Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories

Written by Ambrose Bierce

Narrated by LibriVox Community

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914?), satirist, critic, poet, short story writer and journalist. His fiction showed a clean economical style often sprinkled with subtle cynical comments on human behaviour. Nothing is known of his death, as he went missing while an observer with Pancho Villa’s army in 1913/14.
(Summaries by Peter Yearsley)

The Ways of Ghosts: Stories of encounters with the ghosts of the dead and dying. The spirits of the dead reach out to the living, to pass on a message or to pursue a killer.

Contents (with beginning time):

• Present at a Hanging (02:06)
• A Cold Greeting (07:07)
• A Wireless Message (11:15)
• An Arrest (17:04)

Soldier Folk: Oddities of death and life; from a man who finds that his death is uncertain, through the effects of war on the family, duty that survives death, to the memory of revenge.

Contents (with beginning time):

• A Man with Two Lives (00:31)
• Three and One are One (06:23)
• A Baffled Ambuscade (14:18)
• Two Military Executions (19:45)

Some Haunted Houses - Part One: Encounters of the living with the spirits of the dead who have been bound into buildings. An old man revenges himself; a journalist investigates a haunted house; and the quivering vine that tangles the face of a deserted home.

Contents (with beginning time):

• The Isle of Pines (00:31)
• A Fruitless Assignment (10:39)
• A Vine on a House (17:54)

Some Haunted Houses - Part Two: Houses where the living are never seen again, memories of the mortuary live on, and a murdered man wanders through.


Contents (with beginning time):

• At Old Man Eckert’s (00:30)
• The Spook House (06:36)
• The Other Lodgers (16:04)
• The Thing at Nolan (21:50)

Mysterious Disappearances: Three short tales of men who have vanished living their ordinary lives, sometimes in full view of witnesses; plus a short, probably fictional, description of a theory to partly explain these events.

Contents (with beginning time):

• The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (00:32)
• An Unfinished Race (05:18)
• Charles Ashmore’s Trail (07:50)
• Science to the Front (12:23)

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was an American novelist and short story writer. Born in Meigs County, Ohio, Bierce was raised Indiana in a poor family who treasured literature and extolled the value of education. Despite this, he left school at 15 to work as a printer’s apprentice, otherwise known as a “devil”, for the Northern Indianan, an abolitionist newspaper. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, he enlisted in the Union infantry and was present at some of the conflict’s most harrowing events, including the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. During the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, Bierce—by then a lieutenant—suffered a serious brain injury and was discharged the following year. After a brief re-enlistment, he resigned from the Army and settled in San Francisco, where he worked for years as a newspaper editor and crime reporter. In addition to his career in journalism, Bierce wrote a series of realist stories including “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” which depict the brutalities of warfare while emphasizing the psychological implications of violence. In 1906, he published The Devil’s Dictionary, a satirical dictionary compiled from numerous installments written over several decades for newspapers and magazines. In 1913, he accompanied Pancho Villa’s army as an observer of the Mexican Revolution and disappeared without a trace at the age of 71.