Ambrose Bierce was an influential journalist, satirist, writer of poetry and horror whose works were said to have inspired authors as diverse as H.P Lovecraft and Earnest Hemmingway. And his fame makes it all the more mysterious that, in 1913, he disappeared without a trace.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.