Ambrose Bierce — Author of The Devil's Dictionary Vanishes Into Mexico at Age 71

In late 1913, Ambrose Bierce — the American journalist, short story writer, and satirist best known for The Devil's Dictionary and the Civil War story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge — traveled through the American Southwest documenting Civil War battlefields, then crossed into Mexico, then in the grip of revolution. In January 1914 he sent a letter from Chihuahua. He was never heard from again. Bierce was 71 years old and had been in declining health. He had spent his career writing with savage wit about death, war, and the supernatural — his stories frequently concerned soldiers disappearing into mysterious circumstances and characters encountering inexplicable fates. His own disappearance seemed almost preordained by his literary preoccupations. His final known letter, written from Chihuahua in December 1913, expressed his intention to travel with Pancho Villa's army. He wrote: "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." After that, silence. No body, no grave, no reliable witness account of his death has ever been produced. The theories about his fate are numerous: killed in a battle between Villa's forces and federal troops; captured and executed; dying of natural causes in the Mexican desert; suicide; or — according to a family legend — returning to his hometown of Meyers Grove, California under an assumed name. Bierce's disappearance has the quality of one of his own stories — a man who wrote about the strange and inexplicable meeting a strange and inexplicable end.