The Strange Death of Edgar Allan Poe

 Edgar Allan Poe

   Each spring, the Mystery Writers of America present the Edgar Awards, the most prestigious award a mystery writer can receive.  This award is, fittingly, named after Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the modern detective story (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold Bug).  It is even more fitting that Poe’s untimely death remains one of history’s great unsolved mysteries.

   Poe was born in Boston in 1809 but was orphaned at an early age.  A Richmond couple became his foster parents and Poe spent his youth in Richmond, finally going off to college at the University of Virginia.  Young Poe, now eighteen, incurred gambling debts and quarreled with his foster father. He dropped out of the University of Virginia and joined the United States Army under an assumed name.  This didn’t work out either.  In 1829, Edgar Allan Poe announced that he would make his way in the world by becoming a poet and writer.  Poe became the first American writer to earn a living (a very modest living) through writing alone.

  On September 27, 1849 Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond bound for Philadelphia where he had been commissioned to edit a collection of poems. Poe may never have made it to Philadelphia, and he definitely did not make it to New York to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding.  On October 3, 1849 one Joseph Walker, an employee of the Baltimore Sun, found Poe lying in a Baltimore gutter.  Poe was never to leave Baltimore.  The Poe Museum in Richmond, the repository of many of Poe’s greatest literary works, tells us that the writer was found, “semiconscious and dressed in cheap, ill-fitting clothes so unlike Poe’s usual mode of dress that many believe that Poe’s own clothing had been stolen.”  Edgar Allan Poe remained incoherent, gripped by delirium and hallucinations, unable to explain how he had come to be found in Baltimore,  senseless on the streets, in dirty clothes not his own.  Poe died on the night of October 7, 1849, calling out for “Reynolds”.  The identity of the mysterious Reynolds remains unknown.

   For over one hundred and fifty years people have speculated on the cause of Poe’s death.  Numerous theories have been put forward, including: he died of a beating (1857), he died of epilepsy (1875), he drank himself to death (1921), he died of heart disease (1926), he died of toxic poisoning (1970), he died of hypoglycemia (1979),  he died of diabetes (1977), he died of rabies (1996),  he was murdered (1998).  Other theories proclaim he died of a brain tumor, or from heavy metal poisoning, or from the flu.    

   The most popular theory is that Poe died as a result of a practice called “cooping.”  Cooping was a form of voter fraud practiced in the 19^th century.  Innocent people were snatched off the streets and imprisoned in a room called “the coop”, where they were fed drugs and alcohol, to gain their silence and complicity in a scheme whereby they would vote multiple times in the same election.  The uncooperative would be beaten into submission.  Sometimes they were killed.  Election fraud is a high stakes game.  The now compliant victims were forced to change clothes between casting votes and were often forced to wear wigs and fake beards so that election officials would not recognize them at the polls.

   There is circumstantial evidence that indicates that Poe may have run afoul of such a scheme.  Baltimore elections were notoriously violent and corrupt in 1840.  An election for sheriff was going on at the time.  Poe was found on the street on Election Day near Ryan’s Fourth Ward Polls which was both a bar and a place where votes were cast.  Is it possible that Edgar Allan Poe was kidnapped, drugged and beaten to death in a voter fraud conspiracy?  Perhaps, but the theory still doesn’t explain how Poe got the one hundred miles from Philadelphia to Baltimore.  Surely, it would have been easier for the conspirators to pluck someone off the streets of Baltimore itself.

   Another theory, put forth by writer John E. Walsh in 2000, suggests a more personal reason for Poe’s predicament, one that involved a lady.  Sarah Royster was the teenage sweetheart of Edgar Allan Poe.  Sarah’s father did not approve of Poe and put an end to the relationship while Poe was at the University of Virginia.  Sarah married a very wealthy man named Alexander Shelton and enjoyed a happy marriage until Shelton’s death in 1844.  In 1848, Edgar Allan Poe came back into Sarah’s life.  Sarah attended Poe's lectures in Richmond, and by September 1849 the couple are thought to have had an understanding and were on the verge of marriage.  Once again, Sarah’s family did not approve, perhaps thinking that Poe was a fortune hunter.  John Walsh argues that Poe was in Philadelphia when he was confronted by Sarah’s three brothers who roughly warned him against trying to marry their sister.  A frightened Poe, wanting no further encounters with the brothers, disguised himself (this accounts for the shoddy wardrobe in which Poe was found) and headed back to Richmond to marry Sarah.  The brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, savagely beat him, and left him in the gutter.  He subsequently died.  Possible?  Perhaps, but we may never know the truth.

   Edgar Allan Poe was buried in Baltimore.  An imposing grave monument was dedicated to Poe on November 17, 1875.  Beginning in January 1949 and continuing until January 19, 2009 (the two hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth) a still unidentified stranger entered the cemetery on the night of January 19 and left a partial bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe’s grave. Who was “the Poe Toaster”?  Yet another unsolved mystery.

Virginia Legends and Lore