Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there's nothing scarier than the patriarchy. When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we'll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
I do curse in this episode, as usual, and it mentions suicide, a dead body and hunting. Please be advised.
Speaking of hunting, I'm always on the prowl for those ratings and reviews. If you're enjoying the show so far, please leave Paranormal Pajama Party a five-star rating and review on your favourite podcast app.
“The Boarded Window”, by Ambrose Bierce.
In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest.
The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier – restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which today we should call indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced.
Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow upon the land which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of undisturbed possession.
There were evidences of "improvement" – a few acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the axe. Apparently, the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes.
The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its "chinking" of clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter, however, was boarded up nobody could remember a time when it was not. And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the occupant's dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living today who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.
The man's name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his aging. His hair and long, full beard were white, his grey, lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders – a burden bearer. I never saw him; these particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got the man's story when I was a lad. He had known him when living nearby in that early day.
One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence.
That closes the final chapter of this true story excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot.
But there is an earlier chapter – that supplied by my grandfather.
When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his axe to hew out a farm – the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support – he was young, strong and full of hope.
In that eastern country whence he came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart.
There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit to a lot like that?
One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was no physician within miles, no neighbour; nor was she in a condition to be left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness and so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.
From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather.
When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar natural laws.
He was surprised, too, that he did not weep – surprised and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead.
“Tomorrow,” he said aloud, “I shall have to make the coffin and dig the grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but now – she is dead, of course, but it is all right – it must be all right, somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem.”
He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness ran an undersense of conviction that all was right – that he should have her again as before, and everything explained.
He had had no experience in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know he was so hard struck; that knowledge would come later, and never go.
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.
We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon the table's edge, and dropped his face into them, tearless yet and unutterably weary.
[MYSTERIOUS SHRIEKING NOISE]
Steph: At that moment came in through the open window a long, wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the darkening wood! But the man did not move.
[A LOUDER AND POSSIBLY EVEN MORE MYSTERIOUS SHRIEKING NOISE]
Steph: Again, and nearer than before, sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild beast; perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep.
Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher awoke and lifting his head from his arms intently listened – he knew not why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all without a shock, he strained his eyes to see – he knew not what. His senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood had stilled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who – what had waked him, and where was it?
Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step – another – sounds as of bare feet upon the floor!
He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he waited – waited there in the darkness through seeming centuries of such dread as one may know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the dead woman's name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands were like lead.
Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same instant he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact.
A scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe. Murlock had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there!
There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little groping seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth fixed in her throat!
Then there was darkness blacker than before, and silence; and when he returned to consciousness the sun was high and the wood vocal with songs of birds.
[BIRDS CHIRPING IN THE BACKGROUND]
The body lay near the window, where the beast had left it when frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The clothing was deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow. From the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was broken; the hands were tightly clenched.
Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal's ear.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi! I'm Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together will brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Slide into your bunny slippers because tonight we're getting a little too cosy with the animal kingdom. We're talking about that stunner of a short story. Ambrose Bierce's “The Boarded Window.”
I think it's one we can really… sink our teeth into. Sorry.
This is actually the short story that made me want to start this podcast.
Despite it being one of the most anthology short stories of all time because of that amazing twist ending, I hadn't read this one until recently. I remember being assigned Bierce's “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in 10th grade, and then we had to watch a movie version of it. And it was kind of “...eh”, I think, but everything is kind of “eh” when you're 15, so like, what did I know?
Anyway, I've sort of avoided Bierce since then. I think I kind of knew that he'd written something called The Devil's Dictionary and then mysteriously disappeared, which always struck me as pleasantly spooky, but I didn't look into it any further than that at the time.
This one blew my mind when I read it a couple months back. So much so that I paraphrased it to my partner while he was cooking dinner one night, and I scared the bejesus out of him with it.
It left me reeling, honestly. So instead of going straight to the next story in the collection I was reading, I hopped on to Reddit to see if anyone in the horror literature subreddit had said anything about it. (It's a cool subreddit, by the way. I very much recommend it.) For a story that's been republished a squillion times since its original publication in 1891, I didn't find a lot of chatter online. But a few pages into Google's results, I did find a little blurb that blew my mind again, but this time, like, not in a good way.
Encyclopedia.com’s entry on the story says, “The story deals with a turning point in a man's life, one which has the ability to completely change his future.”
I'm sorry. A turning point in a man's life? A story about his future?
