Never Read Ghost Stories Alone in Backwoods Cabins

Most of us can also recite details of at least one long, spooky night; probably inside a cabin with neither electricity nor running water.

Knowing all that, I shouldn’t have brought the book “Can Such Things Be?” for a recent three-night stay in Doug Duren’s cabin in southwestern Wisconsin’s wooded hills. The book’s author, Ambrose Bierce, was a gifted journalist and Civil War officer who mysteriously disappeared in 1913 at age 71 while covering the Mexican Revolution.

Bierce filled books with war stories, his most famous story being “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” He also spun great tales about ghosts, graveyards, and lone hunters.

During my first two nights in Duren’s cabin, I read “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” who died an old man at 32. Bierce explains: “One who practices sleeping in the woods with nothing under him but dry leaves and damp earth, and nothing over him but branches from which the leaves have fallen and the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for great longevity.”

In the story, two detectives find Frayser’s body within a foggy woods that had reclaimed a graveyard, identified only by depressions, rotting headboards, and discolored headstones. Frayser’s shotgun and gamebag lay nearby, with bird plumage visible through the bag’s mesh. Frayser’s hands and chest were white, but his throat and face were purple, almost black, marred by terrible cuts and bruises. Further, “(his) clothing was saturated; drops of water, condensed from the fog, studded the hair and mustache.”

Frayser had gone “gunning and dreaming” sometime earlier, only to be killed atop the grave of his widowed mother, Katy, though he didn’t know it was her beneath the headstone marked “Catharine Larue.” Halpin’s mother had remarried and moved away with a man he never knew, to a place he never learned. She had died mysteriously soon after, but Halpin didn’t know that, either.

The detectives didn’t solve either murder. As fog surrounded the gravesite, a distinct, terrible laugh sounded just beyond their vision, filling them with unspeakable dread. “They did not move their weapons nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was not of the kind to be met with arms. As it had grown out of silence, so it now died away.”

I set Bierce’s book aside those first two nights with few frets, and shut off my headlamp without further thoughts of Halpin Frayser. After all, I had to get up at 4 a.m. to help guide during Wisconsin’s weekend turkey season for kids 15 and younger.

But as I neared Duren’s cabin in the moonlit woods the third night, I passed a weeded-over yard where a long-abandoned farmhouse stood until recently. Duren sometimes repeats rumors about its long-dead occupants, but he falls as silent as midnight mist when nosy scribblers like me reach for a notepad.

“The public doesn’t need to hear all the farm stories,” Duren explains.

With those stories quelled, my imagination tried conjuring its own when I stepped onto the porch of Duren’s cabin. But those tales soon died too, wanting for local detail. Looking downhill through the woods, past Duren’s duck pond and beyond an unseen field and a deer stand dubbed “The Office,” I thought about sites like “The Big Woods” and “The Navel,” where Steve Rinella’s boy Jimmy shot a longbeard the day before.

Then I entered the darkened cabin, slipped into my headlamp and sleeping bag, and resumed reading Bierce’s ghost stories. The opening lines of “The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch” reminded me of other Duren landmarks like “The Junkyard” and “The Badger.” As Bierce explains, Macarger’s Gulch is where “no one but an occasional enterprising hunter of the vicinity ever goes; and five miles away it is unknown, even by name.”

Soon enough, Bierce’s story centered on a pitch-black night and a shack “containing one small room.” I was in such a cabin now, though the moon was full and bright. I was sitting in bed, looking ahead at a door and out a window. The story’s main character, a Mr. Elderson, described the scene:

“I detected myself staring more frequently at the open doorway and blank window than I could (justify). Outside those apertures all was black, and I was unable to repress a certain feeling of apprehension as my fancy pictured the outer world and filled it with unfriendly entities, natural and supernatural.”

And I agreed when Bierce wrote: “Everyone who has experience in the matter (knows) that one confronts the night’s actual and imaginary perils with far less apprehension in the open air than in a house with an open doorway.”

I rolled from my sleeping bag and latched the cabin’s screen door, feeling silly. What protection is a latch against phobias?

Likewise, Bierce’s Mr. Elderson pointed his shotgun toward the door until shame made him set it aside. He soon fell asleep and dreamed briefly of roaming distant streets until entering a room unnoticed, and seeing a husband and wife sitting apart, “unoccupied and sullen.” The wife had a “certain grave beauty,” and wore a plaid shawl over her shoulders. Her husband was older, dark, “with an evil face made more forbidding by a long scar extending from near the left temple diagonally downward into the black mustache.”

Mr. Elderson then awoke, his foolish fears gone. He lit and smoked his pipe, mulled his dream, and eventually knocked the dying ashes from his pipe, leaving the cabin deathly dark. Instantly, a heavy body hit the floor with a dull, dead sound. He bolted and groped for his shotgun as he heard blows land, feet scuffle, and a woman shriek in mortal agony. His eyes futilely tried “to pierce the darkness” as the violence ended, and he heard the “faint intermittent gasping of some living, dying thing!”

But after lighting a fire, Mr. Elderson saw only his own tracks on the cabin’s dusty floor. Nothing was out of place. He tended his fire till dawn because “not for added years of life would I have permitted the little flame to expire again.”

Years later, Mr. Elderson met a man who had once hunted the area near that abandoned cabin. In fact, this hunter had found a skeleton in Macarger’s Gulch the year before, and a local newspaper reported the details.

The old shack had blown away, its floor planks parted, and its roof and walls scattered debris. The hunter found a plaid shawl between two floor timbers, wrapped about the female skeleton’s shoulders. The skull was fractured in several places, apparently by a blood-stained pick handle lying beneath boards nearby.

All evidence pointed to her husband, but the man was never found nor heard of again, even though the hunter had found a photo of him. Mr. Elderson asked to see the photo, and convulsively spat his coffee when recognizing the evil image from his dream inside the old cabin. He knew that face with a “long scar extending from near the left temple diagonally downward into the black mustache.”

With that, I set the storybook aside, wondering why I hadn’t brought Mark Twain to Duren’s cabin instead of Ambrose Bierce. Still, I slept well and told everyone my tale the next morning.

And I’ll take Jimmy Rinella’s suggestion: I’ll buy Duren a copy of “Can Such Things Be?” I’ll then set it on his cabin’s bookshelf, and tug it out from the other books to subtly invite the next visitor to read it alone by headlamp.