12 Grimmauld Place

**12 Grimmauld Place** was a home owned by the Black family, located in the Borough of Islington, London, in a Muggle neighbourhood, and the location was protected by a Fidelius Charm. As the house was invisible to the neighbourhood residents, the local Muggles have long since accepted the mistake in numbering which landed number 13 next to number 11.

This terraced house was first owned by Betelgeuse Black (1740-1799), who according to family lore coerced the original owner, a muggle, into gifting it to him in his will. It contains a total of nine bedrooms and was constructed in the Georgian style in 1725.

## History

### Early history

"*Tucked away in northwestern London, a twenty minute walk from King's Cross Station, lies number twelve, Grimmauld Place. Both Unplottable and hidden behind a Fidelius Charm, the house is invisible to all but a few. Though the neighbouring Muggles don't even know the building exists, it was for many years home to the Black family — one of the wizarding world's oldest pureblood families, and extremely proud to be so.*"
—Description of the house
Number 12 Grimmauld Place was formerly a handsome Muggle townhouse built in London. Betelgeuse Black, a member of the wizarding House of Black coveted the beautiful house and managed to "persuade" the original Muggle occupant to leave the home to him in his will, and put the appropriate spells on it. His family, consisting of his wife, Adeliza Black (née Rosier), and his four children, Adeliza Nott (then Black), Cygnus Black I, Corvus Black, and Cetus Black IV were the first original wizarding occupants of the house.

### Under Walburga and Orion Black

The house was, apparently, in the Black family for some generations when Walburga Black took possession in the mid-20th century. Sirius and Regulus Black grew up in number twelve, Grimmauld Place. Sirius ran away from home around 1976, at age sixteen, and Regulus died just a few years later, in 1979. This left Walburga and Orion living in the house alone with the family house-elf, Kreacher. Walburga had two more children, Altair and Aquila, in the year 1980. Both Aquila and Altair additionally grew up in this house. Altair Black reportedly passed away of dragon pox in the summer of 1991, as the general public and other less senior members of the Black family believed.

The house became subject to a Ministry of Magic investigation in December 1991 following Orion Black's suicide.

Upon Orion's widow Walburga’s death in January 1994, the house's legal ownership passed to her youngest child, Aquila, which would be held for her until she became of age. Sirius, who though he had been blasted off the family tree had apparently not been disinherited, and was allowed to access the house during this time, most likely because Aquila was not yet seventeen at the time.

Walburga Black made her disgust of having anyone less than pure-blood in her home very clear through the hostile shrieks of her portrait, which was affixed to the wall with a Permanent Sticking Charm.

### Under Sirius Black

Sirius Black, Walburga's son, hated number 12 Grimmauld Place, and left when he was sixteen. He never imagined he would have to return to his family's home. During Sirius's imprisonment in Azkaban, wrongly convicted for the crime of murdering twelve Muggles and Peter Pettigrew (Pettigrew being the real perpetrator), the house was unoccupied, besides the Black family's house elf, Kreacher. Two years after his escape in 1993, Sirius gave the home over to the Order of the Phoenix to be used as a headquarters. His mother had died in January 1994, leaving the house unoccupied, but at the time Sirius was unaware of a surviving sibling, and assumed that he was the only member of his family that was left.

The home required an arduous cleaning up to make it even remotely habitable. Much of this work fell to Molly Weasley and her children. The home was in such disrepair that doxies and boggarts had made themselves quite at home. In the summer of 1995, Aquila Black was let into the house by her best friend, Ginny Weasley, leading to the quite intense and heavy suspicion that the Fidelius Charm had been broken. However, as Aquila had been bound to the house's Wardstone, in 1991, before her father's death, she would have always had unfettered access to the estate. Legally though, however, she was not allowed to own it until she became seventeen, leaving the ownership in the hands of her older brother Sirius.

Aquila, much like Sirius, had escaped from her relatives, however she was fourteen when she left, and not sixteen, like Sirius. She, like him, never imagined returning to the home when she left earlier that January. She soon discovered that when she had left the house behind, the Wardstone in the house's basement had began to fail, leaving the place's condition to severely deteriorate and decay.

The Order, once Albus Dumbledore discovered that she, and she alone, could repair the house's Wardstone, lessened their suspicions of Aquila. Additionally, the Weasleys vouched for her, namely Ginny, who insisted that Aquila was her best friend. Sirius and Aquila met and discussed what was to become of the house. Aquila thought that it had been a brilliant idea to let the Order use the house, which had surprised Sirius, as he had been expecting that she would be a blood purist like their shared parents.