I'm pretty sure this is a story about the day a woman realised she'd married a screw-up because thanks to her shitty husbands bumbling, it was the day she had to fight a death match with a mountain lion, with her hands literally tied.
This is not a story about a man's future. There is a man in it, incidentally. He might even be the villain, actually. But this is a story about a woman and about a woman's death. Worst of all, she doesn't even have a name.
I think I'm in a fight with Encyclopedia.com now. Consider this my strongly worded letter.
So before we talk about the story, which I maintain is not actually about a man, let's talk about… a man.
Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 and was an extremely prolific short story writer, journalist and American Civil War veteran. (He fought for the North – we were all wondering.)
He's influenced writers from Ernest Hemingway to Kurt Vonnegut, and he's considered a forerunner of the horror genre. H.P. Lovecraft even called him “grim and savage”. When the creepy, racist creator of Cthulhu calls you grim and savage, it says something about you.
And I think the thing that it says about Ambrose Bierce is that he was kind of an asshole. He loved being one, too. Loved it. He contributed to or edited a bunch of newspapers and magazines in San Francisco in particular, and had a pretty sassy, regular column.
And by pretty sassy, I mean, some people felt he took his biting satire shtick a little bit too far when he wrote a cute poem about President William McKinley being shot by an assassin. And then President William McKinley was shot by an assassin.
But presidents weren't his only target. One of my sources says, “He had created merriment by shooting dogs. He would, but for an ordinance have shot all dog lovers. He told off-colour stories about the dead and, as a matter of journalistic integrity, advocated violence towards well-enough-meaning anti-evolutionists, feminists, socialists, regionalists, sports fans, fat babies and democracy.”
What a guy. You may have caught feminists in that list. Yeah. Ambrose was not what I would call an ally, and I'd say he was definitely actively contributing to misogyny with some of the entries about women and marriage in his famous work, The Devil's Dictionary.
Disappointingly, The Devil's Dictionary is not a reference book for demons. It's just a collection of satirical definitions of various words. I'm sure it was really funny at the time. I'm sure parts of it still are, but other parts of it read like really bad bumper stickers or like dad jokes in Hallmark cards.
Here's the entry for “woman”, for example: “Woman, noun. An animal usually living in the vicinity of man and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by many of the elder zoölogists with a certain vestigial docility acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion, deny the virtue and declare that such as creation's dawn beheld, it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greenland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular name (wolf-man) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movements, especially the American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not to talk.”
Ha ha ha, I guess.
Ambrose Bierce did go out on an interesting note. In late 1913, when he was 71, he told some fellow journalists that he was going to go fight in the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa, and he was never seen again.
It's one of the most interesting disappearances in literature history, I will give him that. But it seems more likely that the Pancho Villa story was a cover-up for his true intention, which was to commit suicide in the Grand Canyon. Whatever happened, he completely disappeared.
We'll leave Ambrose behind with one more entry from The Devil's Dictionary: “Male, noun. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.”
So now let's turn our attention to the bad provider in this story – the world's worst husband, Murlock the Hermit. “Murlock the Hermit” is the name of my next band, I call it!
In the 19th century, when Bierce was doing his thing, Western culture had a very specific fear that seems kind of quaint now that we have more stuff to worry about, like nanobots and AI and Elon Musk.
People at the time were really, really afraid of being buried alive. I mean, I get it. I'm claustrophobic myself. I'm not saying it would be a good time. I'm just saying that for me personally, as a woman alive today, my fear spectrum ranges from like, a spider where I wasn't expecting it, to the current US Supreme Court. And being buried alive is much closer to the “surprise spider” side of the scale.
But the horror writers of the day, especially sad, drunk Edgar Allan Poe, took full advantage of this fear and wrote a bunch of spooky stories about premature burials. It's a safe bet that Ambrose Bierce was doing the same thing in this story. So it's probably important to remember that for contemporary readers, the twist at the end showing that Murlock's wife was alive the whole time would have been really spooky.
But the other cultural contextual element I think is interesting about this story is its take on pioneers.
Ambrose Bierce was actually born in a log cabin in the same part of Ohio where this story is set. His parents had 13 children and all of their names started with the letter A, like some kind of freaky proto-Duggar family. I don't know what happened to Ambrose and his 12 siblings in that log cabin, but he does not seem to have been very impressed by the pioneer lifestyle.
