteen a gentle old lady named Stafford, and in
eighteen forty five a school teacher of middle age named
Elizer d'urfee, 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

(30:03):
an end to the renting of the house, a series
of anemia deaths preceded by progressive madness, wherein the patient
would craftily attempt the lives of his relatives by incision
of the necker wrist. This was in eighteen sixty In
eighteen sixty one, when my uncle had just begun his
medical practice, and before leaving for the front, he heard

(30:26):
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 know others would babble maledictions in French,

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a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent.
It made one think of poor Ruby Harris nearly a
century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced
collecting historical data on the house after listening sometimes subsequent
to his return from the war, to the first hand
account of doctor Chase and Whitemarsh. Indeed, I could see

(31:09):
that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and
that he was glad of my own interest and 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,

(31:31):
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. I talked
with the elderly Archer Harris, then owner of the house,

(31:54):
many times before his death in nineteen sixteen, and obtained
from him, and is still surviving Maiden's sister Alice, an
authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however,
I asked them what connection with France or its language
the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled

(32:17):
and ignorant as Eye Archer knew nothing, And all that
Miss Harris could say was that an old illusion her
grandfather Dutee Harris had heard of might shed a little light.
The old seaman, who had survived his son Welcome's death
in battle by two years, had not himself known to
the legend, but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient

(32:40):
Maria Robbins, seemed darkly aware of something that might have
lent a weird significance to the French raving of Ruby Harris,
which she had so often heard during the last days
of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the Shunned
house from seventeen sixty nine to the removal of the
family in seventeen eighty three, and had seen Mercy Dexter

(33:01):
die once. She hinted to the child Dutee of a
somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last moments, but he had
soon forgotten all about it, save it was something peculiar
the granddaughter moreover recalled even this much with difficulty. She
and her brother were not so much interested in the

(33:22):
house as was Archer's son Carrington, the present owner with
whom I talked. After my experience, having exhausted the Harris
family of all information it could furnish, I turned my
attention to early town records in Deeds with a zeal
more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shown
in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive

(33:45):
history on the site from its very settlement in sixteen
thirty six, or even before, if any narroganst Indian legend
could be on earth to supply the data. I found
at the start that the land had been part of
the law Ung strip of home lot, granted originally to
John Throckmorton, one of many similar strips, beginning at the

(34:06):
town street beside the river and extending up over the
hill to align roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street.
The Throckmorton lot had later, of course, been much subdivided,
and I became very assiduous in tracing that section through
which back in Benefit Street was later run. It had,

(34:27):
as rumor indeed said, been the Throckmorton Graveyard. But as
I examined the records more carefully, I found that the
graves had all been transferred at an early date to
the North Burial ground on the Pawtucket West Road. Then
suddenly I came by a rare piece of chance, since
it was not in the main body of the records,

(34:47):
and might easily have been missed, upon something which aroused
my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several
of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the
record of a lease in sixteen ninety seven of a
small tract of ground to Annetoine Roulay and his wife.
At last, the French element had appeared, that and another

(35:11):
deep element of horror, which the name conjured, up from
the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading. And
I feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it
had been before the cutting through and partial straightening of
Beck Street between seventeen forty seven and seventeen fifty eight.
I found what I had half expected, that where the

(35:35):
shunned house now stood, the Roulays had laid out their
graveyard behind a one story and Attic cottage, and that
no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document
indeed ended in much confusion, and I was forced to
ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library

(35:57):
before I could find a local door which the name
of Atween Roulai would unlock. In the end, I did
find something something of such vague but monstrous import, that
I set about it at once to examine the cellar
of the shunt House itself with a new and excited minuteness.

(36:19):
The Roulays, it seemed, had come in sixteen ninety six
for East Greenwich, down the west shore of Narragansett Bay.
They were Huguenots from cod and had encountered much opposition
before the Providence Selectmen allowed them to settle in the town.
Unpopularity had dodged them in East Greenwich. Whether they had

(36:41):
come in sixteen eighty six after the revocation of the
Edict of Nance, and rumors said that the cause of
dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice or the
land disputes which involved other French settlers with the English,
and rivalries which not even Governor Andros could quell. But

(37:01):
their ardent Protestantism too ardent, some whispered, and their evident distress,
when virtually driven from the village down the bay, had
moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here the strangers
had been granted a haven, and the swarthy Etwine Roulay,
less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and

