Audiobook · read by volunteers
Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
Read by Peter Yearsley · 5 chapters · 2 h 01
About the book
Ambrose Bierce had a gift for chilling the reader in a few spare lines. In this collection of ghost stories the dead do not always rest, the living cannot always escape, and the line between the two is thin. You will find tales of spirits who reach out to those they leave behind, of soldiers and families marked by war, of houses that seem to remember their past, and of people who simply vanish without a trace. Bierce writes in a clean, economical style, sprinkled with dry and cynical comment on human behaviour, and he rarely wastes a word. Each section gathers several short pieces, so you can listen to a little at a time or let the shivers build. Two hours of unsettling storytelling in the voice of a single reader, best enjoyed after dark.
Introduction
Ambrose Bierce, born in 1842, was a satirist, critic, poet, short story writer and journalist. His fiction shows 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 or 1914, and that mystery has added to the legend that surrounds him. The collection recorded here brings together a number of his tales of the supernatural and the strange.
The five sections of the recording group the stories by theme. The Ways of Ghosts contains stories of encounters with the ghosts of the dead and dying, in which the spirits of the dead reach out to the living. Soldier Folk draws on the experience of war, a subject Bierce knew at first hand as a Union soldier in the American Civil War. Two parts, Some Haunted Houses, are devoted to places that seem to hold on to the past, and Mysterious Disappearances closes the book with accounts of people who vanished and were never seen again. The whole lasts about two hours.
Bierce’s ghosts are rarely sentimental. His narrators tend to be matter-of-fact, which makes the strange events more disturbing, and his endings often depend on a single sharp twist. The stories are short enough to be enjoyed one at a time.
The reading was made by LibriVox volunteers for anyone to hear. It is a good introduction to a writer who influenced later horror and mystery writing and who is also remembered for The Devil’s Dictionary, and a fine companion for a dark evening.
Public domain
Ambrose Bierce died in 1914: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text