An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

“unlucky”: people simply seem to have an uncanny habit of dying there, or at least of being afflicted with anemia or consumption. Neighboring houses are free of any such taint. It had lain deserted— because of the impossibility of renting it—since the Civil War. The narrator had known of this house since boyhood, when some of his childhood friends would fearfully explore it, sometimes even boldly entering through the unlocked front door “in quest of shudders.” As he grows older, he discovers that his uncle, Elihu Whipple, had done considerable research on the house and its tenants, and he finds his seemingly dry genealogical record full of sinister suggestion. He comes to suspect that some nameless object or entity is causing the deaths by somehow sucking the vitality out of the house’s occupants; perhaps it has some connection with a strange thing in the cellar, “a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre…[that] bore an uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up human figure.” After telling, at some length, the history of the house since 1763, the narrator finds himself puzzled on several fronts; in particular, he cannot account for why some of the occupants, just prior to their deaths, would cry out in a coarse and idiomatic form of French, a language they did not know. As he explores town records, he seems at last to have come upon the “French element.” A sinister figure named Etienne Roulet had come from France to East Greenwich, R.I., in 1686; he was a Huguenot and fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, moving to Providence ten years later in spite of much opposition from the town fathers. What particularly intrigues the narrator is his possible connection with an even more dubious figure, Jacques Roulet of Caude, who in 1598 was accused of lycanthropy.

Finally the narrator and his uncle decide to “test—and if possible destroy—the horror of the house.” They come one evening in 1919, armed with both a Crookes tube (a device invented by Sir William Crookes that emits electrons between two electrodes) and a flame-thrower. The two men take turns resting; both experience hideous and disturbing dreams. When the narrator wakes up from his dream, he finds that some nameless entity has utterly engulfed his uncle, “who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.” Realizing that his uncle is past help, he aims the Crookes tube at him. A further demoniac sight appears to him: the object seems to liquefy and adopt various temporary forms (“He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant”); then the features of the Harris line seem to mingle with his uncle’s. The narrator flees down College Hill to the modern downtown business district; when he returns, hours later, the nebulous entity is gone. Later that day he brings six carboys of sulfuric acid to the house, digs up the earth where the doubled-up anthropomorphic shape lies, and pours the acid down the hole—realizing only then that the shape was merely the “titan elbow” of some huge and hideous monster.

The story is based upon an actual house in Providence, at 135 Benefit Street; but the writing of the story was triggered by HPL’s seeing a similar house in Elizabeth, N.J., in early October 1924. HPL describes the house as follows (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, November 4–6, 1924; ms., JHL): “…on the northeast corner of Bridge St. & Elizabeth Ave. is a terrible old house—a hellish place where nightblack deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds—with a

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blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, & an outside flight of steps leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed. It reminded me of the Babbitt house in Benefit St., which as you recall made me write those lines entitled ‘The House’ in 1920.” (HPL refers to his poem “The House,“ published in the Philosopherfor December 1920.) This house in Elizabeth is no longer standing. HPL’s aunt Lillian had resided in the Providence house in 1919–20 as a companion for Mrs. C.H.Babbitt, and HPL may well have seen its interior at that time. This house, built around 1763, has a basement, two stories, and attic built on the rising hill, with shuttered doors in the basement leading directly out into the sidewalk. In contrast to HPL’s comment in the story, it has never been unoccupied. Otherwise, much of the history of the house, as told in the story, is real. The figure of Elihu Whipple appears to be modeled upon that of HPL’s own uncle, Franklin Chase Clark.