(37:23):
drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the
warehouse at Pardon Tillingast's Wharf, far south in Town Street.
There had, however, been a riot of some sort later on,
perhaps forty years later, after Old Roulay's death, and no
one seemed to hear the family after that. For a

(37:45):
century and more. It appeared the Rulays had been well
remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet
life of a New England seaport. Etwin's son, Paul, a
surly fellow, whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot
which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of speculation,

(38:06):
and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her
Puritan neighbors, it was freely intimated by old wives that
his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor
directed toward the proper object. All this had undoubtedly formed
the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins.
What relation it had to the French ravings of Ruby,

(38:28):
Harris and other inhabitants of the Shunt House. Imagination or
future discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of
those who had known the legends realized that additional link
with the terrible which my wider reading had given me.
That ominous item in the Annals of Morbid Horror, which

(38:49):
tells of the creature Jacques Roulet of Claude, who in
fifteen ninety eight was condemned to death as a demoniac,
but afterwards saved from the stake by the Paris Parliament
and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered
with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly
after the killing and rending of a boy by a

(39:10):
pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt.
Surely a pretty heart sighed tale with a queer significance
as to name and place. But I decided that the
providence gossip could not have generally known of it. Had
they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some
drastic and frightened action. Indeed, might not its limited whispering

(39:35):
have precipitated the final riot which erased the Roulays from
the town. I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency,
studying the unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the
walls of the building, and pouring over every end of
the earth and cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission,

(40:00):
I fitted a key to the disused door opening from
the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a
more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs,
ground floor, hall and front door could give. There where
morbidity lurked most thickly. I searched and poked during long afternoons,

(40:22):
when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above grave windows,
and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door,
which placed me only a few feet from a placid
sidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts, only the same,
depressing mustiness and faint suggestions of noxious odors and nitrous

(40:43):
outlines on the floor, and I fancied that many pedestrians
must have watched me curiously through the broken panes at length.
Upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try
the spot nocturnally, and one stormy midnight ran the beams
of an electric torch over the moldy floor, with its
uncanny shapes and distorted half phosphorescent fungi. The place had

(41:08):
dispirited me curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared
when I saw, or thought I saw, amidst the whitish deposits,
a particularly sharp definition of the huddled form I had
suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented, and
as I watched, I seemed to see again the thin, yellowish,

(41:29):
shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy afternoon
so many years before. Above the anthropomorphic patch of mold
by the fireplace, it rose a subtle, sickish, almost luminous vapor, which,
as it hung trembly in the dampness, seemed to develop
vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into

(41:51):
nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the
great chimney, with a fetter in its wake. It was
truly horrible, and the more so to me because of
what I knew at the spot. Refusing to flee, I
watched it fade, and as I watched, I felt that
it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more

(42:14):
imaginable than visible. When I told my uncle about it,
he was greatly aroused, and after a tense hour of reflection,
arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing in his
mind the importance of the matter and the significance of
our relation to it, he insisted that we both test

(42:35):
and if possibly destroy the horror of the house by
joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty
and fungus cursed cellar. On Wednesday, June twenty fifth, nineteen nineteen,
after a proper notification of Carrington Harris, which did not
include surmises as to what we expected to find, my

(42:59):
uncle and I convey aid to the Shunthouse two camp
chairs in a folding camp cot, together with some scientific
mechanism of greater weight and intricacy. These we placed in
the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paper,
and planning to return in the evening for our first vigil.
We had locked the door from the cellar to the
ground floor, and having a key to the outside cellar door,

(43:23):
were prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus, which
we had obtained secretly at a great cost. As many
days as our vigils might be protracted. It was our
design to sit up together till very late and then
watch singly till dawn in two hour stretches, myself first
and then my companion, the inactive member resting on the cot.

(43:46):
The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments
from the laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street
Armory and instinctively assumed direction of our venture was a
marvelous commentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a
man of eighty one. L Hugh Whipple had lived according
to the hygienic laws he had preached as a physician,

(44:09):
and but for what happened later, would be here in
full vigor today. Only two persons suspected what did happen,
Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris because
he owned the house and deserved to know what had
gone out of it. Then too, we had spoke to
him in advance of our quest, and I felt, after

(44:29):
my uncle's going that he would understand and assist me
in some vitally necessary public explanations. He turned very pale,
but agreed to help me, and decided that it would
now be safe to rent the house. To declare that
we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching
would be an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not,