## Security Measures

By the time the Order of the Phoenix made 12 Grimmauld Place its headquarters, the house had been placed under “every security measure known to wizard-kind.” Among other things, the house is Unplottable, which makes it accessible only to wizards, and had spells on the front door such that it could only be unlocked by a wizard using his or her wand. The house was also placed under a Fidelius Charm, meaning it couldn’t be accessed by wizards, either, unless they were told its location by the Secret-Keeper. Albus Dumbledore was the Secret-Keeper for Grimmauld Place until his death in 1997, after which everyone who had been told the secret became a Secret-Keeper themselves. The Fidelius however had an unknown loophole that would allow Aquila Black to enter, as she was the master of the house's Wardstone, on which the spell was cast on.

Dumbledore’s death also led Mad-Eye Moody to place additional enchantments on the house, in order to prevent Severus Snape from accessing it: he set up a Tongue-Tying Curse that sensed whether a person entering the house was Snape, and if so, bound his tongue; and a Dumbledore figure, made of dust, that approaches intruders unless they tell it that they were not the one who killed Dumbledore.

## Layout

### Front Entrance

When a wizard approaches number twelve, Grimmauld Place who knows of its location, it appears to shove its neighbouring houses, number eleven and number thirteen, out of the way as it appears between them. What’s revealed is a worn set of front steps, leading to a battered front door. On the door is a silver knocker in the shape of a twisted serpent, with no keyholes, handles, or anything else that would indicate it to be a door, as it opens only by magic. However, there is a doorbell — a “loud, clanging bell” that has a tendency to awaken Walburga Black’s portrait inside. When one leaves the house, the building vanishes behind him the instant he reaches the street.

### Cellar

The entrance to the cellar is located in a dusty corner of the kitchen, which was on the ground floor. The cellar was divided into two halves: the first, being a place Aquila was prohibited from as a young girl, which included shelves upon shelves of dark artifacts which Orion Black kept with the intention of fixing, but never got around to doing so. There was an abandoned Hand of Glory down there, as well as several other instruments.

In the nearest corner of that room in the cellar, there was a cobblestone pillar, upon which there sat a Wardstone. To any wizard but its master, the stone would appear blank, like a thick slab of slate. To Aquila Black, however, it looked very different; her father, Orion, bound her to it when she was eleven, and she could see every enchantment and piece of carving that had been lain in the stone. Usually wizards would only pass on the control of a house's ward stone when their eldest heir (usually a male) would come of age, or when the former master began to suffer from poor health. Orion, however, at that time had no sons, as Sirius had been disowned and was in Azkaban, and Regulus and Tarry had died. He was plagued by guilt upon his youngest son's murder and overturned the house's control to Aquila before committing suicide. As there had been no note at the time, the Ministry had concluded that Orion had not planned to do so, but Aquila later theorized that he did, at least, think about what was to happen to the house, as well as his wife and daughter.

The rest of the room that the wardstone was positioned in had functioned as Orion's personal Potions lab, and in the years between his passing and the Order taking up residence in the house, its bottles had grown dusty, and ingredients had grown discarded. There was a shelf full of taxidermied animals such as a fox and a weasel, as well as a dusty section full of old books.

Through another doorway was another area that had once served as the house's dungeon. There was a single hoop on the wall used for tying up animals, once upon a time. There had been a puddle of what suspiciously looked like dried blood on the stone floor.

### Ground Floor

The front door opens into a long hallway, lit with gas lamps and a large overhead chandelier. At one time this must have been a grand entryway, complete with ornate portraits on the walls, but by the summer of 1995, it was gloomy and cobwebby, with the wallpaper peeling off and the carpet worn thin.

Of all the portraits, the most prominent (though it’s often covered with curtains) is an enormous portrait of Walburga Black, stuck to the wall via a Permanent Sticking Charm, which takes to screaming at the top of her lungs whenever she spots “Mudbloods” in her house. Much of the decor in the entry hall is made of serpents, though there is also an umbrella stand made from the severed leg of a troll, that Tonks is particularly prone to knocking over.

On one side of the hallway was the dining room, which featured a dresser holding the Black family crest and china. It became filled with spiders when the house was abandoned and the wardstone began to fail.

The dining room contained a long wooden table with chairs and hanging light fixtures. At some point while the house was abandoned, spiders the size of saucers moved into the dresser; Harry, Sirius, and the Weasleys cleaned these out during their summer at Grimmauld Place, though admittedly Ron didn’t help much. At the end of the entrance hall, facing the door, a grand staircase leads to the upper floors of 12 Grimmauld Place. The wall on the stair is decorated with a row of shrunken house-elf heads, mounted on the wall on plaques.

