Table Of Content

GHOST AND HORROR STORIES AMBROSE BIRRCE DOVER FICTION, SCIENCE FICTION, GHOST STORIES, AND ADVENTURE FICTION Flatland: A Romance of many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott. (20001-9) $1.00 Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, Ambrose Bierce. (20767-6) $1.50 AttheEarth's Core; Pellucidar; Tanar of Pellucidar: Three Science Fiction Novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs. (21051-0) $2.50 The Land That Time Forgot; The Moon Maid: Two Science Fiction Novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs. (20358-1) $2.00, (21020-0) Clothbound $4.00 The Pirates of Venus; Lost on Venus: Two Venus Novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs. (21053-7) $2.00 A Princess of Mars; A Fighting Man of Mars: Two Martian Novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs. (21140-1) $2.00 Thuvia, Maid of Mars; The Chessmen of Mars; The Master Mind of Mars: Three Martian Novels, Edgar Rice Bur- roughs. (20039-6) $2.50 TheKinginYellowandOtherTalesofSupernaturalHorror, Robert W. Chambers. (22500-3) $2.00 The Call of the Wild by Jack London; Rab and His Friends, by John Brown; Bob, Son of Battle by Alfred Ollivant; Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders; A Dog of Flanders by Ouida Five Great Dog Novels, edited by Blanche Cirker. : (20777-3) $2.00 She; King Solomon's Mines; Allan Quatermain: Three Adven- ture Novels, H. Rider Haggard. (20584-3) $2.50 Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Lafcadio Hearn. (21901-1) $1.25 TheBest Tales of Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann. (21793-0)$2.50 — The Prisoner of Zenda; Rupert of Hentzau Ruritania Com- plete, Anthony Hope. (20069-8) $2.00 Against the Grain (A Rebours), Joris K. Huysmans. (22190-3) $2.00 Uncle Silas: A Victorian Gothic Novel of Mystery, John S. LeFanu. (21715-9) $2.50 (continued on back flap) Xiti >~7 ~t<utA^tA / Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce Digitized by the Internet Archive 2013 in http://archive.org/details/ghosthorrorstoriOObier Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce Selected and introduced by E. F. Bleiler Dover Publications, Inc. New York Copyright (§) 1964 byDover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved under Pan American and In- ternational Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by General Publishing Com- pany, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario. Published in the United Kingdom by Constable and Company, Ltd., 10 Orange Street, London W.C. 2. This Dover edition, first published in 1964, is a new collection of short stories by Ambrose Bierce, selected from The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, published by the Neale Publishing Com- pany between 1909 and 1912. International Standard Book Number: 0-486-20767-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-13459 Manufactured in the United States of America Dover Publications, Inc. 180 Varick Street New York, N. Y. 10014 Introduction It was a strange environment into which Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born in 1842 in Ohio, an environment that fore- shadowed the atmosphere of macabre catastrophe and bitter irony thatemerges inmany ofhis later stories. For one thing, the family situation was mad. Marcus Aurelius Bierce, Ambrose's father, was an ineffectual man dominated jointly by his wife and his religion. Yet he managed to reconcile an enthusiastic hell-fire Calvinism with a love for poetry, includ- ing the works of Lord Byron, and he carried through the remarkable whimsical feat of naming all thirteen of his children with the letter "A": Ambrose, Amos, Andrew, Augustus, etc. (The Gwin- nett in Ambrose G. Bierce probably entered as a natural associa- tion, since the crime story of Ambrose Gwinnett was a common stage play and chapbook in the early nineteenth century.) In later life Marcus Aurelius Bierce came to believe that he had been confidential secretary to a President, and could tell tales of Wash- ington intrigue. Ambrose's uncle, Lucius Verus Bierce, was something of a minor celebrity. A good stump patriot, he led a filibustering expedition into Canada in 1838 to free the unhappy natives from British oppression. He captured the city of Windsor, but the natives did not rally to him, and Lucius Verus barely escaped with his life. He lived out the remainder of his life in glory as a picnic-shouter and politician, and was mayor of Akron six times. The same family oddness ran through Bierce's nine older brothers and sisters. (Bierce was tenth; three after him did not survive.) They were apparently organized into small bands that carried on perpetual warfare with one another, and hated each other desperately. One brother rebelled against the stern family religion and ran away to become an actor and a circus strong man. A sister embraced religion more closely, went to Africa as a mis- sionary, and according to local legend was eaten by cannibals. This all seems grotesque and amusing to us in the twentieth VI E. F. BLEILER century, but it seems to have been hell for the small boy Ambrose, and he emerged from the family background in Indiana, where the family had moved, as a moodyyoungman who swung between fits of depression in which he felt his inadequacy, and ebullitions that were equally disturbing to his fellows. The result of this family backgroundwas a screaming disapproval of everything that his parents stood for—religion, morality, thrift, and responsibility. The lever that pried Bierce loose from his family was the Civil War, which broke out when he was 19. He enlisted in the Ninth Indiana Volunteers at the first call, and found in the army the school that his father could not afford. It is true that Bierce did attend Kentucky Military Institute for a few months, but one of his fellow students set the buildings on fire and the school was closed down. In the army Bierce was a success, probably more successful than at any other point in his life. He was physically fearless, and the dangers of battle seem to have meant little to him. He was highly intelligent, and hewas capable of a seriousness and single-minded- ness that probably contrasted greatly with the indecisions of his fellow soldiers. He was commissioned an officer on the field—"ob- noxious" was the term applied to him in the local Indiana news- paper upon reporting his promotion—and he eventually became a map officer on General Hazen's staff. He was wounded at Kene- saw Mountain, furloughed for a time, and discharged early in 1865. Bierce served for a time as a Treasury agent watching for con- traband in occupied Alabama, and then in 1866, after a brief and final visit to his family in Indiana, set out overland for the West Coast, traveling as a surveyor under his former chief and patron General Hazen. It was understood that an officer's commission would be waiting for him at the Presidio at San Francisco, but when he arrived, after a long, arduous expedition, he found only a commission for a second lieutenancy. Bierce had been discharged by error as a major rather than as a captain, and it is characteristic of his pride that he simply ignored the commission, neither acknowledging it nor declining it. He had been too gravely insulted. In San Francisco Bierce decided to become a writer. What were his qualifications? He was young, quick to learn, willing to work hard, and he had a remarkable gift for coarse invective. He liked to read, he had a profound awe for learning, and he was willing to bide his time. In a very short while he became the protege of James T. Watkins, a young Englishman who was then editor of