Use of Tropes: The Death of Halpin Frayser

Born in 1842, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce is widely accepted as an important and influential author within American Literature – a critic, who wrote fiction in a variety of genres, he is perhaps best known for the Devil’s Dictionary. I’ll come back to the author, and his place in contemporary vampire media, at the end of this article but for now will concentrate on his short story The Death of Halpin Frayser.

I came across The Death of Halpin Frayser in Vampire Tales: the Big Collection and the 1891 story’s inclusion might confuse as it is not directly obvious that it is a vampire tale (though it certainly a tale of the supernatural). However, it does play with some tropes from the genre (from the underpinning folklore) and I think it well deserves its place in that volume.

The story itself is complex as its chapters jump between chronological times and also a dreamlike state (or perhaps a haunted state) and stark reality. Chapter 1 opens with a short discourse on the return of the dead and whilst mentioning spirits that return, suggests “yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath walked.” Ascribing this description to Hali, Bierce names these as lich and suggests that even someone benign in life might become malign in death. It then describes the titular character Halpin Frayser, a 32-year-old who was sleeping in the forest – a dreamless sleep, from which he wakes and says a name, Catherine Larue (a name unknown to him), before falling back to sleep and into a dream.

This dream, which some have said is inspired by Poe’s Ulalume (1847), is more nightmare than dream. He follows a road, though he senses its evil nature, into a forest and the description is majestically macabre:

“A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere.The weeds growing rankly by the roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big, broad leaves. Patches of dry dust between the wheelways were pitted and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their foliage.”

He feels as though he is perhaps guilty of something but cannot ascribe that feeling to an event and eventually dips a twig into the blood and starts writing in a notebook (we see his poem later) but stops midsentence as “he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!”

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

The next chapter goes back in time and we discover about Halpin’s childhood in the South – an unusual child he was perhaps neglected by his father (as he was dreamy and a poet, albeit a poor one). His mother, however, doted on him. As he matured it seemed that they grew closer, he calling her Katy rather than mother, and, indeed, Bierce suggests incest as he intimates “The two were nearly inseparable, and by strangers observing their manner were not infrequently mistaken for lovers.” Of course, this opens a trope for us as incest, in some sources, is a sure-fire path to vampirism. Be that as it may, Halpin undertakes to travel to California, prompting Katy to tell him of a dream that she believes portents his murder by strangulation. She, at first, suggests going to California as well, but eventually stays out of duty to her husband whilst Halpin leaves. Unfortunately Halpin, whilst in California, is shanghaied and then shipwrecked on an island for six years.

Chapter three returns to Halpin’s nightmare, the forest and the restless body of his mother. She grabs him by the throat and strangles him – much as the portent suggested would happen to him – and in his dream he dies. Of course, a vampire, in folklore, was as likely to strangle you as to suck your blood.

Chapter 4 switches perspective and we meet a Deputy of the Napa area, Holker, and a detective from San Francisco called Jaralson – who is hunting a murderer named Branscom. The murderer cut the throat of his wife who, in turn, is buried in Napa. Jaralson believes that Branscom returns to the grave of his wife. Branscome was not the murderer’s real name and the wife was a widow who travelled to California to find a relative. On the grave, however, they find the strangled Halpin and a notebook that contains a partial poem – the stanza’s are very simplistic compared to Ulalume, the stanza’s constructed as quatrains with dual rhyming couplets. However, the content reminds one (with the earlier prose description of the dream) of Poe’s verse, which was about a lover unconsciously finding the grave of his love – strengthening the incest theme in Bierce. Poe’s poem describes a “ghoul-haunted” woodland.

Jaralson remembers that Branscome’s real name was Larue and his wife’s previous name was Frayser – making her Catherine (Katy) Larue. The detectives put Halpin’s murder down to Branscome but hear a “a low, deliberate, soulless laugh… …a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable!” The obvious answer is that the lich, or revenant, of Katy Frayser/Catherine Larue has killed her son, as the portent warned, with him stumbling upon her grave by happenstance. Joshi, in The Weird Tale (pp161-162), suggests that in the unseen scenes Katy, widowed, travelled to San Francisco, found Halpin who married her under an assumed name and subsequently murdered her. Whichever version you subscribe to, the restless nature of her corpse should not be in question. She is considered by some to be a zombie, or a precursor thereof (see Pulliam & Fonseca’s Encylcopedia of the Zombie) but, to me, the blood motif (albeit the motif is around the blood soaked forest, which might represent Halpin’s unremembered crime, if you subscribe to Joshi’s theory), the incest and the strangulations are certainly tropes from the vampire genre.

Getting back to Bierce, his death is shrouded in mystery as he travelled, in 1913, to Mexico to observe the Mexican Revolution and vanished – rumoured whilst travelling with rebel troops. This was used as a backstory that saw him face vampires, and indeed become one, in From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter.

You can read the story in the following collection:

On Kindle @ Amazon US

On Kindle @ Amazon UK