It was known as the "Spook House." That it was tenanted by evil spirits, visible, audible and active, no one in all that region doubted any more than he doubted what he was told of Sundays by the traveling preacher. Its owner's opinion of the matter was unknown; he and his family had disappeared one night and no trace of them had ever been found.
- Ambrose Bierce
It was known as the "Spook House." That it was tenanted by evil spirits, visible, audible and active, no one in all that region doubted any more than he doubted what he was told of Sundays by the traveling preacher. Its owner's opinion of the matter was unknown; he and his family had disappeared one night and no trace of them had ever been found.
- Ambrose Bierce
They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.
- Ambrose Bierce
Images by Mike V.
As with sounds, so with colors. At each end of the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as 'actinic' rays. They represent colors—integral colors in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real 'chromatic scale' I am not mad; there are colors that we cannot see. And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a color!
- Ambrose Bierce
There was at Auburn an old, abandoned cemetery. It was nearly in the heart of the town, yet by night it was as gruesome a place as the most dismal of human moods could crave. The railings about the plots were prostrate, decayed, or altogether gone. Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeakable sin.
Ambrose Bierce
There was at Auburn an old, abandoned cemetery. It was nearly in the heart of the town, yet by night it was as gruesome a place as the most dismal of human moods could crave. The railings about the plots were prostrate, decayed, or altogether gone. Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeakable sin.
Ambrose Bierce
CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager. The inscriptions following will serve to illustrate the success attained in these Olympian games:
His virtues were so conspicuous that his enemies, unable to overlook them, denied them, and his friends, to whose loose lives they were a rebuke, represented them as vices. They are here commemorated by his family, who shared them.
In the earth we here prepare a Place to lay our little Clara.
Thomas M. and Mary Frazer
P.S. -- Gabriel will raise her.
...a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to my disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal.
Ambrose Bierce
Image by october_dreaming.
It was known as the "Spook House." That it was tenanted by evil spirits, visible, audible and active, no one in all that region doubted any more than he doubted what he was told of Sundays by the traveling preacher. Its owner's opinion of the matter was unknown; he and his family had disappeared one night and no trace of them had ever been found.
There was at Auburn an old, abandoned cemetery. It was nearly in the heart of the town, yet by night it was as gruesome a place as the most dismal of human moods could crave. The railings about the plots were prostrate, decayed, or altogether gone. Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeakable sin.
Ambrose Bierce
The Californian winter was on, and the incessant rain splashed in the deserted streets, or, lifted by irregular gusts of wind, was hurled against the houses with incredible fury. With no small difficulty my cabman found the right place, away out toward the ocean beach, in a sparsely populated suburb. The dwelling, a rather ugly one, apparently, stood in the center of its grounds, which as nearly as I could make out in the gloom were destitute of either flowers or grass. Three or four trees, writhing and moaning in the torment of the tempest, appeared to be trying to escape from their dismal environment and take the chance of finding a better one out at sea. The house was a two-story brick structure with a tower, a story higher, at one corner. In a window of that was the only visible light. Something in the appearance of the place made me shudder, a performance that may have been assisted by a rill of rainwater down my back as I scuttled to cover in the doorway.
Ambrose Bierce
When night had fallen I cautiously left my place of concealment, dodged across the road into the woods and made for the river through the mile of corn. Such corn! It towered above me like a forest, shutting out all the starlight except what came from directly overhead. Many of the ears were a yard out of reach. One who has never seen an Alabama river-bottom cornfield has not exhausted nature’s surprises; nor will he know what solitude is until he explores one in a moonless night.
Ambrose Bierce
On
that night it so happened that the cemetery in one corner of which lay
the now honored ashes of the late Milton Gilson, Esq., was partly under
water. Swollen by incessant rains, Cat Creek had spilled over its banks
an angry flood which, after scooping out unsightly hollows wherever the
soil had been disturbed, had partly subsided, as if ashamed of the
sacrilege, leaving exposed much that had been piously concealed. Even
the famous Gilson monument, the pride and glory of Mammon Hill, was no
longer a standing rebuke to the "viper brood"; succumbing to the sapping
current it had toppled prone to earth. The ghoulish flood had exhumed
the poor, decayed pine coffin, which now lay half-exposed, in pitiful
contrast to the pompous monolith which, like a giant note of admiration,
emphasized the disclosure.
Ambrose Bierce
If the ghosts care to prove their existence as objective phenomena they
are unfortunate in always discovering themselves to inaccurate
observers, to say nothing of the bad luck of frightening them into fits.
That the seers of ghosts are inaccurate observers, and therefore
incredible witnesses, is clear from their own stories. Who ever heard of
a naked ghost? The apparition is always said to present himself (as he
certainly should) properly clothed, either "in his habit as he lived" or
in the apparel of the grave. Herein the witness must be at fault:
whatever power of apparition after dissolution may inhere in mortal
flesh and blood, we can hardly be expected to believe that cotton, silk,
wool and linen have the same mysterious gift. If textile fabrics had
that property they would sometimes manifest it independently, one would
think--would "materialize" visibly without a ghost inside, a greatly
simpler apparition than "the grin without the cat."
Ambrose Bierce
