IT IS HIS HISTORICAL novels that Edward Lucas White (1866–1934) regarded as his most important work, but he is remembered today for his horror stories, which he claimed came to him in dreams and nightmares. Born in Bergen, New Jersey, he attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and spent the rest of his life in that city, mainly as a teacher at the University School for Boys, where he taught from 1915 to 1930. He wrote a history book, Why Rome Fell (1927), in addition to the historical novels El Supremo: A Romance of the Great Dictator of Paraguay (1916), The Unwilling Vestal: A Tale of Rome Under the Caesars (1918), Andivius Hedulio: Adventures of a Roman Nobleman in the Days of the Empire (1921), and Helen (1925). His magnum opus was to be a giant utopian science fiction novel, Plus Ultra, which he began in 1885, destroyed, and began anew in 1901; at an estimated half-million words, it was never published.
While he wrote enough supernatural and fantasy fiction to fill two volumes, The Song of the Sirens and Other Stories (1919) and Lukundoo and Other Stories (1927), only two stories are much read today, the present one and “Lukundoo,” one of the great classics of horror fiction. In this chilling tale, an African witch doctor casts a curse on an explorer who begins to find his body covered with pustules, which he quickly notices are the heads of tiny African men who viciously gesticulate and threaten him. He cuts off their heads but they relentlessly emerge anew, causing him to kill himself. The author, a longtime sufferer of migraine headaches, also committed suicide, on the seventh anniversary of his wife’s death.
“The House of the Nightmare” was originally published in the September 1906 issue of Smith’s Magazine; it was first collected in Lukundoo and Other Stories (New York, Doran, 1927).