Cultural Context of The Damned Thing

In Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing”, Hugh Morgan is not only dead, but his body is battered. The locals, a jury, and a coroner are in the cabin of the deceased person to determine the cause of death. There was a man named William Harker, the only witness to Hugh Morgan’s death who says there was something in the field of oat bushels that Hugh Morgan referred to as a “damned thing”. Everyone else laughed at what William Harker said, and one person sarcastically said that he should go back to the insane asylum. At this point, the reader recognizes the cultural fear that still is extremely debatable to this date, the supernatural. People were first taught that among the supernatural, things such as ghosts, were in purgatory as the good people according to God went to heaven, and the evil people would go to hell. There were a decent amount of people who believed in ghosts, however the rationalists would laugh and mock these people.
This is what happened to poor William Harker, as he would become more frustrated with the jury. At the end of the story, the jury agree to say that Hugh Morgan was killed by a mountain lion. In my opinion, the author of the story, Ambrose Bierce is trying to tell his audience the reason why people deny the supernatural is because it is not well known. If there’s one thing that people fear, it is the unknown. In Hugh Morgan’s diary, he acknowledges that people will never believe in the “damned thing” because the eyes and ears of human beings are imperfect as there are rays the human eyes are not able to say. The ears are imperfect as well because of the black birds that fly away together even though no one has been able to hear a warning before they fly. The author may also be saying that humans are very lucky to have the intelligence, hearing, seeing, and other gifts we have, but we are still not perfect.