Civil War violence, fear, and characters who misread what they see.
Ambrose Bierce was an American journalist, satirist, and short story writer, born in Ohio in 1842. He served in the Union Army, fought at Shiloh, and was wounded at Kennesaw Mountain. He later worked for San Francisco newspapers and wrote The Devil's Dictionary, a collection of satirical definitions. The date and circumstances of his death are unknown.
His war stories often follow people who misunderstand the danger around them. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” concerns a man facing execution, while “Chickamauga” follows a child who encounters wounded soldiers. Bierce describes violence directly and often restricts the account to what one character can perceive. His ghost stories also depend on incomplete knowledge, leaving characters unsure whether an experience has a natural explanation.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
A Confederate sympathizer stands on a railroad bridge with a rope around his neck. Then the rope breaks.
A hunter dies after an attack by something his companion cannot see.
A mother is murdered, a father vanishes, and three accounts tell different parts of what happened.
An orphan crosses the country and comes back to the town where his mother is buried.
On a dangerous night ride, a cavalry officer finds a missing trooper standing beside a fallen horse.
Two friends promise to send a sign after death, and a meeting on a San Francisco street tests their pact.
On a freezing Civil War night, soldiers borrow a blanket from an unidentified dead sergeant.
A mining camp hangs a murderer, but the crowd is unprepared when the body is lowered.
A tenant sees the former owner of his rented house in a room with no exit.
A newspaper reporter spends the night alone in a Cincinnati house that crowds believe is haunted.
A shopkeeper keeps selling goods after his funeral, and the whole village comes to see him.
A widower notices that his wife's body has changed position after its long journey home.
A soldier survives an ambush on the frontier and returns to a fort where no one accepts his account.
A passenger feels an inexplicable bond with a young woman on an Atlantic crossing.
A wounded lieutenant seeks his unit near Stone’s River, but the battlefield has changed around him.
A Union picket officer fears a corpse more than the enemy near his position.
An abandoned Missouri farmhouse draws crowds when the vine covering it starts to move without wind.
Separated from his wife, a man wandering a country road sees an impossible light and a familiar figure.
A fugitive meets a silent figure in a dark forest and follows him back toward the jail.
A man wanders a desolate plain looking for the city of Carcosa and finds signs he cannot explain.
A shoemaker accepts a forty-mile running bet while three men follow close behind in a cart.
An abandoned Vermont farmhouse draws three neighbors who want to test its haunted reputation.
A man hears a familiar tapping in a room where no one else can be.
A boy sets out for water on a snowy night; his footprints end halfway to the spring.
A physician arrives after a sudden death and finds the family's account impossible to reconcile with the room.
A shepherd meets a radiant stranger who vanishes whenever he questions her.
A physician tests a friend’s fear of an inherited watch and sees how serious it is.
At a solemn funeral, the widow looks once more through the coffin glass and screams.
An inventor claims that machines can think, then a visitor hears a struggle inside his workshop.
Three grave robbers open a coffin on a stormy night and find its occupant sitting up.
Identical twins share more than a face as one brother’s engagement turns dangerous.
A minister meets a silent peddler on a misty bridge, then returns to learn why the man was there.
Staley Fleming sees a dog beside his bed every night, but it vanishes when he sits up.
Neighbors keeping vigil beside a dead woman in her mountain cabin witness something they cannot explain.
Lost in a California forest, Halpin Frayser dreams of a deadly encounter with someone he knows.
A plantation owner vanishes while walking across an open field in view of several witnesses.
A rancher claims he killed his Chinese worker over a simple task, but a local witness tells another story.
An isolated house rumored to hide a fortune draws visitors after its secretive owner dies.
Two men agree to fight with knives in a house said to be haunted.
A corpse appears in a locked third-floor bedroom, and no one can identify it.
Alone in a deserted mining camp, Hiram Beeson waits each night for a visitor from beneath his floor.
An exhausted traveler checks into an Atlanta hotel and wakes to find his room occupied.
A man meets a hypnotist he distrusts, then sees his fiancée arrive in town without warning.
A hunter spends the night in an abandoned gulch cabin and hears a struggle he cannot see.
Two travelers shelter from a storm in a house whose owners disappeared years earlier.
A stranger at a desert campfire tells how four prospectors were trapped in a cave thirty years earlier.
A missing farmer is seen miles from home just as his son becomes the chief murder suspect.
A Union soldier returns to the Tennessee home he left after a bitter family split.
After a private is executed for striking an officer, a battlefield roll call receives an answer no one expects.
