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    The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce
    The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce
    The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce

    By Ambrose Bierce

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Bierce was considered a master of pure English by his contemporaries, and virtually everything that came from his pen was notable for its judicious wording and economy of style. He wrote in a variety of literary genres. In addition to his ghost and war stories, he also published several volumes of poetry. His Fantastic Fables anticipated the ironic style of grotesquerie that became a more common genre in the 20th century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilder Publications, Inc.
    Release dateJul 12, 2013
    ISBN9781627552165
    The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce
    Author

    Ambrose Bierce

    Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, critic and war veteran. Bierce fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army following an 1866 expedition across the Great Plains. Bierce’s harrowing experiences during the Civil War, particularly those at the Battle of Shiloh, shaped a writing career that included editorials, novels, short stories and poetry. Among his most famous works are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Boarded Window,” “Chickamauga,” and What I Saw of Shiloh. While on a tour of Civil-War battlefields in 1913, Bierce is believed to have joined Pancho Villa’s army before disappearing in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

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    • 4/5
      S. T. Joshi’s Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs is a better all-around sampler of Bierce’s many facets, but this collection is cheaper, uses Bierce’s Collected Stories as the source for the stories – important since Bierce liked to revise his work each printing, and has all of Bierce’s most famous and significant weird stories and science fiction. I would argue it’s only missing Bierce’s science fiction satires “For the Ahkoond” and “Ashes of the Beacon”. Joshi’s work includes all of Bierce’s Can Such Things Be?, primarily a collection of horror and supernatural works.It does have two things Joshi’s book lacks.First is a Bierce essay on the importance of dreams in his life, “Visions of the Night”.The second is Bleiler’s lengthy introduction. Putting aside that some have found its summary of Bierce’s life as scurrilous, I think its summary and critique of the volume’s story is valuable.
    • 4/5
      Bierce's writing is a bit uneven, but his best ghost and horror stories, such as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", are among the best ever written. This is a very good introduction to his work.
    • 3/5
      While I appreciate Bierce's knack for "dropping the bomb on the reader," some of these stories became a little to predictable. Don't get me wrong; for the most part, I enjoyed this book. However, if you're a fan of his Civil War shorts, you probably won't like this. He becomes extremely wordy at times, and some of the stories don't even have a plot. Not to be negative, the stories are enjoyable overall. Look for his classic "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and some of his creepy ones: "The Damned Thing" and "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot."

    Book preview

    The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce - Ambrose Bierce

    The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce

    by Ambrose Bierce

    SMK Books

    Copyright © 2013 by SMK Books

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

    SMK Books eBook edition June 2013

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

    ISBN 978-1627552165

    Table of Contents

    The Ways of Ghosts

    Present at a Hanging

    A Cold Greeting

    A Wireless Message

    An Arrest

    A Man with Two Lives

    Three and One are One

    A Baffled Ambuscade

    Two Military Executions

    The Isle of Pines

    A Fruitless Assignment

    A Vine on a House

    At Old Man Eckert’s

    The Spook House

    The Other Lodgers

    The Thing at Nolan

    The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

    An Unfinished Race

    Charles Ashmore’s Trail

    Science to the Front

    The Middle toe of the Right Foot

    The Damned Thing

    The Ways of Ghosts

    My peculiar relation to the writer of the following narratives is such that I must ask the reader to overlook the absence of explanation as to how they came into my possession. Withal, my knowledge of him is so meager that I should rather not undertake to say if he were himself persuaded of the truth of what he relates; certainly such inquiries as I have thought it worth while to set about have not in every instance tended to confirmation of the statements made. Yet his style, for the most part devoid alike of artifice and art, almost baldly simple and direct, seems hardly compatible with the disingenuousness of a merely literary intention; one would call it the manner of one more concerned for the fruits of research than for the flowers of expression. In transcribing his notes and fortifying their claim to attention by giving them something of an orderly arrangement, I have conscientiously refrained from embellishing them with such small ornaments of diction as I may have felt myself able to bestow, which would not only have been impertinent, even if pleasing, but would have given me a somewhat closer relation to the work than I should care to have and to avow. - A. B.

