The Boarded Window

America’s long and celebrated tradition of horror writing got fully under way early in the 19th century with the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. His tales of mystery and terror captivated large audiences. One of his most chilling stories, “The Premature Burial,” describes the precise sensations of being buried alive.

Ambrose Bierce’s “The Boarded Window,” first published in 1891, also addresses the terrifying possibility of being given up for dead while still alive. Bierce, though, approaches this ideal from a different angle: a loved one fails to guard a body believed dead until fate enlists a grim reaper in the form of a predator to finish it off.

A journalist and writer of fiction, Bierce was an officer in the Union Army during the US Civil War; he fought in at least 20 battles and witnessed enough carnage to overwhelm any soldier. During his late 40s, Bierce suddenly became a font of storytelling, publishing volume after volume of shorts. By the time of his death, he had written nearly 1,400 stories.

His writing pulls few punches, brutally describing wartime calamities. His cynical attitude toward the so-called glories of battle darkens the moral viewpoints of his stories. In Bierce’s world, the horror of human conflict is unrelieved by some higher purpose; humans die largely without honor, their lives wasted in futile causes. He’s best known for The Devil’s Dictionary, a work of comic satire that redefines common words in cynical ways. For example, “ADMIRATION” becomes “Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves,” “FRIENDSHIP” is “A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul,” and “SELFISH” means “Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.”

After its initial printing in the San Francisco Examiner, Bierce included “The Boarded Window” in his most famous story collection, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Half of the book is war stories and half horror-inflected tales of ghosts, death by fright, and, of course, death by panther.

Tales of Soldiers and Civilians also contains Bierce’s most famous short story, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In it, a Southern Rebel, about to be hung by Union soldiers, seemingly makes a miraculous escape, making it all the way home to his wife. However, the ending reveals that this escape was not real—something the man imagines on the gallows, dropping to his death. “Occurrence” was adapted for TV’s weekly horror series The Twilight Zone. It also inspired Tobias Wolff’s 1995 short story “Bullet in the Brain,” in which a man shot during a bank robbery vividly remembers a perfect moment from his past, possibly reliving it forever. (A study guide for “Bullet in the Brain” is available at supersummary.com: https://www.supersummary.com/bullet-in-the-brain/summary/).

At 1,800 words, “The Boarded Window” is less than five pages long. Bierce sets up an eerie mystery, resolving his tale of illness and tragedy with a shocking outcome. “The Boarded Window” contains many of the now-standard tropes of horror writing: a lonely, decrepit cabin deep in the forest, a haunted old man with a shrouded past, an eerie scream, a shot ringing out, a beast in a darkened room, and blood on the floor. Even Murlock’s name invokes doom: The first syllable is part of the word “murder,” and the second syllable portends a fateful trap.

One of Bierce’s trademarks is the surprise ending, and “The Boarded Window” offers a classic: Murlock’s dead wife somehow fought the panther. The sounds Murlock hears in the pitch-black room suggest either that that the panther bumps the table while investigating Murlock’s wife and then pulls her body to the floor, or that his wife rises from the table—a recovered invalid protecting her husband or a reanimated corpse making its last stand—and does battle with the panther.

The story’s titular boarded window is a haunting symbol in the story. It is a physical reminder of Murlock’s failure to protect his wife, evidence of the casual cruelty of nature, and a warning that humans can do little against death. Bierce never shows Murlock boarding up the window, so readers infer that Murlock leaves the fatal gap in the wall only partially fixed as a memorial to his wife’s violent killing. The window connects the familial space of the cabin, originally filled with a couple’s youthful hopes and dreams, with the impersonal forces of nature outside: illness, wild animals, and other dangers beset these would-be pioneers.

After his wife’s grisly end, Murlock spends the rest of his days wracked with guilt. In his first bout of grief, convinced that his wife is dead, Murlock upbraids himself for not fully descending into mourning. He feels guilty that he does not cry for her or have another emotional response to his loss. However, he is clearly psychologically affected by what has happened—his reaction is to disregard danger even when it seems to pose an immediate threat to his person. He doesn’t respond to the forest cry or the panther attack with a normal fight-or-flight emergency response. Instead, each time, he falls asleep. He is simply not concerned for his wellbeing.

Of course, the irony is that Murlock’s oppressive, consciousness-defying reaction to his wife’s ostensible death causes her actual demise. Had he remained awake, especially after the panther runs off, he might have had a slim chance to dress his wife’s slashed neck and save her. Living with this knowledge puts him into a permanent state of penance: He lives simply, carelessly, all ambition extinguished, waiting for his own death.

The ending of the story strikes an ambiguous note. For Murlock, what happened is pure horror—two forces of nature appeared without warning, killed his beloved, destroyed his hopes, and did so in a way that never quite makes sense. But readers can choose how to understand what happened to Murlock’s wife: Did he indeed fail her, thus making the story a tragedy—or did she reanimate from the beyond to protect her deeply depressed husband in a moment of crisis?