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“A Jug of Sirup”

A ghost story, but not really a horror story. This is a humorous satire where the ghost of a shopkeeper with an inhuman work ethic resumes his business. It could have been worse. Silas has it out with the people who try to mob his store in his own way, but no one is killed, or at least Bierce does not write as such, and the town is forced to allow him to work if he so desires.

“The Damned Thing”

Okay, this is a good one. Bierce does sci-fi where a country man is plagued by an invisible thing, like The Predator, and we get an account of the man’s death from an observer whose life was curiously spared. The story comes across as a cautionary tale about xenophobia as only the man who shot the creature was harmed by it. That and the proverb-like section titles.

“John Bartine’s Watch”

A story of a cursed object tied to the American Revolutionary War. The conceits of the tale tie into whether you can inherit the death of a relative and whether the spirits of people are passed down to their descendants as a kind of direct resurrection. It’s interesting to see a story where George Washington is implicated in political assassinations.

“The Applicant”

I would not classify this as horror except for the fact that the opening moments has a child find what is almost certainly a body in the snow. This is some kind of satire about the cruelty of society where a philanthropist sets up a home for old men and then, when he arrives as an applicant much later in life, is denied access and essentially sentenced to death.

“An Adventure at Brownville”

This is a sort of supernatural story with what I can only assume is some sort of hypnotist villain. I think that the most subtle plot twist of this one is that the narrator is only being courted by Eva so that he can be a witness to her death by “suicide” when she is more or less commanded to jump.

“The Death of Halpin Frayser”

A very dense horror story whose highlight is the dream-imagery that Halpin sees right before his death. As a Gothic horror story there are some squicky beats - like Halpin and his mother barely averting their incest - but the tragedy of the piece is poignant. The inference is that, after death, his mom continued to look for him, but as a revenant, all she could do is kill.

“A Baby Tramp”

This is kind of a ghost story but mostly a tragedy about an orphan whose family had once been the wealthiest of its town. A lot of stuff happens, including some bizarre Biblical plague-type stuff. It’s one of Bierce’s most maudlin tales. Thus far, at least.

“The Thing at Nolan”

Well, this is another one of those anecdotes, this one about a ghost. The gist is that a son probably murdered his father but his father was sighted miles away, walking around with a head wound. It’s pretty obvious here, but the man seen in Nolan was obviously some sort of ghost, whose appearance manages to get his son acquitted… before they find his dad’s body some months later.

“The Secret of Macarger Gulch”

A ghost story with some other psychic phenomena. Dude wonders why the gulch has its name and then spends the night in a cabin there. He has a bizarre dream of a married couple, has random flashes of… insight, and then witnesses one of those hauntings where a brutal act is repeated. In Bierce fashion, a later social call ties the seemingly unrelated elements together.

“The Boarded Window”

This is ostensibly a ghost story but it is actually a retelling of one of Bierce’s anecdotes contained within “Bodies of the Dead”. It’s a considerably younger woman and a wife, here, and it’s not a house cat but a BLACK PANTHER that tries to DRAG the corpse away.

“A Lady From Redhorse”

This is a straight up romance with some occult trappings. Bierce namedrops Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophistical society, which is a weird direction, and it hints at a lot of unsavory stuff, but the entire thing is basically… well, this is a rare happy ending for Bierce.

“Haïta the Shepherd”

This is a prose-poem and parable about happiness, told from the simple life of a shepherd. This story’s main claim to fame would be the origin of Hastur, a name that has been cribbed for cosmic horror for about 150 years since. Here, he’s just a sort of Abrahamic deity. It’s baffling that Hastur exploded into something so much bigger in the wake of this very short fable.

“The Middle Toe of the Right Foot”

This one is a ghost story with a haunted house and a lot of moving parts as befits Bierce. The house has been haunted since its owner murdered his wife and two kids and then ran away. It is chosen as the site of a knife duel to the death. I’m not sure what happened to Rosser, but the twist is very much in Bierce’s serendipity of death.

“The Realm of the Unreal”

Bierce deals with a hypnotist, here, who - once again - has it out with a disbelieving skeptic. Dr. Dorrimore has two encounters with the narrator, five years apart, and both of them leave him something worse for the wear, but at least he isn’t rendered insane or, well, dead.

“The Man and the Snake”

Okay, IIRC Smith used this story as the baseboard for “The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake”. I’m kind of inured to Bierce’s drill, now. Dude’s imagination runs away with himself and he scares himself into a seizure and death. Spoiler / not spoiler: it turns out it’s a stuffed snake.

