The Shunned House

The yellow colonial house set gable end to the street and built into a steeply rising hill attracts attention. The door, at street level, opens directly into a stone-lined cellar; the main entrance is approached by a flight of granite steps. On the gatepost, four signs, in neatly lettered French, direct visitors to beware of a mad dog, then instruct them to forget the dog and heed the master. The occult meaning of the signs is plain to those who have read "The Shunned House" (1937) by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). The owners of the house are sharing an inside joke with Lovecraft devotees, who enjoy tracking down the factual places that he insinuates into his fictional tales. Writing in the first person, Lovecraft weaves fact and fiction into this narrative about the house, built into a hillside on Benefit Street in Providence, where no one would live because "people died there in alarmingly great numbers." According to his story, William Harris built the house in 1763 for his wife, Rhoby Dexter, and their four children. But things were bad from the beginning. A child was still-born, "Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half," according to Lovecraft's text. Soon, the older children began to die, then the servants. Harris, himself, succumbed, and the widowed Rhoby "fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house." She could be heard shouting for hours "in a coarse and idiomatic form" of French, and she "complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her." She died the next year. As the tragic years rolled by, it became clear to people in the community that the evil was not in the family, but in the house. Rhoby Harris muttered of "the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence." A servant complained that something "sucked his breath" at night. The death certificates of fever victims of 1804 showed that "the four deceased persons" were "all unaccountably lacking in blood." A servant, Ann White, insisted that the cellar housed the evil. "Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same time most consistent" explanation: "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 send their preying shapes or spirits abroad at night."

As Lovecraft spins his tale, we learn that the land that the house was built upon once was used as a cemetery. The French Huguenot descendants of Jacques Roulet, condemned to be burned at the stake in Caude, France, in 1598 after confessing that he was a werewolf, were buried in an unmarked cemetery beneath the shunned house. The "anthropomorphic patch of mould" in the cellar acquired an increased terror, and Lovecraft noticed that above it rose "a subtle, sickish, almost luminous vapour which as it hung trembling in the dampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with a foetor in its wake." Lovecraft and his uncle, Dr. Whipple (filling a role similar to that of Dr. Van Helsing in Dracula), decided to spend the night in the cellar, augmented with scientific apparatus to analyze and, if necessary, destroy the evil entity, which they surmised was "traceable to one or another of the ill-savoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion." One of their weapons, a flamethrower, was to be used "in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction--for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart existed to burn." I won't ruin a good story by revealing its ending, so I suggest you read it yourself.

That monstrous fiend of seven "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, Freddy Krueger, may have been born in legends told around the campfires of Camp Ker-Anna in Cumberland, near Diamond Hill Road--quite a distance from the cinematic setting of Elm Street in Springwood, Ohio. The oral stories about Fingernail Freddie go back at least to the mid-nineteenth century and, reflecting the vagaries of an oral tradition, Freddie is frequently intertwined with another local villain. A former camper told it this way: "He was a guy that lived in the woods and because he lived in the woods for so long, his nails grew really long. And he didn't like all the noise the campers made, so they used to say, 'Don't make noise at night, because Fingernail Freddie is gonna come in and claw you with his fingers, with his nails.'" In some versions, especially in the more detailed variants of the legend, Fingernail Freddie is known as Hot-Shot (or even Ha-Cha) Charlie. Another former camper (and counselor at the camp) related this story:

"Hot-Shot Charlie was a man named Charles Torrie (I'm not sure of the spelling) who lived in the area of Camp Ker-Anna in the 1800s. He was a homesteader with his wife and two daughters and he had a small log cabin and plenty of fields to grow his food. And he was always troubled by vandalism from kids who would come from the city on weekends. They'd let his cows out and knock over his crops and give him a lot of grief. So Charlie finally got himself a shotgun and filled it with rock salt. The next time the kids came, he fired at them and hit them with the rock salt. Of course, it burned and hurt--and they decided to get even. They went back and set Charlie's cabin on fire while he was out in one of the barns. When he saw the flames, he went running into the cabin, knowing that his wife and two kids were in there. He tried to save them but couldn't, and he was severely burned. His face and much of his body was so badly disfigured that he stopped going into town and became like a hermit. To get his revenge, if any kids go into the woods near his house, he kills them. "He lived just a little bit north of the camp property. There's still a foundation. If you look, you can still see it, all covered over and buried. No one's sure exactly where Charlie stays, but he lives in the forest. He's out there somewhere, always lurking and waiting."