In the dark of night, one light still yet burns.

Frightened fingers tremble as brittle pages turn.

Fireside Mystery Theatre presents the Midnight Reading,

a summer series of dramatic recitations of dark masterpieces in miniature by the masters of the

macabre. Good evening. I'm Ali Silva. The brilliant but frequently ornery and a rassable man of

letters, Ambrose Bierce, mysteriously vanished sometime around 1914 at the age of 72.

To this day, no one has been able to solve the mystery of his disappearance.

He was reportedly last seen in Chihuahua, Mexico, covering the Mexican Revolution,

but even this has never been fully substantiated.

An eerily apropos ending for one of the all-time greatest

American masters of weird fiction. Beers, whose moniker was bitter Beers, had something of a fascination

with unexplained disappearances that surfaced in several of his short stories.

He wrote in a variety of styles, but is probably best remembered as an intrepid journalist and

savage literary critic. But that's not taking into account the impressive output of strange and

macabre tales in his oeuvre, the most famous of which is the oft-anthologized

occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. For tonight's midnight reading, we decided to travel down the

less-travelled path into Beers' dark imagination with his bizarre and brutal account of a mysterious house.

It is called a fruitless assignment.

Here to read this chilling tale for us is James Reeser.

Henry Saylor, who was killed in Cumberton in a quarrel with Antonio Finch, was a reporter on the Cincinnati commercial.

In the year 1859, a vacant dwelling in Vine Street in Cincinnati became the center of a local excitement because of the strange

sights and sounds said to be observed in it nightly.

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