American writer Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?)—in his collection of mystery and horror tales, Can Such Things Be? (1893)—included a trilogy of stories of incredible disappearances. They are not mere accounts of missing persons such as those that police and private detectives are involved in every day. Instead, in each instance the disappearance has elements of the supernatural.
Bierce’s own disappearance in late 1913 seems both a fitting and ironic end for a writer fascinated by such mysterious vanishings—but was it something more? I undertook to solve the case, and it became part of my doctoral dissertation, Literary Investigation (Nickell 1987). Subsequently, Bierce biographer Roy Morris Jr. (1995) accepted and developed my solution. Come with me now as we track the fabled author, from clue to hidden clue, to his final destination. First, however, it will be instructive to look briefly at a story of the kind Bierce found so fascinating.
A Vanished Boy
Frank Edwards, in his tantalizing book Strangest of All (1962, 102), asks: “Is it possible for a human being to walk off the earth? Science says that it is not, but if that is correct then what happened to Oliver Larch?”
Edwards tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy who disappeared on the night of Christmas Eve 1889 from his family’s farm at the outskirts of South Bend, Indiana. The boy had been sent to the well to fetch water, but just after he started on his errand, he was heard screaming: “Help! Help! They’ve got me! Help! Help! Help!”
Family and visiting friends rushed outside, with Oliver’s father carrying a kerosene lamp. Oliver’s cries were already growing faint, and lamplight revealed that his tracks led about halfway to the well and then ended abruptly! Writes Edwards: “There were no other marks of any kind in the soft snow. Just Oliver’s footprints … and the bucket … and silence.” Subsequent investigation, the writer states, proved the truth of the story. Neither eagles nor even a balloon, he argues, could have made off with the frightened boy. And he concludes: “Because it defied logical explanation, the disappearance of this boy was quietly filed away and forgotten” (Edwards 1962, 103).
I began my investigation of that case in May 1979. Exhaustive searches of local records were made for me by the Services Division of the South Bend Police Department and the Northern Indiana Historical Society. Alas, neither the fantastic disappearance nor any record of such a family could be discovered. After much further effort, I traced the tale back through earlier versions—eventually reaching its original: Although different in many details, it was still recognizable by its major story elements as Ambrose Bierce’s short story titled “Charles Ashmore’s Trail” (Bierce [1893] 1924, 421–424).
One of Bierce’s trilogy of “Mysterious Disappearances,” the story tells how a sixteen-year-old lad fails to return from an errand to fetch water from a spring; subsequently, his tracks are found to cease suddenly in the snow. Two other supernatural tales complete Bierce’s group: one has a planter walking across the pasture and disappearing in full view of his wife and a neighbor, while the other features a runner who stumbles in a footrace only to vanish before touching the ground. The stark purposelessness of these stories embodies Bierce’s personal philosophy that life is essentially meaningless. We must keep this in mind as we consider his fascination with disappearance stories and whether that may have led to his own mysterious vanishing.
Bierce did not originate the genre of “mysterious disappearances”—or “Fortean disappearances,” as they are now often called (after Charles Fort, who loved to taunt “orthodox” scientists with reports of strange occurrences they could not explain). The genre is, in fact, ancient. For example, Hebrews 11:5 reads, “Enoch … was not found, because God translated him,” i.e., took him away. And at the end of Sophocles’s play Oedipus at Colonus (fifth century BCE) Oedipus mysteriously vanishes. Then there is the 1807 case of Benjamin Bathurst, who was a very real person. He indeed disappeared under mysterious circumstances; however, because he was a diplomat carrying dispatches on a mission, he was presumed assassinated. As might be expected, one version of that case is of the Fortean variety (O’Donnell 1972, 52–92).
I suspect that the Fortean genre evolved from two main sources: first, actual missing persons such as Bathurst and, second, from tales of presumed “apparitions” common to ghost stories. The latter frequently tell of someone encountering a figure that then suddenly vanishes, leading the witness to conclude it must therefore have been a spirit that was seen.
Disappearing Bierce
Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842, the son of an Ohio farmer. He distinguished himself as a Union soldier in the Civil War, at the close of which he was, he claimed, breveted a major. He subsequently worked as a Treasury clerk in San Francisco. From about 1868–1900, he became a journalist and editor in San Francisco—except for some three years in London where he achieved a reputation as a humorist. In 1900, Bierce moved permanently to Washington, D.C., where he published additional collections of stories, a collection of verse, and a cynical lexicon (later known as The Devil’s Dictionary). He also assembled the first ten volumes of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce.
By 1912, Bierce was well into the final phase of his life, an old and rather bitter man. He had suffered a failed marriage, the death of his son Leigh in 1901, and an abortive attempt at remarriage in 1910. He was tired, suffered from asthma, and began to plan what seems clearly intended as a final journey. By about October 1913, he headed south and west. A news clipping, reputedly sent to his niece in a letter of November 6, said, in part: “Mr. Bierce was dressed in black. From head to foot he was attired in this color, except where the white cuffs and collar and shirt front showed through. He even carried a walking cane, black as ebony.” In one letter he wrote, “Don’t know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn’t matter much” (Nickell 2005, 22–23; Pope [1922] 1967, xiv–xvi, 189, 195–198).
By the time Bierce ceased to be heard from, in late 1913 or early the next year, speculation about his whereabouts and fate were beginning to circulate. He had told reporters he was heading to Mexico to check on the revolution there: “To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!” This was almost certainly a ruse, but stories of his involvement there—either with Pancho Villa’s forces or, on the other side, with the Carranzistas—proliferated like later Elvis Presley sightings. In fact, the U.S. government had been unable to confirm that Bierce had crossed into Mexico (Nickell 2005, 22–27).
