 | The works of Washington Irving |  |
THE HAUNTED HOUSE.
FROM THE MSS. OF THE LATE DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER.
Formerly almost every place had a house of this
kind. If a house was seated on some melancholy
place, or built in some old romantic manner, or if
any particular accident had happened in it, such as
murder, sudden death, or the like, to be sure that
house had a mark set on it, and was afterwards
esteemed the habitation of a ghost.
Bourne's Antiquities.
In the neighbourhood of the ancient
city of the Manhattoes there stood, not
very many years since, an old mansion,
which, when I was a boy, went by the
name of the Haunted House. It was
one of the very few remains of the
architecture of the early Dutch settlers,
and must have been a house of some
consequence at the time when it was
built. It consisted of a centre and two
wings, the gable ends of which were
shaped like stairs. It was built partly
of wood, and partly of small Dutch
bricks, such as the worthy colonists
brought with them from Holland, before
they discovered that bricks could be manufactured
elsewhere. The house stood
remote from the road, in the centre of a
large field, with an avenue of old locusttrees[14]
leading up to it, se