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I can’t recall exactly where I heard or read about it, but I’m pretty sure there was some sort of reference to American mystery author/journalist Ambrose Bierce on the show sometime during season two. Anyway, I was just researching “I Am Legend” on Wikipedia when I stumbled upon a link to a short-story by Bierce about the “undead.” I was stunned by how many parallels there were in the story to “Lost.” Just absolutely stunned. I’m thinking Bierce’s story might have been the inspiration for the whole show.

In the story there are dead relatives who show up in the woods, unintelligible whispering from beyond the trees, a gray fog of unknown origin, predictions of death before it happens, references to being stranded on an island in the South Pacific, a character named Katy, and strange coincidences that connect seeming strangers to one another.

The short-story — titled “The Death of Halpin Frayser” — is a kind of spooky little thing about a young man in late 19th century California who has gone out hunting alone in the Napa Valley. It gets dark and Halpin decides to rest against a tree and fall asleep. He wakes up after a little while and mutters a name he’s never heard before: “Catharine Larue.” Then he goes back to sleep. He begins to have a vivid nightmare in which he’s walking through an evil-looking wood and starts to hear strange, “inhuman” whispering all around him. There’s some really cool description here that makes your skin crawl. Anyway, Halpin starts seeing pools of blood everywhere and he pulls out his journal and wants to write out a message in case something happens to him, and instead he writes down a poem. He’s stopped mid-line by the appearance of his dead mother, who grabs him by the throat and strangles him. In his dream, Halpin dies.

Bierce gives some backstory about Halpin and his strange relationship with his mother, “Katy.” Halpin and Katy were of romantic, poetic souls and extremely close — they both inherited this from Halpin’s grandfather, the famous poet Myron Bane. Halpin goes to his mother one day and says he wants to visit California. She wants him to not go at all — she had a dream the night before that he’d been strangled. She says maybe she should go with him, but he convinces her to stay. He travels to San Francisco, takes work on a boat, gets deserted on an island in the South Pacific, then finally comes back after many years.

Then Bierce goes on to describe the morning after Halpin fell asleep by the tree, and how a strange gray fog hovered over Mount St. Helena, and then grew bigger and finally spread down and covered all of the Napa Valley. Then we meet two men — a sheriff and his friend — who are out looking for a murderer who goes by the name of Branscom. They aren’t sure, but they think his real name is somethin like “Pardee.” Branscom slit the throat if his wife and is on the run. The sheriff has seen Branscom visiting the grave of his dead wife — a widow who moved out to California to look for her estranged son. They stumble upon the corpse of a man sprawled over a grave near a large tree. He’s been strangled, and there are scuffle marks and footprints all around the body — signs of the attacker. They search the body and find a journal — the book belongs to Halpin Frayser, the grandson of the famous poet Myron Bane, who the sheriff’s friend happens to be a fan of. They look to see what grave Halpin’s body is on, and see it’s the grave of Catharine Larue, who was named Catharine Frayser before she remarried. They find this coincidence extraordinarily odd. Then, the two men hear a strange, ghostly laughter echoing from the woods beyond the graveyard, and the story ends.

Anyway, I didn’t really get the story, and Bierce didn’t really explain or anything at the end, but parts of it were just so much like “Lost” that I thought it would be good to post this and see if anyone else could read the story and see if it helped them with figuring out the show. Halpin’s morther seemed a lot like Desmond, what with the future predicting and the traveling to find a loved one, and Halpin seemed a lot like Jack in the flash-forward at the end of the season. And I thought it was weird that the mother’s name was “Katy.”

Key characters

Short Name	Full Name	Episodes	Theories
Desmond	Desmond David Hume	2.23, 3.17, 4.5	851
Dr. Christian	Dr. Christian Shephard		336
Jack	Jack Shephard	1.1, 1.5, 2.11, 1.11, 1.16, 1.20, 3.9, 3.22, 3.1, 4.10, 4.12, & 3” href=”/episodes/theres-no-place-home-parts-2-3/”>4.13	1451
Kate	Katherine “Kate” Austen	3.6, 1.2, 1.3, 2.9, 1.12, 1.16, 1.22, 3.15, 4.4, 4.12	711
Sawyer	James “Sawyer” Ford	3.4, 2.3, 2.6, 2.13, 1.16, 3.10	451

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