(44:53):
and I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but
scientific study and reforest had taught us that the known
universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the
whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case, an
overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to

(45:15):
the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power, and,
so far as the human point of view is concerned
exceptional malignancy, to say that we actually believed in vampires
or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather, must
it be said that we were not prepared to deny

(45:37):
the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital
force and atunated matter existing very infrequently in three dimensional space,
because of its more intimate connection with other spatial units,
yet close enough to the boundary of our own to
furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a

(45:58):
proper vantage point, may never hope to understand. In short,
it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrivable
array of facts pointed to some lingering influence in the
shunned house, traceable to one or another of the ill
favored French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative

(46:19):
through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion,
that the family of Roulay had possessed an abnormal affinity
for outer circles of entity, dark spheres for which normal
folk hold only repulsion and terror, that recorded history seemed
to prove had not. Then the riots of those bygone

(46:40):
seventeen thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid
brain of one or more of them, notably the sinister
Paul Roulay, which obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried
by the mob and continued to function in some multiple
dimensioned space along the original line of force determined by

(47:02):
a frantic hatred of the encroaching community. Such a thing
was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility. In the
light of a newer science, which includes the theories of
relativity and intra atomic action, one might easily imagine an
alien nucleus or substance or energy formless or otherwise kept

(47:25):
alive by imperceptible or irmaterial subtractions from the life force
or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably
living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric
it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile,
or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of

(47:48):
self preservation. In any case, such a monster must, of
necessity be in our scheme of things, an anomaly and
an intruder whose exportation forms a primary duty with every man,
not an enemy to the world's life, health, and sanity.
What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect

(48:11):
in which we might encounter the thing. No sane person
had ever seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely.
It might be pure energy, a form of ethereal and
outside the realm of substance, or it might be partly material,
some unknown and equivocal mass of plasticity capable of changing

(48:36):
at will to nebulous approximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous,
or tenacious unparticled states, the anthropomorphic patch of mold on
the floor, the form of the yellowish vapor, and the
curvature of the tree roots in some of the old
tales all argued at least a remote and reminiscent connection

(48:57):
with the human shape. But how representative for permanent that
similarity might be. None could say with any kind of certainty.
We had devised two weapons to fight it. A large
and specially fitted croux tube operated by powerful storage batteries
and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors in case it

(49:20):
proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations,
and a pair of military flamethrowers of the sort used
in the World War, in case it proved partly material
and susceptible of mechanical destruction. For like the superstitious exit rustics,

(49:42):
we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if
hart existed. To burn all this aggressive mechanism, we sat
in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to
the cots and chairs, and to the spot before the
fireplace where the mold had taken strange shapes, not suggestive. Patch,

(50:02):
by the way, was only faintly visible when we placed
our furniture and instruments, and when we returned that evening
for the actual vigil. For a moment I half doubted
that I had ever seen it in the more definitely
limbed form, But then I thought of the legends. Our
cellar visual began at ten p m daylight savings time,

(50:25):
and as it continued we found no promise of pertinent developments.
A weak filtered glow from the rain harassed street lamps
outside and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within.
Showed the dripping stone of the walls, from which all
traces of whitewash had vanished, The dank, fetid and mildew

(50:49):
tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi, The rotted
remains of what had been stools, chairs and tables, and
other more shapeless furniture. The heavy planks and massive beams
on the ground floor overhead, the decrepit plank door leading
to bends and chambers beneath our parts of the house,

(51:10):
the crumbling stone staircase with ruined wooden hand rail, and
the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick, where rusted
iron fragments revealed the past presence of hooks and irons,
spit crane, and a door to the Dutch oven. These
things and our stair caught in camp chairs and the

(51:33):
heavy and intricate destructive machinery we had brought. We had,
as in my own former explorations, left the door to
the street unlocked, so that a direct and practical path
of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond
our power to deal with. It was our idea that
our continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign entity

(51:56):
lurked there, and that being prepared, we could dispose of
the thing with one or the other of our provided means,
as soon as we had recognized and observed it sufficiently.
How long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing,
we had no notion. It occurred to us too, that

(52:16):
our venture was far from safe, for in what strength
the thing might appear, no one could tell. But we
deemed the gain worth the hazard, and embarked on it
alone and unhesitatingly, conscious that the seeking of outside aid
would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeed our
entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we

(52:38):
talked far into the night, till my uncle's growing drowsiness
made me remind him to lie down for his two
hour sleep. Something like fear chilled me as I sat
there in the small hours alone. I say alone, for
one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone, perhaps

(52:59):
more alone than he can realize. My uncle breathed heavily,
his deep inhalations and exhilations, accompanied by the rain outside
and punctuated by another nerve racking sound of distant dripping
water within, For the house was repulsively damp, even in
dry weather, and in this storm positively swamp like. I

(53:23):
studied the loose antique masonry, the walls, in the fungus light,
and the feeble rays which stole in from the street
through the screen window. And once, when the noisome atmosphere
of the place seemed about to sicken me, I opened
the door and looked up and down the street, feasting
my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on wholesome air.

