"Charles Ashmore's Trail" (1888)

This is the third installment of Ambrose Bierce's "Mysterious Disappearances" set of three very short stories, all published in October 1888 in the San Francisco Examiner and worth reading together. "Charles Ashmore's Trail" has the most pathos of the three, and really the best spooky effects too. The first to disappear (in "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field") is a slaveholder, the second (in "An Unfinished Race") a drunk who is prone to gambling, though with remarkable physical strength and endurance. In "Charles Ashmore's Trail" it is the only son of a family and the youngest child, 16 years old. They are also scattered geographically: Selma, Alabama; Leamington, Warwickshire, England; and Troy, New York. Charles disappears when he goes for water from the creek behind the house. It's evening and there is a light snow. (Light snow seems to occur often in Bierce stories.) After Charles has been gone too long the family investigates. They find his footprints fresh in the snow. Nice detail: "The last footprints were as conspicuous as any in the line; the very nail-marks were distinctly visible." Yeah but the kid is gone. They look carefully for more footprints all the way to the creek, hoping to find evidence he turned away for some reason. The father even looks up to the sky where the trail of prints ends. It's a clear night and Charles is not floating around up there. The mother can't believe the news and goes out to look for herself. Here's where the good stuff happens. At the point where the trail ends she thinks she can hear his voice, as if from a distance, but she cannot make out or remember the words. At first the family writes that off (gently) as her derangement from grief, but then they start to experience it. It's quite peculiar really: "All declared it unmistakably the voice of Charles Ashmore; all agreed that it seemed to come from a great distance, faintly, yet with entire distinctness of articulation; yet none could determine its direction, nor repeat the words." By the following summer the voice is never heard again. It's full-on supernatural but sneaks up on you. That's partly because it's grouped with the two others and their dry reportorial style. They are less like fiction—I really wonder what the San Francisco newspaper readers made of them in the day—and more like the work of Charles Fort, the paranormal researcher and writer in the early 20th century, or even the Ripley's Believe It or Not! newspaper cartoon. They feel dispassionate and factual even as they describe impossible events, and they leave you half-believing they actually happened.

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce
Read story online.