Writer Ambrose Bierce has had quite an impact on the realm of Forteana. His story "Mysterious Disappearances" inspired the apocryphal accounts of David Lang and Oliver Larch/Lerch, which were believed for decades to be true cases of people vanishing into thin air. [1] Bierce's own disappearance fascinated Charles Fort himself. [2]
Bierce's most famous short story, "The Damned Thing," concerns an invisible monster on the loose in the Old West, evidenced only by its effect on plants, animals -- and people:
"'What is it? What the devil is it?' I asked.
"'That Damned Thing!' he replied, without turning his head. His voice was husky and unnatural. He trembled visibly.
"I was about to speak further, when I observed the wild oats near the place of the disturbance moving in the most inexplicable way. I can hardly describe it. It seemed as if stirred by a streak of wind, which not only bent it, but pressed it down -- crushed it so that it did not rise; and this movement was slowly prolonging itself directly toward us." [3]
Possibly "The Damned Thing" was influenced by earlier invisible creature stories, such as de Maupassant's "The Horla" and Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It?", but, according to Paul Fatout's biography, Ambrose Bierce: the Devil's Lexicographer, it was based on an actual occurrence:
Another story pertinent to character was "The Damned Thing," published in the 1893 Christmas number of the New York Town Topics. Similar to Maupassant's "Le Horla," the tale is of a spectral presence, sensed but unseen: an emptiness that moves and terrifies. It was suggested, the author said, "by a rather disquieting personal experience while gunning":
"I am convinced that in daylight and on an open road I stood in the immediate presence of a wild beast invisible to me but sufficiently conspicuous to my dog, and sufficiently formidable to frighten it exceedingly." [4]
As if that weren't enough, something very much like the Damned Thing [even being referred to as such] seems to be on the loose in south-central Texas, according to Lone Star historian William Edward Syers' Ghost Stories of Texas (1981).
The Ottine Swamp flanks the San Marcos River southeast of Austin and encompasses Palmetto State Park. About 1980, Syers interviewed Berthold Jackson, an A&M graduate and woodsman, one of many hunters and fisherman who have encountered the "thing" in the swamp. "He had never read Ambrose Bierce's masterpiece, 'The Damned Thing'. . . Yet that is precisely what he described to me over early coffee on a fine spring morning."
One night Jackson was hunting with a friend, Johnny Boehm of Gonzales, Texas:
"Johnny was behind me, maybe fifty yards," Jackson said. "I could see his light, and he could see mine. The damned thing got right between us.
"We could see the brush move." He gestured the rippling movement of passage. "We could hear brush snap underfoot. But we couldn't see a thing except that brush moving. Not the thing itself. And that close, an animal's eyes would show like headlights."
"You've never actually seen it?" I asked.
"Just its movement. And I've put a big light on it; so have others, more than once. Nothing!"
Jackson named several others who had encountered the thing, from Luling and Gonzales, Texas. Two men, Billy Webb and Ab Ussery, running a trotline one night, saw an expanse of bloodweeds along the riverbank moving as if something large were passing through it, following them. "A big light, and they weren't twenty feet from the bank," but still they saw nothing.
The "Thing" seems to be attracted to vehicles parked on Lookout Hill, which lies near the entrance of Palmetto State Park. Two young men, Brewster Short and Wayne Hodges, readying themselves to go home from a hunting trip, claimed that something unseen reared up on the back of their car. They fled hastily, leaving their dogs (which had started howling) behind. This experience so disturbed Wayne that he moved into his parents' bedroom.
Lamar Ryan, Berthold Jackson's cousin, was parked one night on the hill with his fiancee, when something started shoving his pickup towards the edge of a steep drop-off. Lamar jumped out, but he could see nothing, despite the moonlight. He and his wife-to-be left hastily.
Jackson's son spoke to a couple who lived in a trailer house near the swamp. He was informed that something had once or twice shook the trailer "like a box," and that the couple had come home one day to find the wife's best dress, which had been on a clothesline, "torn in half, and each half rolled in a ball and stuck under each bed."
Berthold Jackson concluded: "I spent fifty-four months in World War II -- Saipan to Okinawa -- and the only time in my life that my hair has stood straight on end is when I've looked right at it and couldn't see a thing." [5]
Another story of a huge invisible entity was posted at alt.folklore.ghost-stories and later on GHOSTS.ORG by "Nina":
The Invisible Creature: "They had both heard something very large and heavy enough to shake the ground with its footsteps come up from a nearby ravine and walk around their house, trying to get in."
1. See, for instance, "Three Discoveries in Fortean Folklore" by Michael T. Shoemaker, in INFO Journal #66 (June, 1992), p. 22.
2. See Chapter Two of Fort's Wild Talents (1932).
3. Bierce, Ambrose, "The Damned Thing." In Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Dover, 1964), p. 35.
4. Fatout, Paul, Ambrose Bierce, the Devil's Lexicographer (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), pp. 202-203. The quote within the quote comes from the San Francisco Examiner, May 27, 1894.
5. All Ed Syers quotes come from "The Thing in Ottine Swamp," in Ghost Stories of Texas (Waco, Texas: Texian Press, 1981), pp. 22-25.