“No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” was written by Ralph Adams Cram and first appeared in Black Spirits & White (1895). Cram (1863-1942) is better known for his non-literary pursuits: he is known as the best church architect America has ever produced. He was a proponent for the nineteenth century Gothic revival in American architecture and was widely read in his time as a cultural commentator and advocate for the ideals of the Middle Ages. But although Cram thought poorly of modern life and was reactionary in his political and cultural ideas, he was also a fine writer of horror stories. “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” is one of the best haunted house stories of the nineteenth century.

“No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” is another story from the life of the same nameless narrator of “The Dead Valley” and “Sister Maddelena.” In “No. 252" he tells about how, in 1886, he decided to visit an old friend of his, Eugene Marie d’Ardeche. On the death of his aunt Eugene had been left the woman’s property, No. 252 on the Rue M. le Prince in Paris. The aunt and Eugene had never gotten along, so the bequest was a surprise to Eugene. Worse, it was a surprise to Sar Torrevieja, “the King of Sorcerers,” a “malevolent old portent"¹ who had been a familiar of Eugene’s aunt and a regular at No. 252 Rue M. le Prince during the woman’s lifetime. When he discovered that Eugene had been given the property the Sar Torrevieja had removed everything from the property and then cursed it, “elaborately and comprehensively, together with all those who should ever dwell therein.”² When the narrator goes to Paris, he finds No. 252 only a grim doorway of old black stone. The narrator quickly finds Eugene, who tells the narrator that he hasn’t yet stayed in No. 252, which is supposedly haunted and which he can’t rent to anyone–he has had three tenants in the past six months, none of whom has lasted beyond four days. So Eugene and two friends are planning on staying in No. 252, which is known as “la Bouche d’Enfer,” to see whether it is really haunted. The narrator is invited along and gladly accepts. Over dinner Eugene tells the three about the history of No. 252, about how his aunt had lived there by herself and had only one regular visitor, Sar Torrevieja, who was never seen leaving the apartment, only entering it. Once a year, however, many women and men, veiled and with their collars turned up, arrived at the apartment, and then monotonous chanting and strange music could be heard from the apartment’s interior. And only the previous month those same sounds could be heard coming from the apartment, although it was abandoned. When Eugene, the narrator, and Eugene’s two friends enter the apartment, they find it empty and deserted, and “although dark and silent, generally respectable. But then they enter the three worst rooms of No. 252, and all four begin to frighten. The first room is without windows and is completely done up in brightly polished black lacquer. The second is circular, covered by a dome:

walls and ceiling were dark blue, spotted with gold stars; and reaching from floor to floor across the dome stretched a colossal figure in red lacquer of a nude woman kneeling, her legs reaching out along the floor on either side, her head touching the lintel of the door through which we had entered, her arms forming its sides, with the fore arms extended and stretching along the walls until they met the long feet. The most astounding, misshapen, absolutely terrifying thing, I think, I ever saw. From the navel hung a great white object, like the traditional roe's egg of the Arabian Nights. The floor was of red lacquer, and in it was inlaid a pentagram the size of the room, made of wide strips of brass. In the centre of this pentagram was a circular disk of black stone slightly saucer shaped, with a small outlet in the middle.

The effect of the room was simply crushing, with this gigantic red figure crouched over it all, the staring eyes fixed on one, no matter what his position. None of us spoke, so oppressive was the whole thing.³

The third room is like the first, but “entirely sheathed with plates of brass, walls, ceiling and floor...in the middle stood an oblong altar of porphyry...and at one end...a pedestal of black basalt."⁴

The four men decide to keep the doors to their sleeping rooms open, the lights burning, and at the slightest noise rush to the room where the sound comes from. Conversation soon flags, and the narrator has trouble staying awake. He eventually falls asleep, only to awake, certain that something is attacking him, body and mind. His body is paralyzed, but he tries to keep his mind alert. Then he sees eyes in the darkness, and feels a ghastly wet something attach to his body and a icy, jelly-like mouth fasten itself on to his. The narrator fights it, for hours he thinks, and then passes out. He wakes up in the hospital, where Eugene tells him that they called to him, and when he didn’t respond when to wake him, only to find the door closed and locked from the inside. They broke down the door, to find the floor and walls dripping to the height of six feet with a noisome, glutinous substance, and the narrator drenched with the same liquid. They dragged him away, but as they did so a lantern was accidentally (perhaps) knocked over, and the entire building burned to the ground.

