Books: Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
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Ambrose Bierce >> Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
PRESENT AT A HANGING AND OTHER GHOST STORIES
Contents:
The Ways of Ghosts
Present at a Hanging
A Cold Greeting
A Wireless Message
An Arrest
Soldier-Folk
A Man with Two Lives
Three and One are One
A Baffled Ambuscade
Two Military Executions
Some Haunted Houses
The Isle of Pines
A Fruitless Assignment
A Vine on a House
At Old Man Eckert's
The Spook House
The Other Lodgers
The Thing at Nolan
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
An Unfinished Race
Charles Ashmore's Trail
Science to the Front
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 canon 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 canon. 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.