“Some Lingering Influence in the Shunned House”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Three Invitations to Dark Tourism

Abstract

This chapter explores the idea of virtual dark tourism by investigating how Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” not only leads reader-tourists virtually through the dark space of Providence, Rhode Island (to the physical site of the real shunned house) and the dark time of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England (through folklore to grisly evidence of belief in vampires), but also relates its own fictional story of dark tourists who grapple with the legacy of evil in the shunned house.