#### Kitchen

A door at the far end of the entry hall, a set of narrow stone stairs leads to the basement, and the house’s kitchen. Though less ornate than the floors above, the kitchen is still a large, “cavernous” room with a large fireplace at the far end. Iron pots and pans hang from the ceiling above, and a long wooden table sits in the centre of the room, large enough to fit a couple dozen people around it for a meal. The room had a gloomy feeling when it was occupied by the Order of the Phoenix.

Also on the ground floor, just off the kitchen, is a dark pantry, large enough for two people to stand in comfortably; and another cupboard off the kitchen houses the boiler for the house, as well as Kreacher’s den, filled with rags, smelly blankets, and photographs of the Black family. Other than these two small rooms, however, the kitchen seems to fill the entire ground floor — making it quite a large room indeed.

There was a small door that led to the cellar of the house, in the basement.

### First Floor

On the first floor, there are at least three rooms: an old spare bedroom, where Mr. and Mrs. Weasley slept; a bathroom where Harry once ran when he was overcome with a vision of Voldemort; and, of the most significance, the drawing room.

The drawing room was at one time exquisite, with large windows overlooking the street in front of the house, a large fireplace flanked by two ornate glass-fronted cabinets, and an entire wall covered with a tapestry of the Black family tree. In the summer of 1995, though, the room mostly just needed a good cleaning, as the curtains were filled with doxies, the writing desk housed a boggart, and the dark items in the cabinets — from snakeskins to bottles of blood to boxes of Wartcap Powder — were ready to put up a fight against anyone trying to clean them up. It was in this room that Kreacher stored Slytherin’s locket when he couldn’t get it open, and it was in this room that Harry, Ron, and Hermione slept (Hermione on the sofa cushions) when they returned to the house two years later to hide from the Ministry.

Separate from the drawing room was an exquisite office, which had always been locked from the time that Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny first arrived there. It had originally belonged to Orion Black. Before Aquila's arrival, Sirius seemed to avoid the area anyway, but she told Mrs. Weasley in no uncertain terms that it would be rather unwise to unlock it, and that there were plenty of other rooms available for cleaning. Ginny asked Aquila the real reason and she did not explain at first, but later told her it was because she was afraid to go in there.

Once many of the other rooms were cleaned Mrs. Weasley insisted that the office could also be used as another spare bedroom if they cleaned it out, and Aquila was later forced to unlock it by Sirius, who according to Harry became rather menacing, which he found odd for him.

The office had been left in its original state following Orion Black's suicide. His old wand still sat on the desk, gathering dust. When Harry entered it he found himself feeling cold and clammy, but could not explain why. Aquila also did not like the situation, as when the teenagers began pulling it apart, they found papers that seemed to unravel her father's entire life, and she was forced to explain.

### Second Floor

On the second floor there were two more spare bedrooms- it was in this room that Harry and Ron slept during their first stay at Grimmauld Place. The room had two twin beds and a wardrobe, and like the rest of the house was gloomy, had lofty ceilings, and had a doorknob in the shape of a serpent. On the wall is a portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black (though Hermione later removed this), and in the corner there is a wastebasket that coughs when owl droppings are placed in it. Fred and George slept in an additional spare bedroom across the hall.

The Black family library was also located on this floor. Sirius barred people from entering out of fear for their personal safety at first because many of the books were probably cursed. The library had books in Latin, French, German, and Italian, and not many of them were in English, which made it harder to determine which ones were cursed and which ones were not. Many of them were even several hundreds of years old. When Aquila arrived she was able to discern between the old high German collection and the medieval French collection, and surprisingly only a third of them were about the Dark Arts.

The other books, about "half of them," Harry would reckon, were Dark Arts books, and once they were identified, they were thrown out. Aquila and Sirius had a spat when Aquila made the misguided suggestion of perhaps hiring Mundungus to sell them on the black market to raise funds for the Order, but Sirius refused to have those books out in the world for anyone to read, regardless of how much they could fetch, and as such they were destroyed.

From the landing on the second floor, it is possible to look down over the bannisters and see the top of anyone’s head who is standing in the front entrance hall.

### Third Floor

On the third floor, there is a mouldy cupboard that Harry, Ron, and Hermione had to clean out, as well as three bedrooms. The first of which was the largest, and was the second locked room in Grimmauld Place, which no one had been able to open. Aquila had at first assumed that they had left the room empty out of respect to Tarry, but when no one gave any indication of being aware that it had been Tarry's old bedroom, she was able to unlock it, but she also refused to let anyone go in there. Her mother had also taken up residence in this room when she became a widow in 1991, and as such there were pieces of her clothing in the closet, as well as her old wand.