He says right at the beginning of the story, sort of humorously, that pioneers are people who show up, work really hard to make themselves barely comfortable, and then move along and do it all over again. Sort of like having wanderlust, but longing for drowning oxen and dysentery. I will admit that almost all of my knowledge of pioneering comes from Oregon Trail. There was probably a lot of other stuff going on, but I think it was mostly drowned oxen and dysentery.
In the case of Murlock's wife – god, I hate that I have to call her “Murlock's wife” this whole time. I hate that she doesn't have a name and that she's completely defined by this relationship with a man, and not even a very good man!
Anyway, Murlock's wife’s situation got me thinking a lot about being a pioneer wife. It's not like it is now where you publish cookbooks and have a popular lifestyle blog. We're talking about a time when women didn't have much if any autonomy when it came to major decisions for their own families, decisions like packing up all the kids in a wagon and joining a party with one doctor and no money for wheat. Time to hunt venison! …Oregon Trail.
In the story, we don't know anything about Mrs Murlock. Forget about her name, we don't know what country she's from, whether she wanted to be a pioneer, whether she even liked Murlock himself.
The narrator guesses that she went cheerfully along with Murlock’s ideas, and that she must have been nice. Because otherwise, why would her husband have missed her? It couldn't have been for her personality or her mind or anything!
But if you read carefully, these parts are where the narrator of the story is sort of filling in unknown details. Murlock's wife is a mystery to us. We don't know if she was enthusiastically along for the ride, if she thought her husband's ideas were total crap, if she was scared of the woods or panthers or of being buried alive. She's a completely blank canvas here.
I'm not criticising it as a writing choice, really. The story is short and sharp, and I think it's better for it. But I do think it's interesting to look at how her character is treated. The male writer has left her a blank. The male protagonist hasn't bothered to memorialise her in any way, except maybe by boarding that window up. And I'd be willing to bet that a lot of readers, even now, don't give Mrs Murlock any more thought than what's provided in the story.
We're used to that in our media consumption. The bar of female representation in stories and movies is so low that when two named women talk to each other about anything besides a man, even for one sentence, it's so notable that it has a name: that's the Bechdel Test.
According to one academic and biographer, Ambrose Bierce held his wife and daughter to a higher moral standard than his sons – one of whom, by the way, killed himself after nonfatally shooting a girl for rejecting him.
Bierce, quote, “questioned the morals of actresses allied feminism with immorality and suspected any woman who attracted public notice. He was even unwilling to allow a woman to use her mind. Goodness meant nothing less than artless perfection, never blown upon by a breath of detraction. His good woman, innocent, modest, secluded and ornamental, perched on a pillar that might be toppled by a whisper.”
Even so, I think we get some hints about Mrs Murlock as a person, and I'm not sure she would have been the kind of gal Ambrose thought was “good”.
There are two things we know for sure about Mrs Murlock: We know she's tough – she can hack it in the wilderness without her husband for long stretches because he leaves to go on hunting trips without her for at least a few days at a time. We also know she's tough, and I can't emphasise this enough, because she held her own pretty well in a death match against a mountain lion.
We also know she has a really, really shitty husband.
“The Boarded Window” has some really poignant things to say about grief that are just as true in 2024 as they were in 1891. I'm not faulting Morlock for having trouble understanding the complexities of his emotions over the loss of his wife, especially because I don't think old-timey pioneers probably got a lot of encouragement to examine, or even feel their feelings – and that's probably especially true of male old-timey pioneers.
But this man. In this very short story, he fails his wife not once, by not realizing that she's not actually dead yet. Not twice, by standing around uselessly while a panther drags her off a table. By my count, he fails her 10 times!
Fail one: He comes home, where she's been left all alone, and finds her sick. Presumably a hunter – although, as we see later, he's not a very good one – he's clearly left the domestic side of things entirely to his wife, because he's not able to nurse her back to health.
He's also made the decision to move his little family so far out into the woods that they don't have anyone to go to for help. Eventually, she apparently dies.
Fail two: Except she didn't die, did she? Murlock, who has apparently received no medical training ahead of isolating his family in the wilderness, doesn't check for a pulse, doesn't hold something under her nose to see if she's breathing. He doesn't even realise, as a hunter who presumably handles dead things all the time, that her body's not getting colder.
Fail three: It's especially bonkers that he doesn't notice this because the story spends a long time talking about the steps he takes and re-takes to prepare her for burial. And he doesn't even do that right, and can't believe that he's not a natural at it. Presumably, because his poor wife covered up for his incompetencies until now.
