Were Ambrose Bierce's Ghost Stories Inspired by His Agoraphobia?

I’m hardly surprised that horror is associated with various locales and settings. Some places simply
scare us more than others. But I’m intrigued by the geographical pattern of these settings. One might
imagine that horror knows no boundaries, but in practice it tends to observe them with scrupulous
care.

The European horror story usually finds its home at an ancient castle. The Castle of Otranto,
Horace Walpole’s clumsy (but influential) novel published in 1764, set the tone for countless
subsequent gothic horror stories. We find
another such a castle at both the opening
and conclusion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
and even though Mary Shelley neglected to
include one in her novel Frankenstein,
Hollywood stepped in to rectify the omission
—indeed, many will go further and claim
that an actual Frankenstein castle near
Darmstadt in Germany inspired her 1818
book.

In the United States, we have no cursed
castles. But horror novels set in the South
or Northeast invariably involved a haunted
house or mansion. Maine stands out as an
especially popular setting for this kind of books, most famously in novels by Stephen King, but
also in stories by Richard Matheson, Jack Ketchum and others. Perhaps the state should consider
changing its Latin motto from Dirigo (I lead) to Deterreo (I frighten).

But out West a different type of horror was required—the kind that takes place outdoors, perhaps
around the campfire, in a secluded gulch or ravine, or at a deserted cemetery. No author did more
to define and refine this archetypal scary story of the Far West than Ambrose Bierce. As even the
titles of his horror stories indicate—tales such as "The Haunted Valley," "The Moonlit Road," "The
Secret of Macarger’s Gulch," "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field"—Bierce may even have suffered
from agoraphobia.

In the latter story, a man disappears suddenly from view while crossing a large open space. Bierce
uses this exact same plot device in "An Unfinished Race." And he returns to it once more in
"Charles Ashmore’s Trail." The nature of the 'horror' in these tales corresponds with exactitude to
the clinical accounts of agoraphobics, who often describe their anxiety in crossing an open space
as a fear that they won’t reach the other side. This is the precise fate of Bierce’s disappearing
characters.

Bierce, too, could write a classic haunted house story, but it is striking how often, even in these
cases, that the haunting takes place outside of the house. In "At Old Man Eckert’s," the horror
assails visitors the moment they walk out the front door. In another story, Bierce reflects on the
apprehension of spending the night in a house with an open doorway. The epicenter of fear is
located not inside the house, but in the empty landscape that surrounds it.

Even Freud, the connoisseur of irrational neuroses, admitted that he suffered from a fear of open
spaces. Robert Burton had described this phenomenon as early as 1621, but medical science didn’t
accept the clinical diagnosis of agoraphobia until the 1860s. Some have seen it as a kind of
existential displacement, others as a response to consumerist society, or as a manifestation of a
displaced Oedipal complex. But in assessing Bierce, I
prefer to draw on the concepts of scholar Paul Carter,
who sees it as an aesthetic stance, a kind of poetics of
rebellion against the dehumanization of modern urban
life. Carter doesn’t cite Ambrose Bierce in his book
Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia, but
this acerbic critic of American manners—whose telling
nickname was "Bitter Bierce"—practiced precisely that
kind of rebellion in his life and works. For my part, I
find it revealing that Bierce, in his famous Devil’s
Dictionary, defines the word ghost as "the outward
and visible sign of an inward fear."

Yet perhaps a different explanation, biographical rather
than psychological, underlies Bierce's aversion to open
spaces. Around a third of this author’s published short stories deal with war, and draw on Bierce’s
experiences on the battlefield. He served in the infantry for the North, and fought at the battle of
Shiloh, where Ulysses Grant secured a victory but at the cost of more than 10,000 Union
casualties. Here Bierce led his soldiers into an ambush and watched a dozen of them fall in the
ensuing gunfire. During Sherman’s march to Atlanta, Bierce was involved in a disastrous attack on
Pickett’s Mill that led to the death of almost a third of the men in his brigade in less than an hour.
A few days later, at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Bierce got shot in the head. He survived—
although the bullet was permanently embedded behind his left ear. Who can be surprised that
Bierce, in later life, wrote about the anxieties of standing exposed in an open space? We need no
Freudian schemas to explain this phobia.

The editors of Bierce’s short fiction tend to combine them into three broad categories: horror stories,
war stories and tall tales. But these writings are more diverse than such a categorization might
suggest. For example, Bierce anticipates many of the themes of 20th century science fiction in his
tales. "Moxon’s Master" deals with the provocative question of whether machines can think.
Published in 1893, it predates the Turing test by more than a half century. The story also represents
one of the first appearances of a robot (although that term didn’t exist at the time) in literature. In
"The Damned Thing," first published in that same year, Bierce introduces an invisible creature,
and instead of relying on magical or whimsical explanation for the phenomenon, he suggests a
scientific theory based on the existence of colors beyond the capacity of the human eye to perceive.
H.G. Wells would not publish his The Invisible Man for another four years.

And how should we classify Bierce’s most famous story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"?
The editor of Bierce’s collected tales classifies it as a war story, but the suspense and terror infused
into this narrative have no relationship to battlefield heroics or the dangers of combat. Instead,
Bierce mixes quasi-magical fantasy, beguiling memory, and intense realism into a new formula,
more akin to Borges and Kafka than to anything in nineteenth century American literature.

But Bierce’s most provocative story was his first, "The Haunted
Valley," published in 1871. This tale demands attention as one
of the most significant works of nineteenth century West Coast
fiction—and perhaps the most prescient. It includes a searing
critique of racism, exploring the hostility towards immigrants
at a time when almost every resident of California had been born
somewhere else. The story also involves cross-dressing and a
complex love story involving ambiguous gender roles—which
are described with remarkable sensitivity given the attitudes of
the time. And the story is sufficiently open-ended as to invite
multiple interpretations, some of them very rich in psychological
implications.

Bierce’s own story is as mysterious as any of those he left behind
in his books. And readers of his tales may find unintended irony
in them when compared with the concluding chapter of the writer's
biography. Indeed, his fictions foreshadow Bierce’s own death. In late 1913, the author traveled
to Mexico, where he accompanied Pancho Villa's army as an observer. His last letter talks about an
imminent departure to an unknown destination. He was never heard from again, and rumors and
conflicting theories still circulate about the reasons for his disappearance.

Yet how strange that the author who documented, in numerous stories, the dangers of traversing
open spaces should vanish while doing just that! In this spirit, allow me suggest an epitaph for the
grave that Ambrose Bierce never had. It is drawn from his influential story "An Inhabitant of
Carcosa": "For there be diverse sorts of death," Bierce writes, "some wherein the body remaineth;
and in some it quite vanisheth away with the spirit."

But though the body vanisheth, the work remains, and if anything it grows stronger. In the
century after Bierce’s death, the West Coast of the United States would come to dominate the
world of genre fiction. Anyone tracing the lineage of this marvelous blossoming of horror, fantasy
and suspense would find almost every path links back to the originator of West Coast genre fiction
and still one of its greatest masters, the estimable Ambrose Bierce.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.

Publication Date: July 18, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum

Week 22
B ooks of Blood, Vols. 1-3
by Clive Barker

Week 23
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris

Week 24
T he Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich

Week 25
S trange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Week 26
P sycho
by Robert Bloch

Week 27
F ledgling
by Octavia E. Butler

Week 28
D emons by Daylight
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 29
T he Complete Short Stories
by Ambrose Bierce