A posthumous story of immense power, written by a master of weirdfiction—a tale of a revolting horror in the cellar of an oldhouse in New England
From even the greatest of horrorsirony is seldom absent. Sometimesit enters directly into the compositionof the events, while sometimes itrelates only to their fortuitous positionamong persons and places. The lattersort is splendidly exemplified by a casein the ancient city of Providence, wherein the late forties Edgar Allan Poe usedto sojourn often during his unsuccessfulwooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman.Poe generally stopped at the MansionHouse in Benefit Street—the renamedGolden Ball Inn whose roof hassheltered Washington, Jefferson, andLafayette—and his favorite walk lednorthward along the same street to Mrs.Whitman's home and the neighboringhillside churchyard of St. John's, whosehidden expanse of Eighteenth Centurygravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.
Now the irony is this. In this walk, somany times repeated, the world's greatestmaster of the terrible and the bizarrewas obliged to pass a particular houseon the eastern side of the street; a dingy,antiquated structure perched on theabruptly rising side hill, with a greatunkempt yard dating from a time whenthe region was partly open country. Itdoes not appear that he ever wrote orspoke of it, nor is there any evidencethat he even noticed it. And yet thathouse, to the two persons in possessionof certain information, equals or outranksin horror the wildest fantasy of thegenius who so often passed it unknowingly,and stands starkly leering as asymbol of all that is unutterably hideous.
The house was—and for that matterstill is—of a kind to attract the attentionof the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farmbuilding, it followed the averageNew England colonial lines of the middleEighteenth Century—the prosperouspeaked-roof sort, with two stories anddormerless attic, and with the Georgiandoorway and interior panelling dictatedby the progress of taste at that time. Itfaced south, with one gable end buriedto the lower windows in the eastwardrising hill, and the other exposed to thefoundations toward the street. Its construction,over a century and a half ago,had followed the grading and straighteningof the road in that especial vicinity;for Benefit Street—at first called BackStreet—was laid out as a lane windingamongst the graveyards of the first settlers,and straightened only when theremoval of the bodies to the North BurialGround made it decently possible to cutthrough the old family plots.
At the start, the western wall had lainsome twenty feet up a precipitous lawnfrom the roadway; but a widening of thestreet at about the time of the Revolutionsheared off most of the intervening space,exposing the foundations so that a brickbasement wall had to be made, givingthe deep cellar a street frontage with doorand one window above ground, close tothe new line of public travel. Whenthe sidewalk was laid out a century