The second largest bedroom on the third floor is Aquila Black's childhood bedroom. Ginny and Hermione stayed in this room when they first arrived at Grimmauld Place, as Ginny had chosen this room because she recognised signs of her best friend in this room. No one else slept on this floor except for Aquila, Hermione, and Ginny when the Order came to stay. However, Remus himself had some things in the smallest bedroom out of the three, farthest away but the closest to the landing, suggesting that on some nights he did sleep there, perhaps on nights following the full moon.

### Fourth Floor

The fourth floor contains only two doors: one leading to Sirius’s room, and the other to Regulus’s. The latter was marked by a sign on the door — “*Do Not Enter Without the Express Permission of Regulus Arcturus Black*” — that eventually proved to be the clue Harry would need to discover the identity of R.A.B. Though Harry never entered either until he owned the house himself, he could tell that both rooms had once been beautiful, with carved wooden headboards on the beds, velvet curtains, and fine wall hangings and furniture. The decor in the two rooms, of course, could not have been more different: Sirius decked his room out in Gryffindor colours and banners, and posters of Muggle motorbikes and bikini-clad girls. In Regulus’s room, slightly smaller, the decor of course highlighted his Slytherin, pure-blood heritage, with a Black family crest painted over the bed and newspaper clippings about Voldemort donning the walls.

Sirius slept in his childhood bedroom when the Order came to stay, but no one ever entered Regulus's bedroom.

### Fifth Floor

The fifth floor was the final floor before the small attic. It contained only the master bedroom, where Orion and Walburga had originally slept. Walburga actually moved to Tarry's room when Orion passed away in December 1991, and no one slept there when the Order came to stay. It is where Sirius kept Buckbeak, saying that it had been his "mother's old bedroom," and as such, much of the furniture was covered in Hippogriff dung.

### Attic

The attic was a small space above the master bedroom, accessible only by ladder. The attic held old portraits that had long since lost their enchantments, and other items that had belonged to former residents of the house.

## Contents

Number 12, Grimmauld Place held many Black family heirlooms and possessions, such as a music box that played a sickly tune and tried to put the listener to sleep, crested goblets, a biting silver box containing Wartcap powder, and an unopenable locket which turned out to be Salazar Slytherin's Locket, one of Lord Voldemort's Horcruxes. This was where Kreacher put the object after he drove himself mad not being able to complete his master's orders to destroy the locket because it had to be damaged past the point of repair, which was beyond the capabilities and understanding of the house-elf.

Another object of note was the Portrait of Walburga Black, which has an unpleasant habit of loudly screaming about the "Mudbloods" and "blood traitors" of the Order of the Phoenix members that inhabited the house, due to Walburga's prejudice against such people. The portrait was usually closed off with curtains, which aimed to keep the portrait quiet, but are not very effective; any loud noise in the vicinity would cause the curtains to fly open, and Walburga to start raging and howling again until someone forces the curtains shut.

### Known Objects

* An ornate crystal bottle with a large opal set into the stopper, full of what appeared to be blood.
* Boxes, made of tarnished silver and inscribed old high German and variants of medieval French.
* A dusty box containing Arcturus Black's Order of Merlin First Class.
* China with the Black family crest and motto.
* Rusty daggers.
* Family photos in silver frames.
* A grandfather clock, that shot heavy bolts at whomever passed by.
* A spider-like tweezers, which scurried away and tried to puncture Harry's skin.
* A grand piano held in the drawing room.
* Many boggarts.
* An unopenable locket which turned out to be Salazar Slytherin's Locket.
* An enchanted music box that played a faintly sinister, tinkling tune that when wound nearly knocked everyone out.
* A large and golden ring bearing the Black family crest.
* An ancient purple robes that tried to strangle Ron when they were removed from their wardrobe.
* Several ancient seals.
* Mounted House-elf heads
* Coiled snakeskin
* A silver snuffbox, filled with Wartcap Powder, that tried to bit everybody.
* A nest of dead Puffskeins under a sofa
* Doxies that hid in the curtains
* A taxidermied fox and a taxidermied weasel, kept in the cellar.
* A troll-leg umbrella stand
* A wand belonging to Orion Black, found in his formerly-locked office.
* A wand belonging to Walburga Black, found in Altair Black's old bedroom.
* A 1970s Slytherin Quidditch knit that had probably belonged to Regulus Black.
* Dusty toys from Altair Black's old bedroom.
* French and German tombes

## Etymology

Grimmauld Place can be taken as *"grim, old place"* or *"grim mould place."*The house's owner for most of the books is also Sirius Black, whose Animagus form is confused for, and referred to as, "the Grim".