Chapter 1

PRESENT AT A HANGING AND OTHER GHOST STORIES

By
Ambrose Bierce

CONTENTS

THE WAYS OF GHOSTS PAGE
PRESENT AT A HANGING 327
A COLD GREETING 331
A WIRELESS MESSAGE 335
AN ARREST 340
SOLDIER-FOLK
A MAN WITH TWO LIVES 345
THREE AND ONE ARE ONE 350
A BAFFLED AMBUSCADE 356
TWO MILITARY EXECUTIONS 361
SOME HAUNTED HOUSES
THE ISLE OF PINES 369
A FRUITLESS ASSIGNMENT 377
A VINE ON A HOUSE 383
AT OLD MAN ECKERT’S 389
THE SPOOK HOUSE 393
THE OTHER LODGERS 400
THE THING AT NOLAN 405
THE DIFFICULTY OF CROSSING A FIELD 415
AN UNFINISHED RACE 419
CHARLES ASHMORE’S TRAIL 421

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 note for Mr. Conway was to me
sufficient evidence that the latter was in every way worthy of my
confidence and esteem. At dinner one day Conway told me that it had been
solemnly agreed between him and Barting that the one who died first
should, if possible, communicate with the other from beyond the grave, in
some unmistakable way—just how, they had left (wisely, it seemed to me)
to be decided by the deceased, according to the opportunities that his
altered circumstances might present.

“A few weeks after the conversation in which Mr. Conway spoke of this
agreement, I met him one day, walking slowly down Montgomery street,
apparently, from his abstracted air, in deep thought. He greeted me
coldly with merely a movement of the head and passed on, leaving me
standing on the walk, with half-proffered hand, surprised and naturally
somewhat piqued. The next day I met him again in the office of the
Palace Hotel, and seeing him about to repeat the disagreeable performance
of the day before, intercepted him in a doorway, with a friendly
salutation, and bluntly requested an explanation of his altered manner.
He hesitated a moment; then, looking me frankly in the eyes, said:

“‘I do not think, Mr. Foley, that I have any longer a claim to your
friendship, since Mr. Barting appears to have withdrawn his own from
me—for what reason, I protest I do not know. If he has not already
informed you he probably will do so.’

“‘But,’ I replied, ‘I have not heard from Mr. Barting.’

“‘Heard from him!’ he repeated, with apparent surprise. ‘Why, he is
here. I met him yesterday ten minutes before meeting you. I gave you
exactly the same greeting that he gave me. I met him again not a quarter
of an hour ago, and his manner was precisely the same: he merely bowed
and passed on. I shall not soon forget your civility to me. Good
morning, or—as it may please you—farewell.’

“All this seemed to me singularly considerate and delicate behavior on
the part of Mr. Conway.

“As dramatic situations and literary effects are foreign to my purpose I
will explain at once that Mr. Barting was dead. He had died in Nashville
four days before this conversation. Calling on Mr. Conway, I apprised
him of our friend’s death, showing him the letters announcing it. He was
visibly affected in a way that forbade me to entertain a doubt of his
sincerity.

“‘It seems incredible,’ he said, after a period of reflection. ‘I
suppose I must have mistaken another man for Barting, and that man’s cold
greeting was merely a stranger’s civil acknowledgment of my own. I
remember, indeed, that he lacked Barting’s mustache.’

“‘Doubtless it was another man,’ I assented; and the subject was never
afterward mentioned between us. But I had in my pocket a photograph of
Barting, which had been inclosed in the letter from his widow. It had
been taken a week before his death, and was without a mustache.”

A WIRELESS MESSAGE

IN the summer of 1896 Mr. William Holt, a wealthy manufacturer of
Chicago, was living temporarily in a little town of central New York, the
name of which the writer’s memory has not retained. Mr. Holt had had
“trouble with his wife,” from whom he had parted a year before. Whether
the trouble was anything more serious than “incompatibility of temper,”
he is probably the only living person that knows: he is not addicted to
the vice of confidences. Yet he has related the incident herein set down
to at least one person without exacting a pledge of secrecy. He is now
living in Europe.

One evening he had left the house of a brother whom he was visiting, for
a stroll in the country. It may be assumed—whatever the value of the
assumption in connection with what is said to have occurred—that his mind
was occupied with reflections on his domestic infelicities and the
distressing changes that they had wrought in his life.

Whatever may have been his thoughts, they so possessed him that he
observed neither the lapse of time nor whither his feet were carrying
him; he knew only that he had passed far beyond the town limits and was
traversing a lonely region by a road that bore no resemblance to the one
by which he had left the village. In brief, he was “lost.”

