Benefit Street

Rhode Island · United States · Road

A mile of colonial houses in Providence, and the street H. P. Lovecraft could not stop writing about.

Benefit Street runs along the slope of College Hill in Providence, a mile of eighteenth and nineteenth century houses saved from demolition in the 1950s and now among the finest colonial streetscapes in America. It is also, by long consensus, the most haunted address in Rhode Island.

The carriage is the oldest of its stories. A horse drawn carriage has been described on the street by separate witnesses across many years, heard as often as seen, moving at the pace of an ordinary journey and gone at the corner. An elderly woman is reported at an attic window of one of the houses, always the same window, by people who did not know the story before they looked up.

One house on the street, at number 135, was the model for the house in H. P. Lovecraft's story about a cellar and the thing beneath it, and its reputation has fed the street's ever since. Lovecraft himself lived nearby and walked here constantly. Edgar Allan Poe walked it too: he courted the poet Sarah Helen Whitman on College Hill in 1848, the year before his death, and their engagement broke off here. Both men are described among the early morning walkers, which says as much about what Providence wants to be haunted by as about who is actually walking. These are lived in homes. The street is public, the doorsteps are not.

FAQ

Where is Benefit Street located?

Benefit Street is in Rhode Island, United States.

Image: Unknown author / public domain via Wikimedia Commons