As he wrote in a letter: On the northeast corner of Bridge Street and Elizabeth Avenue is a terrible old house—a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds—with a blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, and an outside flight of stairs leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed.

Later its image came up again with renewed vividness, finally causing me to write a new horror story with its scene in Providence and with the Babbit House as its basis.

Dr. Whipple has made extensive use of records tracking the mysterious, yet apparently coincidental, sickness and death of many who have lived in the house for over one hundred years.

They set up both cots and chairs in the cellar, arm themselves with military flamethrowers, and outfit a modified Crookes tube in the hopes of destroying any supernatural presence they might find.

He tells the narrator that he had strange visions of lying in an open pit, inside a house with constantly shifting features, while faces stared down at him.

He digs into the earthen floor of the cellar, turning up fungous yellow ooze, and arranges the barrels of acid around the hole in the belief that he will happen upon some kind of monstrous creature.

When he awakens, the narrator empties the two remaining barrels, to no effect, replaces the dirt, and finds that the strange fungus has turned to harmless ash.

The genuine item, watermarked "Canterbury," is the rarest book associated with Arkham House (several variants exist involving the copyright notice).