Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories

Description

The oeuvre of Ambrose Bierce is certainly varied and colorful, including satiric writings and literary criticism just as much as Gothic stories. This collection contains the best of Bierce’s short stories, both writings inspired by history and scary stories, but don’t expect horror stories that will make you feel terrified to spend a night alone in your own home – what you should expect is a set of exciting stories that will send shivers down your spine, but without any horror elements.

The book organizes the nineteen short and quick paced stories into five chapters. The first chapter is entitled The Ways of Ghosts and it includes four stories of dead people as they are trying to reach out for the world of the living in order to help the living; the second set of four stories is collected under the title Soldier Folk and also deals with strange events, but this is also the chapter that contains stories about how the war impacts family life and how duty can defeat death.

The third chapter bears the title Some Haunted Houses, part one, followed by the fourth chapter with part two, both being about spirits that are confined to buildings. The last three stories are grouped under the chapter title Mysterious Disappearances – they deal with how people living everyday lives suddenly disappeared and they make an attempt of presenting a theory to account for the mysterious events. Ambrose Bierce not only wrote about unexplainable disappearances – his own death was also a mysterious disappearance. In 1913, Bierce set off on a journey to visit the important battlegrounds of the Civil War. In December, he wrote a letter to a friend of his, but nothing more is known about him after that letter – he simply vanished and the mystery has not been elucidated to our days.
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