The Spook House

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The Spook House

"The Spook House" is a Gothic short story of a haunted house written by Ambrose Bierce. It was first published in The San Francisco Examiner on July 7, 1889.^[1]

According to H. P. Lovecraft, the story is "told with a severely homely air of journalistic verisimilitude", yet "conveys terrible hints of shocking mystery".^[2]

Plot

In 1858 an entire family of seven persons disappears suddenly and unaccountably from a plantation house in eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions untouched — furniture, clothing, food supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves.

About a year later two men of high standing are forced by a storm to take shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble into a supernatural room lit by an unaccountable greenish light and having an iron door which cannot be opened from within. In this room lie the decayed corpses of all the missing family; and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace a body he seems to recognise, the other is so overpowered by a putrid odor that he accidentally shuts his companion in the vault and loses consciousness.

Recovering his senses six weeks later, the survivor is unable to find the hidden room; and the house is burned during the Civil War. The imprisoned discoverer is never seen or heard of again.^[3]

References

↑ http://www.ambrosebierce.org/house.htm
↑ s:Supernatural Horror in Literature/The Weird Tradition in America
↑ This summary is taken from H. P. Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927).

Works by Ambrose Bierce

Books	Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) The Devil's Dictionary (1906) A Vision of Doom (1980)

Short stories	"A Psychological Shipwreck" (1879) "Killed at Resaca" (1887) "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1887) "One of the Missing" (1888) "A Tough Tussle" (1888) "An Unfinished Race" (1888) "One of Twins" (1888) "A Horseman in the Sky" (1889) "The Spook House" (1889) "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" (1890) "The Man and the Snake" (1890) "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) "The Realm of the Unreal" (1890) "The Boarded Window" (1891) "The Secret of Macarger's Gulch" (1891) "The Death of Halpin Frayser" (1891) "The Damned Thing" (1893) "The Eyes of the Panther" (1897) "Moxon's Master" (1899) "The Moonlit Road" (1907) "Beyond the Wall" (1907)

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