In a house built on an ancient error, something vast and vampiric waits for the warm blood of the living.
In this tale of ancestral curse and scientific horror, the unnamed narrator and his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, turn their scholarly attention to a notorious, centuries-old dwelling in
Providence, Rhode Island
. For over two hundred years, the house has been shunned by the locals and has a horrifying reputation: every family that has ever lived there has been afflicted by mysterious illnesses and gruesome, unnatural deaths.
The investigators delve into the house's history and geology, discovering a pattern of unexplained sickness and an odd, yellowish fungus found growing in the cellar. The narrator and his uncle begin to suspect that the deaths are not the work of a traditional ghost or poltergeist, but a physical, elemental evil that resides deep within the earth beneath the foundation.
Their final, terrifying hypothesis is that the house is built over a
prehistoric, cosmic entity--
a protoplasmic, semi-sentient blob that feeds on the life-force and warmth of human blood. The climax sees the investigators descending into the cellar to confront the gelatinous horror in an attempt to destroy the source of the curse with chemical agents.
The Shunned House
is a classic, early work of
H. P. Lovecraft
that masterfully blends the tropes of gothic haunted houses with the emerging genre of cosmic horror. It shifts the terror from a spiritual haunting to a physical, biological reality, presenting a creature that is monstrous not through malice, but through its primordial need to feed.