Realizing his mischance, he smiled; central New York is not a region of
perils, nor does one long remain lost in it. He turned about and went
back the way that he had come. Before he had gone far he observed that
the landscape was growing more distinct—was brightening. Everything was
suffused with a soft, red glow in which he saw his shadow projected in
the road before him. “The moon is rising,” he said to himself. Then he
remembered that it was about the time of the new moon, and if that
tricksy orb was in one of its stages of visibility it had set long
before. He stopped and faced about, seeking the source of the rapidly
broadening light. As he did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road
in front of him as before. The light still came from behind him. That
was surprising; he could not understand. Again he turned, and again,
facing successively to every point of the horizon. Always the shadow was
before—always the light behind, “a still and awful red.”

Holt was astonished—“dumfounded” is the word that he used in telling
it—yet seems to have retained a certain intelligent curiosity. To test
the intensity of the light whose nature and cause he could not determine,
he took out his watch to see if he could make out the figures on the
dial. They were plainly visible, and the hands indicated the hour of
eleven o’clock and twenty-five minutes. At that moment the mysterious
illumination suddenly flared to an intense, an almost blinding splendor,
flushing the entire sky, extinguishing the stars and throwing the
monstrous shadow of himself athwart the landscape. In that unearthly
illumination he saw near him, but apparently in the air at a considerable
elevation, the figure of his wife, clad in her night-clothing and holding
to her breast the figure of his child. Her eyes were fixed upon his with
an expression which he afterward professed himself unable to name or
describe, further than that it was “not of this life.”

The flare was momentary, followed by black darkness, in which, however,
the apparition still showed white and motionless; then by insensible
degrees it faded and vanished, like a bright image on the retina after
the closing of the eyes. A peculiarity of the apparition, hardly noted
at the time, but afterward recalled, was that it showed only the upper
half of the woman’s figure: nothing was seen below the waist.

The sudden darkness was comparative, not absolute, for gradually all
objects of his environment became again visible.

In the dawn of the morning Holt found himself entering the village at a
point opposite to that at which he had left it. He soon arrived at the
house of his brother, who hardly knew him. He was wild-eyed, haggard,
and gray as a rat. Almost incoherently, he related his night’s
experience.

“Go to bed, my poor fellow,” said his brother, “and—wait. We shall hear
more of this.”

An hour later came the predestined telegram. Holt’s dwelling in one of
the suburbs of Chicago had been destroyed by fire. Her escape cut off by
the flames, his wife had appeared at an upper window, her child in her
arms. There she had stood, motionless, apparently dazed. Just as the
firemen had arrived with a ladder, the floor had given way, and she was
seen no more.

The moment of this culminating horror was eleven o’clock and twenty-five
minutes, standard time.

AN ARREST

HAVING murdered his brother-in-law, Orrin Brower of Kentucky was a
fugitive from justice. From the county jail where he had been confined
to await his trial he had escaped by knocking down his jailer with an
iron bar, robbing him of his keys and, opening the outer door, walking
out into the night. The jailer being unarmed, Brower got no weapon with
which to defend his recovered liberty. As soon as he was out of the town
he had the folly to enter a forest; this was many years ago, when that
region was wilder than it is now.

The night was pretty dark, with neither moon nor stars visible, and as
Brower had never dwelt thereabout, and knew nothing of the lay of the
land, he was, naturally, not long in losing himself. He could not have
said if he were getting farther away from the town or going back to it—a
most important matter to Orrin Brower. He knew that in either case a
posse of citizens with a pack of bloodhounds would soon be on his track
and his chance of escape was very slender; but he did not wish to assist
in his own pursuit. Even an added hour of freedom was worth having.

Suddenly he emerged from the forest into an old road, and there before
him saw, indistinctly, the figure of a man, motionless in the gloom. It
was too late to retreat: the fugitive felt that at the first movement
back toward the wood he would be, as he afterward explained, “filled with
buckshot.” So the two stood there like trees, Brower nearly suffocated
by the activity of his own heart; the other—the emotions of the other are
not recorded.

A moment later—it may have been an hour—the moon sailed into a patch of
unclouded sky and the hunted man saw that visible embodiment of Law lift
an arm and point significantly toward and beyond him. He understood.
Turning his back to his captor, he walked submissively away in the
direction indicated, looking to neither the right nor the left; hardly
daring to breathe, his head and back actually aching with a prophecy of
buckshot.

Brower was as courageous a criminal as ever lived to be hanged; that was
shown by the conditions of awful personal peril in which he had coolly
killed his brother-in-law. It is needless to relate them here; they came
out at his trial, and the revelation of his calmness in confronting them
came near to saving his neck. But what would you have?—when a brave man
is beaten, he submits.

So they pursued their journey jailward along the old road through the
woods. Only once did Brower venture a turn of the head: just once, when
he was in deep shadow and he knew that the other was in moonlight, he
looked backward. His captor was Burton Duff, the jailer, as white as
death and bearing upon his brow the livid mark of the iron bar. Orrin
Brower had no further curiosity.

