An Inhabitant of Carcosa
by Ambrose Bierce
The ghost of a man from the ancient, fictional city of Carcosa
seems destined to wander the city’s ruins, meeting wildlife and perhaps one even older
ghost. Although we detected no definitive time phenomena, the time frame of the story is
nebulous and intriguing, and the city’s mythos provided a fertile ground for
20th-century writers including Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, and George R.
R. Martin.
— Michael Main
In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet
the body was in vigour for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with
the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did
decay.
“An Inhabitant of Carcosa” by Ambrose Bierce, in the
San Francisco Newsletter and California Advertiser, 25 December 1886.