    Present at a Hanging

    An old man named Daniel Baker, living near Lebanon, Iowa, was suspected by his neighbors of having murdered a peddler who had obtained permission to pass the night at his house. This was in 1853, when peddling was more common in the Western country than it is now, and was attended with considerable danger. The peddler with his pack traversed the country by all manner of lonely roads, and was compelled to rely upon the country people for hospitality. This brought him into relation with queer characters, some of whom were not altogether scrupulous in their methods of making a living, murder being an acceptable means to that end. It occasionally occurred that a peddler with diminished pack and swollen purse would be traced to the lonely dwelling of some rough character and never could be traced beyond. This was so in the case of old man Baker, as he was always called. (Such names are given in the western settlements only to elderly persons who are not esteemed; to the general disrepute of social unworth is affixed the special reproach of age.) A peddler came to his house and none went away - that is all that anybody knew.

    Seven years later the Rev. Mr. Cummings, a Baptist minister well known in that part of the country, was driving by Baker’s farm one night. It was not very dark: there was a bit of moon somewhere above the light veil of mist that lay along the earth. Mr. Cummings, who was at all times a cheerful person, was whistling a tune, which he would occasionally interrupt to speak a word of friendly encouragement to his horse. As he came to a little bridge across a dry ravine he saw the figure of a man standing upon it, clearly outlined against the gray background of a misty forest. The man had something strapped on his back and carried a heavy stick - obviously an itinerant peddler. His attitude had in it a suggestion of abstraction, like that of a sleepwalker. Mr. Cummings reined in his horse when he arrived in front of him, gave him a pleasant salutation and invited him to a seat in the vehicle - if you are going my way, he added. The man raised his head, looked him full in the face, but neither answered nor made any further movement. The minister, with good-natured persistence, repeated his invitation. At this the man threw his right hand forward from his side and pointed downward as he stood on the extreme edge of the bridge. Mr. Cummings looked past him, over into the ravine, saw nothing unusual and withdrew his eyes to address the man again. He had disappeared. The horse, which all this time had been uncommonly restless, gave at the same moment a snort of terror and started to run away. Before he had regained control of the animal the minister was at the crest of the hill a hundred yards along. He looked back and saw the figure again, at the same place and in the same attitude as when he had first observed it. Then for the first time he was conscious of a sense of the supernatural and drove home as rapidly as his willing horse would go.

    On arriving at home he related his adventure to his family, and early the next morning, accompanied by two neighbors, John White Corwell and Abner Raiser, returned to the spot. They found the body of old man Baker hanging by the neck from one of the beams of the bridge, immediately beneath the spot where the apparition had stood. A thick coating of dust, slightly dampened by the mist, covered the floor of the bridge, but the only footprints were those of Mr. Cummings’ horse.

    In taking down the body the men disturbed the loose, friable earth of the slope below it, disclosing human bones already nearly uncovered by the action of water and frost. They were identified as those of the lost peddler. At the double inquest the coroner’s jury found that Daniel Baker died by his own hand while suffering from temporary insanity, and that Samuel Morritz was murdered by some person or persons to the jury unknown.

    A Cold Greeting

    This is a story told by the late Benson Foley of San Francisco:

    "In the summer of 1881 I met a man named James H. Conway, a resident of Franklin, Tennessee. He was visiting San Francisco for his health, deluded man, and brought me a note of introduction from Mr. Lawrence Barting. I had known Barting as a captain in the Federal army during the civil war. At its close he had settled in Franklin, and in time became, I had reason to think, somewhat prominent as a lawyer. Barting had always seemed to me an honorable and truthful man, and the warm friendship which he expressed in his

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