Ep. 43: Psi Friday with Mason: “The Mysterious Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce"

Dive into the strange life and mysterious disappearance of Ambrose Bierce with Mason on this week’s Psi-Friday. Civil War veteran, satirist, horror writer, and one of America’s darkest literary minds, Bierce vanished without a trace in Mexico in 1913…and nobody truly knows what happened to him. Was it murder, suicide, espionage, or something even stranger?

Plus, we tease our next episode exploring one of the weirdest places on Earth: The Zone of Silence.

#PsiFriday #MasonWinfield #AmbroseBierce #Paranormal #Mystery #ZoneOfSilence #HauntedHistory

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Cy Friday with Mason. And you know, I think for the next couple of weeks, I might be talking about some connections in Mexico, the zone of silence. But it occurs to me that maybe we should work our way in. Today I'm talking about an American author named Ambrose Bierce. Now, Ambrose Bierce, he was born in Meigs County, Ohio, which is way down at the southeast corner. He was born on the auspicious day of Midsummer's Day, June 24th, 1842, which made Ambrose Bierce ideal for fighting in the Civil War. He fought for the Union side during the American Civil War. He was in the Army for a long time, 1861 to 1866. He was at a couple of significant battles. Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain. He received at least one wound, which we would classify today as a traumatic brain injury. It doesn't seem to have affected his intelligence because Ambrose Bierce went on to be one of the most significant American authors of the second half of the 19th century. He may be most familiar to people either as the author of The Devil's Dictionary or as a gothic short story writer, including a story that was made into an episode on Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. It was called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. And Bierce was also a literary critic, said to have been acerbic, acid, bullseye wham. He was said to have been feared too. He didn't want to make him mad at you. And Ambrose Bierce, actually, he knew Albert Hubbard of Roycroft. And we're filming right now in the Roycroft Inn. And Ambrose Bierce and Albert Hubbard were contemporaries, their lives overlapped. Actually, they both may have passed away under strange circumstances separately in the magical year 1915. Maybe we'll talk about that someday. But for now, it is some of Ambrose Bierce's theories about holes in the universe, about vortexes, about gaps in time. And he may have disappeared at an advanced age in one of those places that's fabled for such disturbances today. So let's take Ambrose Bierce up to the age of 71 or 72. I mean, his dates are 1842 to question mark, 1914 question mark. I think the last time anybody knew he was alive was 1914. So Beerce was a journalist for the Hearst Newspaper Foundation. And Bierce was a relentless satirist. And he pissed off so many politicians that a lot of them were trying to get William Randolph Hearst to fire him, and Hearst would never do that. We're a newspaper. We're not supposed to get along with people, we're supposed to report the uncomfortable truth. So Bierce hits about the age of 70, and the Mexican Civil War is going on. And the rebel, Pancho Villa, nobody knows what to make of him. He has allies in the United States, he has opponents. And Ambrose Bierce, incidentally, who had a terrible track record in his family life. He had three children, two boys and a girl. All of them grew to adulthood. All of them died under traumatic circumstances. I believe the daughter died of some complication due to alcoholism, not a mature age, not an advanced age. And the two boys, I think one of them may have committed a murder, killed himself, and I think the other one committed suicide anyway. It's just a really unhappy story with Ambrose Bierce's family. And with his wife, he divorced her because he thought she was running around on him. She probably was. So it's not a happy life. And indeed, Ambrose Bierce's stories, I've read some of his horror fiction, as praised as they are by authors like uh Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft thought Bierce was a tremendous gothic writer, a more or less contemporary horror fiction writer, S. T. Joshi. Highly respected, considered Bierce to be a model. And I've read some of Bierce's horror fiction, gothic fiction, and I don't disavow his skill as a writer, but they're not joyful to read for me. They're they give you the creeps, but it's you feel like scratching, you know, you feel like you wish you hadn't read that. They're not the kind that, like love crafts will scare you from going into the basement, you know. Um, Edgar Allan Poe will get your dreams haunted. Bierce, I just found, would just creep me out. And I don't enjoy that. But at any rate, here's how Bierce disappeared from the world. Late in his life, he wanted to take a look at the Mexican Civil War. He led an expedition. This ex-military man, Ambrose Pierce, he would have been about as tough a 72-year-old as you're going to run into. He led an expedition of we don't know how many paramilitaries, bodyguards, you know, tough guys, armed to the teeth on this expedition into Mexico. And we know he met Pancho Villa, we know he traveled with him a bit, and somewhere near the Mexican village of Chihuahua, which I think might be a whole province, Bierce just vanishes. And it was said that he made it to an area in Quiapas Province called the Zone of Silence. And the Zone of Silence is a very mysterious region. We will talk about that. But shortly after Ambrose Bierce disappeared in Mexico, and he said he just wanted to um track down Pancho Villa, but we're not sure what he was after. And there's so much occult speculation about it that that alone gives us a bit of a buzz. And shortly after Bierce disappeared, the American general John Blackjack Pershing led a couple of divisions into Mexico on some kind of an expedition of his own. What was he looking for? He was romping all over Mexico. And there were maybe 15, a huge army on the border ready to reinforce him. I mean, there were enough American soldiers to take over Mexico that were ready to come in and bail Pershing out if he got into trouble. This was all transpiring around the time of Ambrose Bierce's disappearance. What the heck was going on down there? And uh we'll continue with a little more of this when we talk about the zone of silence next week. Until then, thanks so much for joining me on Cy Friday with Mason.