The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft

Chapter 1

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 40s Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his

unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess Mrs. Whitman.

Poe generally stopped at the mansion house and 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 in the neighboring hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose hidden expanse of 18th-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 bazaar

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 18th century, the prosperous

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