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    Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
    Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
    Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
    Ebook81 pages1 hour

    Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories

    By Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “Present at a Hanging, and other Ghost Stories” collects some of Ambrose Bierce’s finest tales of the supernatural and eerie side of life. Regarded by his 19th century peers as a master of the English language, his economical yet florid style shines in these compact stories concerning time, war, and impossible events. Mentioned in the same breath as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, Bierce is thought to be a master of short horror fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media
    Release dateSep 11, 2018
    ISBN9781974997572
    Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
    Author

    Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

    Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – 1914) was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.

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    Reviews for Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories

    3.5/5

    23 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I found this interesting. Not something I would generally read, but it was an LT member giveaway that looked good. It's a lovely edition and a short, quick, fascinating read. The stories are very short. I've not really come across this style before - halfway between fiction and non-fiction.
    • 3/5
      This is a collection of ghost stories, most just three to six or seven pages long. In Bierce's ghost stories, there tends to be a really interesting set-up, a bit of a chilling ghostly sighting, then an anti-climactic ending. So you'll have a little town, a house that everyone knows is haunted, a person or pair of witnesses who see a ghost walking in and out the house, then a refusal to speak of it and that's the end. So many of the stories were of this formula that things got repetitive, yet it's Bierce, so it's still worthy.
    • 1/5
      Aaarrrrgggghhhhh! Absolutely completely devoid of any life or interest. I'm sure that the conceits he used were, at the time, new and fresh and all that, but his writing style was awful and the conceits he did use now look quaint and old-fashioned (not in the good way). His ghost stories reminded me of the old hook hanging on the car door canard. As told by someone who didn't know how to tell a story. Blech.

    Book preview

    Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

    cover.jpg

    PRESENT AT A HANGING

    AND

    OTHER GHOST STORIES

    By

    AMBROSE BIERCE

    This edition published by Dreamscape Media LLC, 2018

    www.dreamscapeab.com * info@dreamscapeab.com

    1417 Timberwolf Drive, Holland, OH 43528

    877.983.7326

    dreamscape

    About Ambrose Bierce:

    Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – circa 1914) was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran.

    Bierce's book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has been described as one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

    A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others, and he was considered an influential and feared literary critic. In recent decades Bierce has gained wider respect as a fabulist and for his poetry.

    In December 1913, Bierce traveled to Chihuahua, Mexico, to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared, and was rumored to be traveling with rebel troops. He was never seen again.

    Source: Wikipedia

    TABLE OF 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

    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 worthwhile 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.

    The Ways of Ghosts

    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

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