Eventually they entered the town, which was all alight, but deserted;
only the women and children remained, and they were off the streets.
Straight toward the jail the criminal held his way. Straight up to the
main entrance he walked, laid his hand upon the knob of the heavy iron
door, pushed it open without command, entered and found himself in the
presence of a half-dozen armed men. Then he turned. Nobody else
entered.

On a table in the corridor lay the dead body of Burton Duff.

SOLDIER-FOLK

A MAN WITH TWO LIVES

HERE is the queer story of David William Duck, related by himself. Duck
is an old man living in Aurora, Illinois, where he is universally
respected. He is commonly known, however, as “Dead Duck.”

“In the autumn of 1866 I was a private soldier of the Eighteenth
Infantry. My company was one of those stationed at Fort Phil Kearney,
commanded by Colonel Carrington. The country is more or less familiar
with the history of that garrison, particularly with the slaughter by the
Sioux of a detachment of eighty-one men and officers—not one
escaping—through disobedience of orders by its commander, the brave but
reckless Captain Fetterman. When that occurred, I was trying to make my
way with important dispatches to Fort C. F. Smith, on the Big Horn. As
the country swarmed with hostile Indians, I traveled by night and
concealed myself as best I could before daybreak. The better to do so, I
went afoot, armed with a Henry rifle and carrying three days’ rations in
my haversack.

“For my second place of concealment I chose what seemed in the darkness a
narrow cañon leading through a range of rocky hills. It contained many
large bowlders, detached from the slopes of the hills. Behind one of
these, in a clump of sage-brush, I made my bed for the day, and soon fell
asleep. It seemed as if I had hardly closed my eyes, though in fact it
was near midday, when I was awakened by the report of a rifle, the bullet
striking the bowlder just above my body. A band of Indians had trailed
me and had me nearly surrounded; the shot had been fired with an
execrable aim by a fellow who had caught sight of me from the hillside
above. The smoke of his rifle betrayed him, and I was no sooner on my
feet than he was off his and rolling down the declivity. Then I ran in a
stooping posture, dodging among the clumps of sage-brush in a storm of
bullets from invisible enemies. The rascals did not rise and pursue,
which I thought rather queer, for they must have known by my trail that
they had to deal with only one man. The reason for their inaction was
soon made clear. I had not gone a hundred yards before I reached the
limit of my run—the head of the gulch which I had mistaken for a cañon.
It terminated in a concave breast of rock, nearly vertical and destitute
of vegetation. In that cul-de-sac I was caught like a bear in a pen.
Pursuit was needless; they had only to wait.

“They waited. For two days and nights, crouching behind a rock topped
with a growth of mesquite, and with the cliff at my back, suffering
agonies of thirst and absolutely hopeless of deliverance, I fought the
fellows at long range, firing occasionally at the smoke of their rifles,
as they did at that of mine. Of course, I did not dare to close my eyes
at night, and lack of sleep was a keen torture.

“I remember the morning of the third day, which I knew was to be my last.
I remember, rather indistinctly, that in my desperation and delirium I
sprang out into the open and began firing my repeating rifle without
seeing anybody to fire at. And I remember no more of that fight.

“The next thing that I recollect was my pulling myself out of a river
just at nightfall. I had not a rag of clothing and knew nothing of my
whereabouts, but all that night I traveled, cold and footsore, toward the
north. At daybreak I found myself at Fort C. F. Smith, my destination,
but without my dispatches. The first man that I met was a sergeant named
William Briscoe, whom I knew very well. You can fancy his astonishment
at seeing me in that condition, and my own at his asking who the devil I
was.

“‘Dave Duck,’ I answered; ‘who should I be?’

“He stared like an owl.

“‘You do look it,’ he said, and I observed that he drew a little away
from me. ‘What’s up?’ he added.

“I told him what had happened to me the day before. He heard me through,
still staring; then he said:

“‘My dear fellow, if you are Dave Duck I ought to inform you that I
buried you two months ago. I was out with a small scouting party and
found your body, full of bullet-holes and newly scalped—somewhat
mutilated otherwise, too, I am sorry to say—right where you say you made
your fight. Come to my tent and I’ll show you your clothing and some
letters that I took from your person; the commandant has your
dispatches.’

“He performed that promise. He showed me the clothing, which I
resolutely put on; the letters, which I put into my pocket. He made no
objection, then took me to the commandant, who heard my story and coldly
ordered Briscoe to take me to the guardhouse. On the way I said:

“‘Bill Briscoe, did you really and truly bury the dead body that you
found in these togs?’

“‘Sure,’ he answered—‘just as I told you. It was Dave Duck, all right;
most of us knew him. And now, you damned impostor, you’d better tell me
who you are.’

“‘I’d give something to know,’ I said.