(53:46):
Still nothing occurred to reward my watching, and I yawned repeatedly,
fatigue getting the better of apprehension. Then the stirring of
my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He turned
restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half
of the first hour, but now he was breathing with

(54:06):
unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than
a few of the qualities of a choking moan. I
turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face averted.
So rising and crossing to the other side of the cot,
I again flashed the light to see if he seemed
in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly,

(54:30):
considering its relative triviality. It must have been merely the
association of any odd circumstance with the sinister nature of
our location and mission. For surely the circumstance was not
in itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my
uncle's facial expression, disturbed, no doubt by the strange dreams

(54:52):
which our situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and seemed not
at all characteristic them. His habitual expression was one of
kindly and well bred calm, whereas now a variety of
emotions seemed struggling within him. I think on the whole

(55:14):
that it was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle,
as he gasped and tossed in increasing perturbation, and with
eyes that had now started open, seemed not one but
many men, and suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.

(55:34):
All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did
not like the look of his mouth and teeth as
he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable, and then
with a tremendous start, I recognized something about them which
filled me with icy fear, till I recalled the breadth
of my uncle's education, and the interminable translations he had

(55:56):
made from anthropological and antiquarian articles, and the Revue du
dusement for the vernable Eli Hugh Whipple was muttering in French,
and the few phrases I could distinguish seemed connected with
the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous
Paris magazine. Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead,

(56:19):
and he leaped abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of
French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse
voice shouted excitedly, my breath, my breath. Then the awakening
became complete, and then, with a subsidence of facial expressions
to the normal state, my uncle seized my hand and

(56:40):
began to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I
could only surmise with a kind of awe. He had,
he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of
dream pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to
nothing he had ever read. It was of this world
and yet not of it, a shadowy geometrical confusion in

(57:05):
which could be seen elements of familiar things and most
unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly
disordered pictures superimposed upon one another, an arrangement in which
the essentials of time as well as of space seemed
dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this

(57:29):
kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one
might use the term of singular clearness, but unaccountable heterogeeny.
Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug
open pit with a crowd of angry faces framed by
straggling locks, and three cornered hats frowning down on him. Again,

(57:53):
he seemed to be in the interior of the house,
an old house, apparently, but the details and inhabit poons
were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of
the faces of the furniture, or even the room itself,
since doors and windows seemed in just as great a
state of flux as the presumably more mobile objects. It

(58:15):
was queer, damnably queer, and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly,
as if half expecting not to be believed, when he
declared that one of the strange faces many had unmistakably
borne the features of the Harris family. And all the
while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if

(58:36):
some pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and
sought to possess itself of his vital processes. I shuddered
that the thought of those vital processes, worn as they
were by eighty one years of continuous functioning in conflict
with unknown forces of which the youngest and strongest system
might well be afraid, But in another moment reflected that

(59:00):
dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable versions could
be at most no more than my uncle's reaction to
the investigations and expectations which had lately filled our minds
to the exclusion of all else. Conversation also soon tended
to dispel my sense of strangeness, and in time I

(59:21):
yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber.
My uncle seemed now very wakeful and welcomed his period
of watching, even though the nightmare had aroused him far
ahead of his allotted two hours. Sleep seized me quickly,
and I was at once haunted with dreams of the
most disturbing kind. I felt in my visions a cosmic

(59:45):
and abysmal loneliness, with hostility surging from all sides. Upon
some prison where I like and find, I seemed bound
and gagged and taunted by the echoing yells of distant
multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle's face came
to me with less pleasant association than in waking hours,

(01:00:06):
and I recall many feutile struggles and attempts to scream.
It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a second
I was not sorry for the echoing shriek which closed
through the barriers of dream and flung me to a
sharp and startled awakeness, in which every actual object before
my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and reality.

