Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories — John Shaqi
Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost StoriesBierce, Ambrose
General
Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
Bierce, Ambrose
Ghost stories, American; Horror tales, American; Short stories, American
conscious of a sense of the supernatural and drove home as rapidly as his
willing horse would go.
On arriving at home he related his adventure to his family, and early the
next morning, accompanied by two neighbors, John White Corwell and Abner
Raiser, returned to the spot. They found the body of old man Baker
hanging by the neck from one of the beams of the bridge, immediately
beneath the spot where the apparition had stood. A thick coating of
dust, slightly dampened by the mist, covered the floor of the bridge, but
the only footprints were those of Mr. Cummings’ horse.
In taking down the body the men disturbed the loose, friable earth of the
slope below it, disclosing human bones already nearly uncovered by the
action of water and frost. They were identified as those of the lost
peddler. At the double inquest the coroner’s jury found that Daniel
Baker died by his own hand while suffering from temporary insanity, and
that Samuel Morritz was murdered by some person or persons to the jury
unknown.
A COLD GREETING
THIS is a story told by the late Benson Foley of San Francisco:
“In the summer of 1881 I met a man named James H. Conway, a resident of
Franklin, Tennessee. He was visiting San Francisco for his health,
deluded man, and brought me a note of introduction from Mr. Lawrence
Barting. I had known Barting as a captain in the Federal army during the
civil war. At its close he had settled in Franklin, and in time became,
I had reason to think, somewhat prominent as a lawyer. Barting had
always seemed to me an honorable and truthful man, and the warm
friendship which he expressed in his note for Mr. Conway was to me
sufficient evidence that the latter was in every way worthy of my
confidence and esteem. At dinner one day Conway told me that it had been
solemnly agreed between him and Barting that the one who died first
should, if possible, communicate with the other from beyond the grave, in
some unmistakable way—just how, they had left (wisely, it seemed to me)
to be decided by the deceased, according to the opportunities that his
altered circumstances might present.
“A few weeks after the conversation in which Mr. Conway spoke of this
agreement, I met him one day, walking slowly down Montgomery street,
apparently, from his abstracted air, in deep thought. He greeted me
coldly with merely a movement of the head and passed on, leaving me
standing on the walk, with half-proffered hand, surprised and naturally
somewhat piqued. The next day I met him again in the office of the
Palace Hotel, and seeing him about to repeat the disagreeable performance
of the day before, intercepted him in a doorway, with a friendly
salutation, and bluntly requested an explanation of his altered manner.
He hesitated a moment; then, looking me frankly in the eyes, said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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