First published in 1898, 'The Damned Thing' is Ambrose Bierce's masterwork of unseen terror: a coroner's inquest in a remote California mountain cabin, a dead hunter, torn diary pages, and a thing no human eye can perceive. Is Hugh Morgan mad, or has he stumbled onto a truth about the limits of our senses that the living cannot afford to believe? This edition reproduces Bierce's complete, unabridged original text exactly as it appeared in his collection 'In the Midst of Life,' preserved in the public domain. A new introduction sets the story in the context of Bierce's Civil War-haunted fiction and the scientific currents of his age, while reader's notes illuminate the references and craft behind this foundational tale of cosmic horror—fiction whose influence runs plainly through H. P. Lovecraft and beyond. Part of The Founding Texts Library.