(01:00:30):
I had been lying with my face away from my
uncle's chair, so that in this sudden flash of awakening,
I saw only the door of the street, the window,
and the wall and floor and ceiling toward the north
of the room, all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain,
and a light brighter than the glow of the fungi
or the rays from the street outside. It was not

(01:00:52):
a strong or even a fairly strong light, certainly not
as strong enough to read an average book by, but
asked a shadow on myself and the cot on the floor,
and had a yellowish penetrating force that hinted at things
more potent than luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy sharpness,

(01:01:13):
despite the fact that two of my other senses were
violently assailed, For on my ears rang the reverberations of
the shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench
which filled the place. My mind, as alert as my senses,
recognized the gravely unusual, and almost automatically, I leapt up

(01:01:34):
and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we
had left trained on the moldy spot before the fireplace.
As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see,
for the scream had been in my uncle's voice, and
I knew not against what menace I should have to
defend him and myself. Yet after all, the sight was

(01:01:58):
worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors,
and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable
hideousness which the Cosmo saves to blast in a cursed
and unhappy few. Out of the fungus ridden earth steamed
up a vaporous corpse, light yellow and diseased, which bubbled

(01:02:20):
and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines, half
human and half monstrous, through which I could see the
chimney in fireplace. Beyond it was all eyes, wolfish and mocking,
and the regose, insect like head dissolved at the top
to a thin stream of mist, which curled putridly about

(01:02:43):
and finally vanished up the chimney. I say that I
saw this thing, but it is only in conscious retrospection
that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form.
At the time, it was to me only a seething,
dimly phosphores and cloud of fungus loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving

(01:03:05):
to an aberrant plasticity. The one object on which all
my attention was focused. That object was my uncle, the
venerable Elihu Whipple, who, with blackening and decaying features, leered
and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to

(01:03:26):
rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.
It was a sense of routine which kept me from
going mad. I had drilled myself in preparation for the
crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognizing the bubbling
evil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry,

(01:03:46):
and therefore ignoring the flamethrower which loomed on my left,
I threw on the current to the Creux's two apparatus
and focused toward that scene of immoral blasphemousness, the stronger
ether radiations which man's art can arouse from the spheres
and fluids of nature. There was a bluish haze and
a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to

(01:04:10):
my eyes, but I saw the dimness was only that
of contrast, and that the waves from the machine had
no effect whatsoever. Then, in the midst of that demonic spectacle,
I saw a fresh horror, which brought cries to my lips,
and sent me fubbling and staggering toward the unlocked door
to the quiet street, careless of what abnormal terrors I

(01:04:33):
loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of
men I brought down upon my head. In that dim
blend of blue and yellow, the form of my uncle
had commenced, a nauseous liquefication whose essence eludes all description,
and in which there played across this vanishing face such
changes of identity as only madness can conceive. He was

(01:04:56):
at once a devil and a multitude of carnal house
and pageant. Lit by the mixed and uncertain beams, the
gelatinous face assumed a dozen, a score a hundred aspects,
grinning as it sank to the ground, of a body
that melted like tallow, and the caricatured likeness of legions
strange and yet not strange. I saw the features of

(01:05:17):
the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile, and
other features, old and young, coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar.
For a second there flashed a degraded counterfeit of a
miniature of a poor mad Ruby Harris that I had
seen in the School of Design Museum. And another time
I thought I had caught the raw boned image of

(01:05:39):
Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in
Carrington Harris's house. It was frightful beyond conception. Toward the last,
when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickered
close to the fungus floor, where a pool of greenish
grease was spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features
fought against themselves and strode to form contours like those

(01:06:01):
of my uncle's kindly face. I like to think that
he existed at that moment, and that he tried to
bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccuped a
farewell from my own parched throat. As I lurched out
into the street. A thin stream of grease followed me
through the door to the rain drenched sidewalk. The rest

(01:06:23):
is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the
soaking street, and in all the world, there was no
one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College
Hill in the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the
bridge to the business section, where tall buildings seemed to
guard me, as modern material things guard the world from

(01:06:45):
ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then gray dawn unfolded wetly from
the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples,
and beckoning me to the place where my terrible work
was still unfinished. And in the end I went, wet,
hatless and dazed in the morning light, and entered that

(01:07:08):
awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar,
and which still swung cryptically in full sight of the
early householders, to whom I dared not speak. The grease
was gone, for the moldy floor was porous, and in
front of the fireplace was no vestige of the giant
doubled up form traced in nighter. I looked at the cot,