“A Watcher by the Dead”

Two men bet that a third can’t stay in a room for a period of time with a corpse. Except, the corpse is a doctor who is only playing. Things Go Badly, but with Bierce’s clever twists, which - once the final segment is revealed, like a Poirot novel - elevates the tale.

“The Suitable Surroundings”

A story that lays out the operator behind the earlier “Holy Terror”, where the proper circumstances arise which results in a man being scared to death. Where Bierce excels is in the unknown. Did the writer know how Breede would die, or was it merely the happenstance of the farm-boy that pushed an otherwise friendly wager over the edge?

“Two Haunted Houses”

Two accounts of haunted houses, each by malevolent spirits. They do a great job of prompting unresolved questions. For example, a hidden corpse whose face is the spitting image of the former owner, whose own corpse was nonetheless verified as still being in its grave. The other house has a tale of a bizarre hidden room with a springtrap door, still laden with the bodies of the trapped.

“One of Twins”

This story involves twin magic and has twin brothers who mix with each other so much that they don’t know where John ends and Henry begins. The supernatural aspect is in their mind link, with the twins unconsciously sharing thoughts, which leads to an unfortunate end for one of them… and then a reckoning based on the image of the deceased.

“Whither?”

Yet another trio of supernatural occurrences. This theme details mysterious disappearances. Specifically, situations where people were observed to have vanished into thin air, so to speak, with multiple witnesses (or an uncanny situation in the case of Ashmore). These stories, lacking the melodrama of ghosts, feel a bit stranger than the others and offer a bit of cosmic horror in the postscript.

“Behind the Veil”

Two more ghost stories and a few subtle jabs at the Society for Psychical Research. The first is a play on the bargain, which I’ve heard of and seen in other stories, of two men who promise that whoever dies first will make some communication with the other. The second story is another haunted house, but this one has a pirate angle that varies things up a bit.

“Hither From Hades”

Another trio of contemporary supernatural stories but these are about ghosts. One of these has Bierce’s penchant for spirits who transcend time and space, with one man on the moment of his death reaching five years into the past to his father. The last of the tales is a “dude has to spend a night in a haunted house”, with predictable results for the genre-savvy.

“Bodies of the Dead”

More tales of disturbing post-mortem behavior. A few of these are typical “obviously dead / embalmed body moves in a naturalistic way”, the second of which traumatizes the dead woman’s husband. The last one is a ghastly account of a hanging whose aftermath goes horribly wrong and was a definite highlight of the grotesque.

“Bodies of the Dead”

These are fictitious (?) accounts of dead bodies exhibiting bizarre supernatural behavior, from disappearing outright to huddling for warmth to teleporting to a close friend fighting with a cat. This is basically creepypasta from the late 1800s; Joshi intimates that Bierce was doing a straight-faced parody of the Society for Psychical Research.

“The Man Out of the Nose”

This psychological story features a man who is little more than a ghost and then tells the story of how he came to be that way. It’s a domestic drama that begins with adultery and ends in trauma, but one born out of accident, not malice. As a sketch it reminds me of one of Poe’s quirkier dramas.

“An Inhabitant of Sarcosa”

Fantastically weird fiction; you can see how influential this single story was on the Lovecraft / Smith crowd. It has the ring of one of their prose poems without becoming overblown and speaks to ancient, forgotten civilizations - but here, from the point of view of a long-dead resident of said civilization, now doubly ancient.

“A Holy Terror”

Another California gold rush story. This one is composed of coincidences that results in two people dying from shock. That’s a key aspect of Bierce’s psychological horror. Lovecraft would bury his characters in insanity, maybe metaphorically death but a distinctly different kind.

“A Psychological Shipwreck”

A dude on a steamer makes good friends with a woman who is traveling on the same boat. The ship wrecks and he wakes up on a completely different boat with his friend who was trying to get him to travel with him. The implication is thst Miss Jane used meditation to draw her fiancé’s friend’s spirit to her boat, presumably to get to know him better before they met?

“The Famous Gilson Bequest”

More goofy Californian gold miner melodrama where one man, Gilson, is suspected of stealing from his fellow pan-miners. The ending is one of those more ambiguous bits - did Gilson truly appear to the remorseful executor of his will, or was it a fancy, a hallucination brought on by a guilty conscience and the past five years of stress?