As I write this, Halloween is approaching, and I’ve been getting enough Ideas that I might not even do that many movie reviews. Among other things, I had been planning an installment of my woefully intermittent features on short fiction, which in the process brought me to something on the Fortean vein. That provoked me enough to try filling out the lineup with another post in this feature. Last time, I covered the Mary Celeste, an actual unsolved historical mystery that just might come down to outright insurance fraud. This time, I’ll be talking about a case that was always fraud through and through. I speak of a horrifying tale that must have terrified countless impressionable kids, the disappearance of one Oliver Larch, whose real vanishing act was leaving no trace of his existence in the first place.
The tale, as I remember first reading it long, long ago, begins with a festive celebration by a family called the Larches at their farmhouse in South Bend, Indiana on Christmas Eve 1889. In the midst of the party, the young and instantly sympathetic Oliver, age 11, is sent out to fill a pail of water from their well, across a field covered in new-fallen snow. He leaves his popcorn behind (really, that’s repeatedly specified) to do his part for the family. Soon after, the family hears a commotion outside. They run out, to hear Oliver calling for help, and adding, “They’ve got me!” But his cries are fading, and they seem to come from overhead. Meanwhile, the family follows the trail of prints in the snow. At the end of it, perhaps halfway to the well, they find the bucket, but no trace of Oliver. And, invariably, it is affirmed that the police and other authorities investigated these facts and found them beyond dispute.
Except, of course, every remotely critical investigation found nothing of the kind. (See Kevin Randle's thorough, hilarious and pitiful rundown from 2008.) The South Bend police department stated only that they had not maintained or preserved records from the time of the incident. Newspapermen and other recordkeepers, evidently annoyed, reported no record of an individual named Oliver Larch or his family residing in the area at that or any other time, and openly opined that the tale of the disappearance was fantasy or fiction. On top of that, weather reports that were handed down recorded clear weather with little or no snow. But the smoking gun was that the tale was nearly identical to the plot of “Charles Ashmore’s Trail”, a work of fiction published by Ambrose Bierce in 1888. By the 1970s, after being repeated in such publications as Fate, the tale was repudiated in the Fortean community as either a legend or outright hoax. But was that the end of the story? I will be the first to say, yes, dammit, it was. Except, things still weren’t that simple.
And that’s where I come in, in the course of rereading Bierce’s work for what would have been another post altogether. In the midst of it, I remembered the strange saga of Oliver Larch and reread the tale that supposedly started all this. What struck me was that, for a story with such an enduring impact, it was conspicuously unimpressive. Bierce was a master of modern minimalist horror while Gothic purple prose was still riding high (I will name-drop “A Fruitless Assignment” as the peak of his form), yet one would not guess it from the yarn under consideration. Even allowing for its short length, it is awkward and oddly unengaging. What is all the more striking is that it lacks a number of dramatic details and sympathetic hooks of the received legend. Rather than a lovable lad, Charles Ashmore is just a guy of 16 who would have been considered virtually an adult in the Victorian era. Instead of Christmas eve, the night of his disappearance is simply an evening in November. In place of a dramatic disturbance, his family find his trail after merely noticing that he has not returned, and only later hear his voice in the course of their ordinary doings. Given these discrepancies, how certain can we be that this was the source of the tale of Oliver Larch?
In fact, we can guardedly give the lore a certain benefit of a doubt. It is already clear that the tale as received is more like a legend or “myth” than an outright hoax, though the more brazen “true” retellings certainly cross the line into the latter category. If it did originate from Bierce’s yarn at all, it certainly had to have evolved greatly before it reached the form known to us. It follows that Bierce himself might likewise have drawn from much older sources, and it is no stretch to allow that the underlying lore persisted independent of or at least in parallel with his influence. We may finally consider that the quite vivid tale of young Oliver is indeed the earlier and more authentic form of the tale.
It is at this point that we can consider certain oddly modern features of the story, which the folklorist will find more akin to “urban legends” than the folklore of the elder world. First, while a supernatural element is explicit, there is no endorsed or implied “explanation” that would root it in established religion or mythology. There is no invocation of devils, witches or fairies. For all intents and purposes, the abductors of Oliver Larch represent nothing more or less than the unseen and unknown. On a closely related note, there is no moralizing element. There is no suggestion of young Oliver being punished for any wrongdoing. Indeed, we might take his tale as a child’s jeering mockery of such adult-sanctioned lore, except that he is never set up as an obnoxious do-gooder either (compare/ contrast with Saki’s astonishing “The Story-Teller”). Finally, there are the effortlessly confident appeals to authority which leave no doubt of its truth, a distinctly recent preoccupation. On this vein, it is consistently recounted that no balloons were in the air, as if anticipating this as a viable explanation. To anyone actually knowledgeable about lighter-than-air aviation, of course, it would be obvious that a balloon used in the manner described (at night!) would simply crash in a trail of burning wreckage, as would any known aircraft prior to Sikorsky’s development of a practical (but still very, very loud…) helicopter in the aftermath of World War 2.
With this frame of reference, we can outline the most probable path of the tale’s development. It undoubtedly began somewhere in the morass of 19th-century oral tradition, if it did not somewhat predate the 1800s. It was then retold especially among children and teenagers, perhaps at some point to a still young Bierce. With or without his influence, the tale persisted into the 1890s and early 1900s, when we know it first began to circulate in print. From there, it was a small if delayed jump into early Fortean literature, where it was repeated with painful earnestness long after multiple debunkings.
So that brings us to the end of the trail. And you know something? I still like the story. It’s the Platonic archetype of a campfire tale, and it perfectly expresses the anxieties of young and old alike. There will always be things we don’t understand. There will also always be bad things happening to good people, sometimes not even outside your front door. If it takes a tale like this to teach that lesson to the young, then it would be a more than fair price. The only people who made it a problem were grownups who only remembered contrived terror for its own sake. For the rest, knowing the truth is only part of the balance of growing up. With that, I bring this short chapter to an end.
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