A Good Southern Mystery

A Good Southern Mystery

by Gary Wright

“Some poems don’t rhyme and some stories don’t have a clear ending.”

— Gilda Radner

Who doesn’t love a good mystery? Whenever we hear a good ghost story we tend to suspend our practical knowledge and want so hard to believe. We all do believe, to some degree, a well-spun story of strange lights in the sky, eerie disappearances of people and monsters appearing from the deep woods. Southerners are perhaps world experts in telling ghost stories — and believing them. We are also some of the world’s most susceptible in believing our own made-up stories. What true Southerner doesn’t remember sitting outside on a cool summer night, listening to grandpa telling us “chilluns” about a ghost that “hainted” someone. His stories seemed so real that we youngsters could not sleep with both eyes shut for weeks.

One such story involves a fellow named Orion Williamson, a Selma, Alabama farmer who, on a sunny and clear July day in 1854, simply vanished into thin air whilst walking across his own property. There have been many real disappearances, some involving mayhem and murder, runaway youngsters, and people who simply want to make a new life. The case of Orion Williamson, though, is especially bizarre in that he vanished while walking in full sight of his wife, son, and two neighbors. One minute he was there and the next, he just wasn’t.

Armour Wren and his son, James were riding in a horse-drawn buggy on a road adjacent to the field through which Orion was walking, while Mrs. Williamson and son were watching from the other side of the field. Orion simply disappeared in the blink of an eye in a blur of light blue smoke. All the witnesses realized something remarkable had occurred and immediately ran to the spot in the field where he disappeared. They began searching the ankle-deep grass but found nothing but a small burn circle.

Word quickly spread and dozens of townspeople arrived to search for the missing man. Combing the field and surrounding area for several days, they found nothing unusual except a bald spot in the grass where the man had disappeared. The bald spot seemed caused by a huge source of energy, as if some mysterious force had taken him away. Within days, a geologist and his team arrived to search for unusual formations or underground cavities. Nothing, however, was found which would shed light on the disappearance. Reporters swarmed to the scene in the ensuing days and widely reported the incident as “Man Vanishes into Thin Air!”

Ambrose Bierce, famous author and journalist of the time, was said to have become very interested in the case. He interviewed members of the search party and studied the grassy, treeless, field where Williamson had disappeared. Eventually, Bierce wrote a short story titled ‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,’ which chronicled the strange case of Mr. Williamson’s disappearance.

Whatever may be true and whomever you choose to believe, you must believe what happened later. Ambrose Bierce entered Mexico in 1913 at the age of 71 to cover the ongoing revolution led by Pancho Villa. Some say he went to fight on the side of Villa’s forces; others say he went to fight on the other side. There was secrecy, stealth, and unusual activities surrounding his Mexican adventure. He was a man of mystery and many think that he lent his own style of mystique to his quest. However it happened, he, too, mysteriously disappeared in the wilds of Mexico much as Williamson had. His last letter from Mexico to a friend stated, “. . . tomorrow I leave for an unknown destination.” Then, he too, vanished from the face of the earth.

Throughout his life, Bierce wrote about ghostly characters and eerie accounts of strange incidents. Some say that there was no trace of his own disappearance. However, the opposite is really true. There were at least a dozen reports of his death and some four reported grave sites. Reports of his death ranged from having been killed in battle by one side of the Mexican forces or the other, or, that he was shot as a spy. Others say that he fell into a ravine, he died in bed with a pretty senorita, or even that he was in ‘an affair of honor.’ There are even reports that he left Mexico and kept heading south. Whatever happened to him, he never returned to his home.

Did his untimely demise play out as one of his strange, intriguing tales? We are left to ponder in wonderment about Bierce’s strange disappearance which was so figuratively prophesied by Orion Williamson of Selma, Alabama some 59 years earlier. Bierce, like Williamson in the story he wrote about, simply vanished. To this day, no further clues have ever turned up as to precisely what happened to either Orion Williamson or Ambrose Bierce.

Field image licensed under CC By 4.0