Bill Mason

Oct 7, 1849: Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital at 40. The man who invented the detective story left behind a mystery nobody has ever solved: what happened to him during the five days before he was found. The last year of his life had actually been looking up. His young wife Virginia had died of tuberculosis in 1847, and he had sunk into grief and drinking. But in the summer of 1849 he was in Richmond giving lectures that drew big crowds. He joined a temperance society and took a public pledge to stop drinking. He got engaged to Elmira Shelton, a widow who had been his sweetheart when they were teenagers, before her father broke them up. On Sept 27 he left Richmond on a steamboat for Baltimore. He was supposed to go on to Philadelphia for an editing job, then to New York to bring his mother-in-law back to Richmond for the wedding. He arrived in Baltimore on Sept 28. Then he vanished. Nobody knows where he went or what he did for the next five days. On Oct 3 a printer named Joseph Walker found him at Gunner's Hall, a tavern on East Lombard Street. It was election day in Baltimore, and the tavern was being used as a polling place. Poe was barely conscious and couldn't make sense. Walker sent a note to Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, an old acquaintance of Poe's, describing a gentleman who was rather the worse for wear and badly needed help. When Snodgrass arrived, Poe was wearing someone else's clothes. Poe was known for dressing carefully in black, even when he was broke. Now he had on a cheap, stained, badly fitting suit and a worn-out straw hat. His own clothes and his trunk were gone. Oddly, he still had a walking stick he had borrowed from a doctor friend in Richmond. Poe's uncle by marriage lived in Baltimore and was brought along. He refused to take him in. Poe was carried to Washington College Hospital. He spent four days there under Dr. John Moran. Moran said he shook, hallucinated, and talked to things on the walls that weren't there. He would come around for a moment and then slip back into delirium. He could never explain how he had gotten to that tavern or whose clothes he was wearing. On his last night, according to Moran, he kept calling out a name over and over: Reynolds. No one knew who that was. Around 5 a.m. on Sunday, Oct 7, he died. Moran said his last words were a prayer for God to help his poor soul. That's about all anyone knows for sure, and even that is shaky. Moran told the story many times in later years, and it changed every time he told it. There's no death certificate. The hospital records disappeared. Newspapers said he died of congestion of the brain, a phrase often used at the time to politely cover a death from drinking. The funeral was held the next afternoon in Baltimore. It was cold and rainy. Only a handful of people came, and it was over in a few minutes. He was buried in an unmarked grave. His cousin ordered a marble headstone. Before it could be put up, a train derailed and crashed into the stonecutter's yard and smashed it. Ever since, people have tried to solve it. The main theories: Cooping. Political gangs in Baltimore were known to grab men off the street, keep them locked up, get them drunk or drugged, and drag them from polling place to polling place to vote over and over. They changed the victims' clothes so election judges wouldn't recognize them. Poe was found at a polling place on election day wearing strange clothes. It fits almost too well. The problem is that Poe was a famous man in Baltimore and would have been easy to recognize. Alcohol. Poe had a well-known weakness for it, and people who knew him said even a small amount hit him hard. Maybe he broke his pledge and went on a binge. But Moran later claimed he didn't smell alcohol on him at all. Rabies. In 1996 a University of Maryland doctor reviewed the case and argued Poe's symptoms matched rabies: the confusion, hallucinations, the way he came in and out of it, and reports that he struggled to drink water. There's no record of an animal bite. A brain tumor. When his body was dug up in 1875 to move him to a new monument, workers reported seeing something hardened rattling around inside his skull. The brain itself would have decayed, but some tumors can harden and last. Others have pointed to a beating by the brothers of his fiancée, who weren't happy about the marriage, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or the flu, or murder. Even the name he called out has theories. Some think it was Jeremiah Reynolds, an explorer whose ideas about the South Pole inspired Poe's only novel. Researchers later found that one of the election judges at the polling place where he was found was a man named Henry Reynolds. His reputation got murdered too. A rival editor named Rufus Griswold wrote his obituary under a fake name. It said few people would be grieved by his death and painted him as a bitter, friendless man. Then Griswold got Poe's mother-in-law to name him as Poe's literary executor. He published a memoir of Poe and doctored his letters to make him look like a drunk, a drug addict, and a madman. It sold well, and it shaped how people saw Poe for decades. For about 60 years starting in 1949, every year on Poe's birthday, a figure dressed in black with a scarf over his face came to Poe's grave in the night. He left three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac, raised a toast, and disappeared. People gathered outside the cemetery gates to watch him. Nobody ever found out who he was. He stopped coming after 2009. Poe invented the modern detective story. He wrote about premature burial, madness, and death better than almost anyone. And the one case he left behind, his own, is still open.