Table Of ContentGHOST
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)
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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 remark-
able 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 dis-
charged 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
