shunned house for sale

By incredible good luck, it turns out that my bedroom faces “The Shunned House” from Lovecraft’s early story of the same name. There is now a “For Sale” sign in front, and my God, I wish I had enough wealth at my command to buy it instantly (it must be worth $1 million or more in a neighborhood like this). How many houses in the United States have that sort of literary aura about them?

If you’ve read the story, you may remember that there’s a strong French angle to it. The original haunting begins with a Frenchman, one of the maids in the house begins speaking French despite never having studied the language, and so forth. The reason I mention this is because the owners have a number of French signs on the gate (such as “Attention : chien bizarre!”). I appreciate that humorous touch.

The final haunting, you will also recall, occurs in the cellar-type area not directly beneath the house, which can be seen in the foreground of the photo. [ADDENDUM: I’ve started rereading the story, and I now think this is incorrect. The “cellar” in the story actually seems to be what now looks like the ground floor room right on the sidewalk. It would have been the cellar before they exposed the foundations of the house when Benefit Street was considerably widened.]

The narrator in the story makes much of the fact that all these horrific events occur nonetheless just a few feet from the sidewalk.

I think I’ll reread the story tonight while directly facing the house.

Something else, which is also mentioned explicitly in the story, is the relationship of Edgar Allan Poe with this street. Towards the end of his life, the widower Poe was courting the important Providence poet SARAH HELEN WHITMAN. As I remember from the biographies, she was even prepared to marry Poe, but his reputation simply wouldn’t allow her to go through with it in the end. The Wikipedia article on Whitman makes it sound more like Poe broke things off, but my recollection was somewhat different from that.

The narrator in Lovecraft’s story makes the “ironic” point that Poe must have passed by the shunned house quite often on his visits to Whitman (who lived on Church Street, just a few blocks from here), without ever noticing the house. Nice job by Lovecraft at dealing with his anxiety of influence!