Nevertheless, conjecture reigned, and Bierce would have loved it. If he reportedly died, again and again in Mexico—killed in battle, stood in a firing squad, or just summarily murdered—it must have been his ghost that later appeared briefly in France, as an officer on Lord Kitchener’s staff, only to vanish again. One scenario was based on the supposition that the writer ended his days in the State Asylum in Napa, California, where his dear friend Carrie Christiansen lived out her last years. Bierce was everywhere, elsewhere, and nowhere—spotted rather frequently for one who had, supposedly and ironically, disappeared (Nickell 2005, 23–25, 32–33).
What Actually Happened
Toward the end of his life, Bierce was burned out. He had written a powerful essay advocating suicide titled “Taking Oneself Off,” in which he insisted, “Suicide is always courageous” (Bierce [1909–12] 1966, 338–344). He wrote farewell letters to friends, saying to one, “My work is finished, and so am I”; to another, he said he longed for “the good, good darkness”; and to still another, he stated, “I am going away and have no notion when I shall return” (see Pope [1922] 1967, 189, 195–198). In fact, he had put his affairs in order—permanently.
A few of Bierce’s friends, such as Carrie Christiansen, appear to have been in on his ruses to fool everyone else. Only his close friend Walter Neale later gave up what he knew, Bierce having confided his basic plan to him. According to Neale, approximately a year before he vanished, “he took a journey through Yellowstone National Park, explored part of the Cañon of the Colorado, and somewhere in the gorge of the Colorado selected the place of his last earthly habitat.” That occurred in the summer of 1912, but as early as 1910, Bierce had written of the Grand Canyon, “I’d like to lay my bones thereabout” (quoted in Pope [1922] 1967, 164).
Bierce showed Neale “a photograph of the exact location, which I think he himself had taken with a kodak, and pointed out that there he would be protected from vultures.” Bierce had often vowed to die by his own hand as a refusal to suffer the debilities of old age, and, Neale reported, Bierce had a German revolver for the purpose. Neale explains why Bierce may have ventured toward Mexico without actually going there: Bierce, he believed, took the Southern Pacific route to the Grand Canyon to avoid asthma, attacks of which had plagued him so on his last California-to-Washington, D.C., trip via a northern route that “he had to interrupt his journey several times” (Neale [1929] 1969, 429–439).
Neale’s account rings true, and it is corroborated in its main parts by the foregoing evidence: Bierce’s essay on suicide, his last letters, and the fact of his settled affairs. Finally, and I use that word with emphasis, there is the revealing letter Bierce sent his daughter in early 1913 giving up his cemetery plot. The letter ends with the statement that he did “not wish to lie there. That matter is all arranged and you will not be bothered about the mortal part of [signed] Your Daddy” (quoted in Grenander 1971, 73).
To complete his disappearing trick, Bierce needed only a distracting puff of smoke, so he furthered the illusion that he had crossed the Mexican border. He seems to have played games with his final communications. A “last letter” was supposedly destroyed as per Bierce’s orders and exists only among other colorful, suspicious notebook entries (penned, I observe, in Miss Christiansen’s handwriting). That phantom letter was reportedly datelined “December 25, 1913,” and headed “Chihuahua, Mexico,” but the American consul could not find evidence Bierce was ever in that town. There are other examples of his subterfuges: regarding one letter he headed with an anticipated future place and date, he would subsequently confess, “Thus does man’s guile come to naught”; in a postscript to another, he cautioned, “You need not believe all that these newspapers say of me and my purposes. I had to tell them something” (see Nickell 2005, 22–31).
Conclusions
Perhaps Ambrose Bierce felt that although he could not cheat death, he could somehow cheat the grave. Carey McWilliams observed: “Nothing so augmented the interest in Ambrose Bierce as his disappearance. Obscurity is obscurity, but disappearance is fame.” Bierce surely agreed. He had promised (quoted by Paul Fatout 1951, 208), “And nobody will find my bones.” And so with his last act and by his own hand—as we can picture him in his rock niche, firmly gripping his revolver—Ambrose Bierce steeled himself and kept that promise.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the numerous people who have helped further my work—none more so than John and Mary Frantz, whose generous financial assistance over the years has made many of my investigations possible.
References
Bierce, Ambrose. (1893) 1924. Can Such Things Be? New York, NY: Albert and Charles Boni, 421–424.
———. (1909–12) 1966. The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (12 vols.). New York, NY: Gordian.
Edwards, Frank. 1962. Strangest of All. New York, NY: Signet.
Fatout, Paul. 1951. Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Lexicographer. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Grenander, M.E. 1971. Ambrose Bierce. Boston, MA: Twayne.
Morris, Roy Jr. 1995. Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. New York, NY: Crown Publishers.
Neale, Walter. (1929) 1969. Life of Ambrose Bierce. New York, NY: AMS Press.
Nickell, Joe. 1987. Literary Investigation, doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky, 19–53.
———. 2005. Unsolved History. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky. (The present article is adapted largely from this source.)
O’Donnell, Elliott. 1972. Strange Disappearances. New York, NY: University Books.
Pope, Bertha Clark, ed. (1922) 1967. The Letters of Ambrose Bierce. New York, NY: Gordian.
Vanished
(for Ambrose Bierce)
Your work
finished,
you vanished,
wandered.
Everyone
won-
dered.
You forsook
your grave plot,
to make
your way
to a way-
side spot,
have us look
for nothing, or not.
Hidden
in a canyon,
a place
to punctuate
your final thought—
before the skeletonizing rot—
with the precise
period of a pistol shot.
Joe Nickell