Can Such Things Be?

By Ambrose Bierce

"Can Such Things Be?" is a thrillingly creepy collection of short stories from one of the 19th century's masters of horror. Sit yourself by a campfire or candlelight and enjoy these 24 eerie stories, told in Bierce's witty, clear prose, filled with ghosts, apparitions, doppelgängers, grave robbers, death omens and other strange, inexplicable occurrences. The story of "The Damned Thing" has appeared in the tv show "Masters of Horror", while "Haïta the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" have reverberated in the history of supernatural fiction from Robert W. Chambers' "The King in Yellow" to HBO's "True Detective" starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.-

• Language: English
• Publisher: SAGA Egmont
• Release date: Jan 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9789176392638

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.

Book preview

The secret of Macarger’s Gulch

Northwestwardly from Indian Hill, about nine miles as the crow flies, is Macarger’s Gulch. It is not much of a gulch—a mere depression between two wooded ridges of inconsiderable height. From its mouth up to its head—for gulches, like rivers, have an anatomy of their own—the distance does not exceed two miles, and the width at bottom is at only one place more than a dozen yards; for most of the distance on either side of the little brook which drains it in winter, and goes dry in the early spring, there is no level ground at all; the steep slopes of the hills, covered with an almost impenetrable growth of manzanita and chemisal, are parted by nothing but the width of the water course. No one but an occasional enterprising hunter of the vicinity ever goes into Macarger’s Gulch, and five miles away it is unknown, even by name. Within that distance in any direction are far more conspicuous topographical features without names, and one might try in vain to ascertain by local inquiry the origin of the name of this