The Shunned House
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. The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by William
Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah, born in
1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born
in 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India
trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After
Brown's death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Company made him
master of the brig _Prudence_, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus
enabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his
marriage.
The site he had chosen--a recently straightened part of the new and
fashionable Back Street, 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, 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 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 in the following
June. Eli Lideason, the other servant, constantly complained of
weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth 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, enfeebled as he was by the climate of
Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods
during the preceding decade.
The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's
death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the
final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of
insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house;
her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, 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, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel 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 within five years'
space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumor which later
became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from
out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown
now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named
Zenas Low.
* * * * *
It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle
talk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the
Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as
now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892
an Exeter community exhumed a dead body 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 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within a
few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and
amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.
Meanwhile poor Rhoby 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 cousin, Peleg
Harris, in 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 well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with
Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence,
tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such 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 staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant
Zenas died, and when Mrs. 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 her husband.
Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, 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 1780, as a
captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell,
he met and married Phebe 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
widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But
Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay,
so that 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. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth
to a still-born 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 of the radically
unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and
closing it for ever. 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 1785, his son Dutee was
born; and there 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 1876. William
and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee
was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg'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 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