(01:07:32):
the chairs, the instruments, my neglected hat, and the yellow
distral hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I
could scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality.
Then thought trickled back, and I knew that I had
witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. Sitting down,

(01:07:54):
I tried to conjecture, as nearly as sanity would let me,
just what had happened, and how I might in the
horror if indeed it had been real matter. It seemed
not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivable by
mortal mind. What then, but some exotic emanation, some vampirish vapor,

(01:08:16):
such as exit rustics tell of as lurking over certain graveyards.
This I felt was the clue, and again I looked
at the floor before the fireplace, where the mould and
nighter had taken strange forms. In ten minutes, my mind
was made up, and taking my hat, I set out
for home, where I bathed, ate and gave by telephone

(01:08:40):
an order for a pickaxe, a spade, a military gas mask,
and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to be delivered
the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned
house and Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep,
and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the
position of inane verses to counteract my mood. At eleven

(01:09:04):
am the next day, I commenced digging. It was sunny weather,
and I was glad of that I was still alone.
For as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought,
there was more fear in the thought of telling anybody. Later.
I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because he

(01:09:25):
had heard odd tales from old people, which disposed him
ever so little toward belief. As I turned up the
stinking black earth in front of the fireplace, my spade
causing a viscous yellow icher to ooze from the white
fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious thoughts
of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth

(01:09:47):
are not good for mankind, and this seemed to be
one of them. My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved.
After a while, standing in the large hole I had made.
With the deepening of the hole, which was about six
feet square, the evil smell increased, and I lost all
doubt of my eminent contact with a hellish thing whose

(01:10:10):
emanations had cursed the house for over a century and
a half. I wondered what it would look like, what
its form and substance would be, and how big it
might have waxed through long ages of life. Sucking at length,
I climbed out of the hole and dispersed the heaped
up dirt, then arranging the great carboys of acid around

(01:10:31):
and near two sides, so that when necessary I might
empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that,
I dumped earth only along the other two sides, working
more slowly and dotting my gas mask as the smell grew.
I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless
thing at the bottom of a pit. Suddenly my spade

(01:10:55):
struck something softer than the earth. I shuddered and made
a motion as if to climb out of the hole,
which was now as deep as my neck. Then courage returned,
and I scraped away more dirt in the light of
the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered
was fishy and glassy, a kind of semi putrid congealed

(01:11:19):
jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further and saw
that it had form. There was a rift where part
of the substance was folded over the exposed area was
huge and roughly cylindrical, like a mammoth's soft blue white stovepipe,
doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter.

(01:11:43):
Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out
of the hole and away from the filthy thing, frantically
unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys and precipitating their corrosive
contents one after another down the carnal gulf, and upon
the unthinkable abnormality whose tight an elbow I had seen.

(01:12:03):
The blinding maelstrom of greenish yellow vapor which surged tempestuously
up from that hole as the floods of acid descended,
will never leave my memory. All along the hill people
tell of the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes
arose from the factory waste dumped in the Providence River.

(01:12:23):
But I know how mistaken they are as to the source.
They tell too, of the hideous roar, which at the
same time came from the disordered water pipe or gas
maine underground. But again I could correct them if I dared.
It was unspeakably shocking, and I do not see how
I lived through it. I did faint after emptying the

(01:12:47):
fourth carboy, which I had to handle after the fumes
had begun to penetrate my mask. But when I recovered,
I saw that the hole was emitting no fresh vapors.
The two remaining cars boys I emptied down without particular result,
and after a time I felt it safe to shovel
the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before

(01:13:09):
I was done, but fear had gone out of the place,
The dampness was less feeded, and all the strange fungi
had withered to a kind of harmless, grayish powder which
blew ash like along the floor. One of Earth's nethermost
terrors had perished forever, and if there be a hell,

(01:13:30):
it had received at last the demon soul of an
unhallowed thing. And as I padded down the last spade
full of mold, I shed the first of many tears
with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved
uncle's memory. The next spring, no more pale grass and

(01:13:53):
strange weeds came up in the shunned house's terraced garden,
and shortly afterward, Carrying and Harris rented the place. It
is still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me. And I
shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when
it is torn down to make way for a toddy

(01:14:14):
shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in
the yard have begun to bear small sweet apples, and
last year the birds nested in their gnarled bowels. End
of the Shunned House, recorded by Justin Paul