The Haunted House

The beautiful river, which retains its Indian name of Merrimack, winds
through a country of almost romantic beauty. The last twenty miles of
its course in particular, are unsurpassed in quiet and rich scenery,
by any river in the United States. There are indeed, no bold and
ragged cliffs, like the Highlands of the Hudson, to cast their grim
shadows on the water--no blue and lofty mountains, piercing into the
thin atmosphere, and wrapping about their rocky proportions the mists
of valley and river--but there are luxuriant fields and pleasant
villages, and white church-spires, gleaming through the green foliage
of oak and elm--and wide forests of Nature's richest coloring, and
green hills sloping smoothly and gracefully to the margin of the
clear, bright stream, which moves onward to the Ocean, as lightly and
gracefully as the moving of a cloud at sunset, when the light wind
which propels the trial voyager is unfelt on earth.

It was on the margin of this stream, during the early times of
Massachusetts, that a stranger--a foreigner of considerable fortune--
took up his residence. He had a house, constructed from a model of his
own which, for elegance and convenience, far surpassed the rude and
simple tenements of his neighbors; and he had a small farm, or rather
garden. which he seemed to cultivate for amusement, rather than from
any absolute necessity of labor. He had no family, save a daughter--an
interesting girl of sixteen.

Near the dwelling of Adam McOrne--for such was the stranger's name--
lived old Alice Knight--a woman, known throughout the whole valley of
the river, from Plum Island to the residence of the Sachem
Passaconaway, on the Nashua,--as one under an evil influence--an ill-
tempered and malignant old woman--who was seriously suspected of
dealing with the Prince of Darkness. Many of her neighbors were ready
to make oath that they had been haunted by old Alice, in the shape of
a black cat--that she had taken off the wheels of their hay-carts and
frozen down their sled-runners, when the team was in full motion--that
she had bewitched their swine, and rendered their cattle unruly--nay,
more than one good wife averred, that she had bewitched their churns
and prevented the butter from forming; and that they could expel her
in no other way, than by heating a horse-nail and casting it into the
cream. Moreover, they asserted that when this method of exorcism was
resorted to, they invariably learned, soon after, that goodwife Alice
was suffering under some unknown indisposition. In short, it would be
idle to attempt a description of the almost innumerable feats of
witchcraft ascribed to the withered and decrepid Alice.