“A week later, I escaped from the guardhouse and got out of the country
as fast as I could. Twice I have been back, seeking for that fateful
spot in the hills, but unable to find it.”

THREE AND ONE ARE ONE

IN the year 1861 Barr Lassiter, a young man of twenty-two, lived with his
parents and an elder sister near Carthage, Tennessee. The family were in
somewhat humble circumstances, subsisting by cultivation of a small and
not very fertile plantation. Owning no slaves, they were not rated among
“the best people” of their neighborhood; but they were honest persons of
good education, fairly well mannered and as respectable as any family
could be if uncredentialed by personal dominion over the sons and
daughters of Ham. The elder Lassiter had that severity of manner that so
frequently affirms an uncompromising devotion to duty, and conceals a
warm and affectionate disposition. He was of the iron of which martyrs
are made, but in the heart of the matrix had lurked a nobler metal,
fusible at a milder heat, yet never coloring nor softening the hard
exterior. By both heredity and environment something of the man’s
inflexible character had touched the other members of the family; the
Lassiter home, though not devoid of domestic affection, was a veritable
citadel of duty, and duty—ah, duty is as cruel as death!

When the war came on it found in the family, as in so many others in that
State, a divided sentiment; the young man was loyal to the Union, the
others savagely hostile. This unhappy division begot an insupportable
domestic bitterness, and when the offending son and brother left home
with the avowed purpose of joining the Federal army not a hand was laid
in his, not a word of farewell was spoken, not a good wish followed him
out into the world whither he went to meet with such spirit as he might
whatever fate awaited him.

Making his way to Nashville, already occupied by the Army of General
Buell, he enlisted in the first organization that he found, a Kentucky
regiment of cavalry, and in due time passed through all the stages of
military evolution from raw recruit to experienced trooper. A right good
trooper he was, too, although in his oral narrative from which this tale
is made there was no mention of that; the fact was learned from his
surviving comrades. For Barr Lassiter has answered “Here” to the
sergeant whose name is Death.

Two years after he had joined it his regiment passed through the region
whence he had come. The country thereabout had suffered severely from
the ravages of war, having been occupied alternately (and simultaneously)
by the belligerent forces, and a sanguinary struggle had occurred in the
immediate vicinity of the Lassiter homestead. But of this the young
trooper was not aware.

Finding himself in camp near his home, he felt a natural longing to see
his parents and sister, hoping that in them, as in him, the unnatural
animosities of the period had been softened by time and separation.
Obtaining a leave of absence, he set foot in the late summer afternoon,
and soon after the rising of the full moon was walking up the gravel path
leading to the dwelling in which he had been born.

Soldiers in war age rapidly, and in youth two years are a long time.
Barr Lassiter felt himself an old man, and had almost expected to find
the place a ruin and a desolation. Nothing, apparently, was changed. At
the sight of each dear and familiar object he was profoundly affected.
His heart beat audibly, his emotion nearly suffocated him; an ache was in
his throat. Unconsciously he quickened his pace until he almost ran, his
long shadow making grotesque efforts to keep its place beside him.

The house was unlighted, the door open. As he approached and paused to
recover control of himself his father came out and stood bare-headed in
the moonlight.

“Father!” cried the young man, springing forward with outstretched
hand—“Father!”

The elder man looked him sternly in the face, stood a moment motionless
and without a word withdrew into the house. Bitterly disappointed,
humiliated, inexpressibly hurt and altogether unnerved, the soldier
dropped upon a rustic seat in deep dejection, supporting his head upon
his trembling hand. But he would not have it so: he was too good a
soldier to accept repulse as defeat. He rose and entered the house,
passing directly to the “sitting-room.”

It was dimly lighted by an uncurtained east window. On a low stool by
the hearthside, the only article of furniture in the place, sat his
mother, staring into a fireplace strewn with blackened embers and cold
ashes. He spoke to her—tenderly, interrogatively, and with hesitation,
but she neither answered, nor moved, nor seemed in any way surprised.
True, there had been time for her husband to apprise her of their guilty
son’s return. He moved nearer and was about to lay his hand upon her
arm, when his sister entered from an adjoining room, looked him full in
the face, passed him without a sign of recognition and left the room by a
door that was partly behind him. He had turned his head to watch her,
but when she was gone his eyes again sought his mother. She too had left
the place.

Barr Lassiter strode to the door by which he had entered. The moonlight
on the lawn was tremulous, as if the sward were a rippling sea. The
trees and their black shadows shook as in a breeze. Blended with its
borders, the gravel walk seemed unsteady and insecure to step on. This
young soldier knew the optical illusions produced by tears. He felt them
on his cheek, and saw them sparkle on the breast of his trooper’s jacket.
He left the house and made his way back to camp.

The next day, with no very definite intention, with no dominant feeling
that he could rightly have named, he again sought the spot.