Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories by Ambrose Bierce. Page: 1
PRESENT AT A HANGING
AND OTHER GHOST STORIES
by Ambrose Bierce
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
THE WAYS OF GHOSTS
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 worth while 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