Fail four: I had to look this up to make the ribbon thing make sense later, but I think he would have tied her wrists together to make her body easier to move, and maybe wrapped some fabric around her jaw to keep it shut. This doesn't become a fail until later when it turns out he's handicapped her when she most needs her hands, teeth, and voice.
Fail five: He neglects to listen to his intuition. Maybe it’s grief, maybe not. But the whole time he's thinking about how life just has to go on as normal… because nothing's really changed. He can't wrap his brain around her being dead because his gut is telling him that she doesn't seem dead – because she isn't dead!
Fail six: He falls asleep on the watch. I am a champion sleeper. I can do it anytime, anywhere, sometimes whether I want to or not. So at first, I was going to cut him some slack here, because sometimes you just… you can't help it.
But it sort of seems to me like the least he could do is sit up with the remains of his wife and companion in hardship. But no, not this guy. He has had a hard day. He had a really big, hard day. Not “prematurely prepared for burial and then forced into a death match with a cougar” hard, but it was hard, I guess.
Fail seven: Murlock and his wife live in the middle of untamed forest, away from all other humans, in a one-room cabin with what is evidently a wide-open window in the back.
When he wakes up and hears the thump and what sounds like footsteps, he immediately suspects that of all the things that could be in the world, he's hearing his wife back from the dead.
That would be scary as hell, I admit. But it still feels like a kind of betrayal to me that his first feelings when he thinks that his wife might be back aren't like, “Oh, good, she's back. I'm happy again!” They’re feelings of dread. He villainizes her.
Fail eight: This is the point of the story where Murlock could have been a hero. The only thing he can do, which the narrator’s told us several times, is hunt. He ensures their survival while he tries to settle the land by hunting.
But when it comes down to it, when his skill would be the most valuable, when he would save the life of the person he's let down, endangered and hobbled, he fails again. He doesn't think, he doesn't aim, he just shoots. And all he accomplishes in that moment is setting himself up for…
Fail nine: At the end of the story, we realise retrospectively that there is one final moment of hope for Mrs Murlock, and her husband fell short once again. He faints and he's out for so long that by the time he wakes up, she is long dead – and for real, this time. It wasn't the illness that got her, however. She bled to death on the floor while he was out cold.
And finally, the disappointment that makes me the angriest. Fail 10: After all of this, and perhaps because he's stuck in his own mind, realising all the horrific, tragic ways he's let her down, Murlock fails her one more time. He neglects to memorialise her in any way. He doesn't tell her story. He doesn't mark her grave with a name. He doesn't do anything with his life in her memory – unless, as the narrator seems to think, his hermitage is penance for his sins.
But it seems to me that he just gives up. The most he can do is board up the window where death came in and wallow in his own incompetencies until it comes for him, too.
Maybe I am being harsh here. He's… He's riled me up. I can't help it. I just… I also can't help but feel that Encyclopedia.com got it so, so wrong.
Sure, Murlock has a hero's journey here. He leaves life as he knew it behind, tries to refuse the call to adventure, approaches the inmost cave of his own grief, goes through a harrowing final ordeal, the whole works.
But the way Bierce writes it, he's sort of sidelined in his own story. Honestly, if you saw the Barbie movie, I think Murlock is kind of “just Ken”.
Maybe that's because this isn't his story. There's another, sneakier hero's journey going on in the background of this story, and I think it's the more compelling one.
Mrs Murlock gets married and whisked away from her home country into adventure in the wilderness. There she's tested. She makes an enemy in her own husband, whether she knows it or not. She gets horrifically sick and crosses the threshold into the underworld. And then off-screen, she fights a tremendous, horrible battle that ends in her death. She isn't victorious at the end, but she is the hero.
Woof. I didn't even get to the part about cats, femininity, and how when a cougar and a bobcat have a baby, that kitten is called – and this is not a joke, people – a bougar. A bougar! Amazing!
I think we'll have to save that for a future episode because, alas, it's time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party.
To learn more about Ambrose Bierce; taphophobia, which is the fear of being buried alive, of course; and to read “The Boarded Window” on your own, check out the sources linked in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today's episode. If I can find a picture of one, I will absolutely include a fluffy little baby bougar in there. ...Let me enunciate that a little more clearly: A fluffy bougar, Not a fluffy booger.
I'll see you next week for more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don't forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
