The Gaunt House was the ancestral home of the House of Gaunt, the last known descendants of Salazar Slytherin. By the early 20th century, the family's wealth and status had dwindled to nothing, and their home reflected their impoverished and degraded state. The house was little more than a hovel, hidden away in a dense thicket of trees. Its walls were slimy with moss, sections of the slate roof were missing, and a dead snake was nailed to the front door, a clear symbol of their Slytherin heritage and their ability to speak Parseltongue. The interior consisted of a single, filthy main room. It was described as having grubby walls, a soot-blackened ceiling, and a floor covered in grime. The furniture was meager and broken, and the general atmosphere was one of extreme squalor and gloom. In the summer of 1925, the house was visited by Ministry of Magic official Bob Ogden. He had come to serve a summons on Morfin Gaunt for attacking a local Muggle, Tom Riddle Sr.. The visit escalated into a violent confrontation, resulting in both Morfin and his father, Marvolo Gaunt, being sentenced to Azkaban. During their imprisonment, Merope Gaunt used a Love Potion to ensnare Tom Riddle Sr. and eloped with him, abandoning the house forever. Marvolo returned from his sentence to find his daughter gone and died soon after. Morfin returned after his own longer sentence and lived in the shack in solitude for many years. Around 1943, a young Tom Marvolo Riddle sought out his maternal family and found his uncle Morfin living in the house. It was here that Riddle learned of his heritage, stole Marvolo Gaunt's Ring, and then framed his uncle for the murder of the Riddle family before leaving him to die in Azkaban. The house subsequently fell into ruin and was abandoned for over fifty years.
The Gaunt House is a location of pivotal importance in understanding the history and psychology of Lord Voldemort. Harry Potter witnesses its state in the 1920s through a Pensieve memory shown to him by Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This memory reveals the arrogance, poverty, and violent instability of Voldemort's maternal relatives, providing crucial context for his own identity and his deep-seated hatred of his Muggle heritage. Years after his visit to Morfin, Voldemort returned to the now-derelict shack to hide one of his Horcruxes—the stolen Marvolo Gaunt's Ring—placing it in a golden box hidden beneath the floorboards and protecting it with powerful Dark Magic. In 1996, Albus Dumbledore journeyed to the ruins of the Gaunt House to locate and destroy this Horcrux. While he successfully retrieved the ring, he was grievously injured by a deadly curse placed upon it, an injury that blackened his hand and ultimately sealed his fate. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort, realizing his Horcruxes are being targeted, returns to the shack to check on the ring's safety, only to discover that it is gone. This moment confirms his fears and triggers his frantic race to secure his remaining soul fragments.