Author: James Brush

I first read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce (the full story is online – just follow the link) a few years ago while searching for a short story to teach on a Friday during summer school. Recently, it showed up on the Lost episode “The Long Con” as one of the books that John Locke is seen organizing in the hatch.

“Owl Creek” tells the tale of the Confederate saboteur Peyton Farquhar’s execution by Union soldiers during the US Civil War. The story begins with Farquhar about to be hanged from the Owl Creek Bridge. He is pushed over the bridge, but the rope breaks and he falls into the river, where he dodges bullets and swims to safety.

He makes his way through a forest that grows increasingly primeval and sinister the closer he gets to home. As he reaches his house, he feels a terrible pain in the back of his neck, the rope breaks, and Farquhar hangs dead from Owl Creek Bridge, the entire story of his escape a flight of imagination occurring in the space between falling from the bridge and the rope snapping his neck.

Great story, beautifully imagined and written, but why is it referenced in Lost?

It seems to me that “Owl Creek Bridge” is something of a suggestion to the viewer that perhaps the survivors of Oceanic 815 are not really survivors, but are experiencing the final moments just before their deaths. This theory has been discredited by the show’s writers, but apparently The Third Policeman (another Lost book, which I’ve not yet read) also suggests this interpretation.

One thing that stood out in rereading “Owl Creek Bridge” was this description of the forest as Farquhar runs from the Yankee troops:

The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which–once, twice, and again–he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.

Anyone addicted to Lost will certainly be intrigued by this passage particularly the reference to mysterious voices in the woods, which often occur on the show just before strange things happen. There is also the hint of a suggestion that Farquhar has entered another world, perhaps some kind of parallel dimension existing just on the edge of death.

I don’t think the survivors of Oceanic 815 are in their final seconds of life; I think that’s a bit too easy, but I do wonder if they are in some kind of alternate or psychically created world, or at least one in which psychic manipulation occurs.

If you haven’t read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” check it out because it really is a great story. Also read Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Secret Miracle,” a similar story, though one that hasn’t (yet) shown up on Lost.

For more of my Lost book posts, check out The Lost Book Club.

Good, as in God, the style of Henry, or if I might call him so, Mr. James, author of The Turn of the Screw, who in the late nineteenth century wrote the thin ghost story, is torturous, as a stretching on the rack. One might imagine, if so inclined as to imagine such a horror, a horror beyond compare, the voice of Shatner, William Shatner reading each phrase, set off with a preponderance of punctuation in the form of commas, commas that precede every unnecessary phrase, like a water torture of Chinese design and implementation, dripping prose into one’s mind in an effort to present a story, a tale, of ghosts and other mysteries.

Woof. It’ll drive you nuts but perhaps that’s the point.

An unnamed narrator has been appointed to take care of two young children at an English country estate called Bly. The owner, a gentleman in London, has inherited the children and wants nothing to do with them so he hires a governess who promptly falls in love with the beautiful, innocent, angelic children.

Then she starts seeing ghosts. The apparitions are the former governess and her lover both of whom died under mysterious circumstances. No one else sees them, but it’s clear the children, Miles and Flora, are somehow involved.

At times I wondered if the narrator was seeing things that weren’t there, which caused me to question her sanity, but her spot on descriptions of the former servants whom she never met, led to me suspect that the ghosts were real.

The spirits seem to be engaged in some kind of communion with the kids, but it is unclear (intentionally so, I think) whether they are controlling the children or if the children are summoning them.

Applying this to Lost, the most obvious parallel becomes the story of Michael and his young son, Walt. When Walt’s mother dies and his step-father wants nothing more to do with him (apparently because Walt seems to exhibit some kind of psychic abilities) Michael comes to Australia to take Walt back to the US, which is why they are on the plane. While stranded on the island Michael comes to idealize Walt in much the same that the narrator of The Turn of the Screw comes to idealize her charges.

As with Miles and Flora, there may be more to Walt than meets the eye. Strange things seem to happen around him as if his thoughts alter reality. There are suggestions of this throughout the series, both on the island and in flashback. At times certain characters see ghosts, and Walt himself has been seen in places it’s impossible for him to be. Michael does not know it, but it seems that Walt (or his spirit anyway) is what led Shannon to her death.

Astral projection? Shaping reality? Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s clear that Walt has some kind of profound power that no one – not even Walt – understands.

At one point in The Turn of the Screw, the narrator describes a day spent playing with the kids on the grounds as a day in which she lived in a world of their creation. One wonders how much of the world of Lost might be a world of Walt’s creation in the form of some kind of psychic projection. There are suggestions that this might be the case as well as the ominous pronouncement in the season two finale that the Others do not want Walt because he turned out to be more than they bargained for when they kidnapped him at the end of season one.

The Turn of the Screw, like Lost, is very vague about what is actually occurring. In both stories the living see the dead, there are children who appear innocent but who possibly harbor tremendous powers, and there are adults who are driven to the brink of sanity in an effort to save those children.

Reading Turn of the Screw makes me think of Walt and raises a question about how his presence on the island affects the lives of the other survivors. Is Walt a cause of their problems or is he, like them, a victim of other unknown forces either natural or supernatural. I think Walt is probably controlling, perhaps unintentionally, some of the strange things that happen on the island.

Check out my other Lost book posts at The Lost Book Club.