“No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” is more evidence that horror fiction lost a major talent when Cram decided not to write more in the genre. (He dismissed Black Spirits & White and the stories therein as a youthful indiscretion.⁵) “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” is the third story in which Cram uses a traditional horror form to excellent effect. “The Dead Valley” is a classic story of a Bad Place. “Sister Maddelena” is a near-classic ghost story. And “No. 252" is an excellent haunted house story. Had Cram decided to continue writing horror fiction he would undoubtedly have become an immortal in the field, rather than being known for his work in architecture.

Cram chooses a different tone and style in which to tell “No. 252" than he did in the other two stories. Unlike the folklorish tone of “The Dead Valley” and the more straightforward style of “Maddelena,” “No. 252" is told in a witty and descriptive style, full of small, nice touches, like the description of Sar Torrevieja’s “crab-wise” sidle up to the door of No. 252 and how he was only ever seen entering the house, never leaving it. Cram’s scene-setting is concise and descriptive, and he conveys why Paris is such a great setting for a story like this. “No. 252" is also interesting for its assumptions about the reader. The sense of Paris as a natural destination for rich young men doing the American version of the Grand Tour in the 1880s and 1890s, of a place that readers would know almost as well as their own home towns, is heavy in the story. Cram casually refers to settings and events, like the Jardin Mabille, an outdoor dance hall and theater known for its risqué dances, which his contemporaries would have known about but which modern readers are ignorant of. In some cases this use of cultural knowledge which is lost to modern audiences can be off-putting, but in “No. 252" it is effective in creating and sustaining the atmosphere of this lost Paris.

As a horror story, “No. 252" works quite well. Cram invokes Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” (1876) and, to better effect, Bulwer Lytton’s “The Haunters & the Haunted,” which not only nicely hints at the horrors to come but prepares the reader to be frightened by those horrors. (Modern readers will no doubt be unaffected by the reference to Bulwer Lytton, but it must be remembered how well-known his work was in the nineteenth century. Mentioning “The Haunters & the Haunted” in the course of a haunted house story, before the scary parts have begun, is similar to a modern possession horror story mentioning The Exorcist. It frames the story within a context the reader is likely to know while preconditioning the reader for what is to come). Although Cram built the frightening atmosphere more gradually in “The Dead Valley,” the scare in “No. 252,” when it comes, is effective. The image of the “dead cuttle-fish” mouth settling over the narrator’s mouth and drawing the life from him is memorably nasty.

Black Spirits & White was notable at the time not so much for its content and for its presentation. The book’s cloth cover was a vivid green, with a carnation motif, “the flower of Decadence that Wilde and others made into a symbol of homosexuality in Cram’s youth.”⁶ Although Cram was married and his letters contain mention of heterosexual love affairs and experiences with prostitutes, Cram’s intimate relationships with other men also appear in the letters, and it seems clear that Cram was, if not a gay man hiding behind heterosexual relations, then at least bisexual.⁷ In this light, Black Spirits & White’s cover is revealing–as is the vaginal description of the evil spirit of “No. 252,” which is indicative of a kind of sexual panic:

...the pattern of the stories [in Black Spirits & White] suggests a fear of sexual contact with women and anxiety over the homoerotic feelings the fear implies. The literary heritage of Poe and the Gothic novel makes possible the coded language Cram employs: supernatural horror is the medium for psychosexual anxiety. Cram’s conversion to the High Church may have made it easier for him to relinquish his rationalism an free his imagination to invent supernatural happenings. But given that the agent of this conversion was a young man for whom Cram felt a deep affection, the Catholic conversion comes at the cost of sexual unease.⁸

Print: Ralph Adams Cram, Black Spirits & White. Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2004.

^{^[1]} Ralph Adams Cram, “No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince,” in Black Spirits & White (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895), 4.

^{^[2]} Cram, “No. 252,” 4.

^{^[3]} Cram, “No. 252,” 19-20.

^{^[4]} Cram, “No. 252,” 20.

^{^[5]} Douglass Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900: Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 62.

^{^[6]} Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 64.

^{^[7]} Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 257-260.

^{^[8]} David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain, 1890-1926 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 71.