No name calls to mind the mystery and atmosphere of the macabre like Edgar Allan Poe’s. To think Poe is to think horror: the darkness of the mind, deceit, murder, and the heavy, almost tangible, atmosphere he so excelled at writing. His image is synonymous with gothic fiction and the mystery, fear, and sense of foreboding that define the genre.
Conjuring bleak, unsettling tales with his powerful, direct language, and masterful use of symbolism and atmosphere, Poe wrote horror that shifted the genre from the castles and curses of old to something more realistic for readers, exploring terror in a deeper, more intrinsic way. He was the first to spin tales of psychological horror, focusing on intuitive fear and the unraveling of one’s mind, sometimes in the face of something horrible or sometimes the cause of something horrible. His first-person narration invited readers further into the darkness of his stories, allowing them to experience madness and terror like no American horror writer had ever done before with their third-person novels.
Poe wrote some of the most well known pieces of American literature, building the foundation for modern horror and pushing the bounds of gothic fiction. He’s credited with inventing the detective story and the archetype of the eccentric genius who solves crimes, to be used later by writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, with The Murders in the Rue Morgue. His impact on literature and culture is immeasurable.
And yet, perhaps his most strange tale of the bizarre and mysterious is not one of Poe’s written collection, but that of his own disappearance and death.
In late September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond, Virginia on a boat headed to Baltimore. Excepting a brief stop in Philadelphia for some editing work, his ultimate destination was New York, where he would pick up his aunt (who was also his mother-in-law, considering his deceased wife was also his cousin) for his impending wedding to Sarah Elmira Shelton. The boat departed Richmond in the wee hours of September 27th.
Poe never made it to Philadelphia.
On October 3rd, Poe was found in the gutters outside a Baltimore polling station. He was delirious, barely conscious, unable to move, and wearing what appeared to be scruffy, secondhand clothes. It was the first time, that we know of, he was seen since he’d left Virginia. A man named Joseph W. Walker found him, stumbling across the disheveled writer in the gutters outside Gunners Hall on his way to vote. By this time, The Raven had catapulted Poe’s literary career and made him something of a household name, and Walker recognized him that day. Concerned, Walker asked Poe if there was anyone in the area he could reach out to on his behalf. Poe gave the name Joseph E. Snodgrass—a magazine editor in Baltimore who had some medical training and an acquaintance of Poe’s.
Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849
Dear Sir,
There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.
Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.
Poe was taken to a hospital where he suffered hallucinations and fits of delirium, moving in and out of consciousness, screaming at nothing and calling out the name “Reynolds.” On October 7th, 1849, four days after he was found, Edgar Allan Poe died.
During the four days he spent in the hospital, Poe never regained enough consciousness to explain what had happened to him between September 27th and October 3rd. According to his death certificate, the official cause of death was phrenitis, or swelling of the brain—a common diagnosis when the true cause of death was unknown by physicians.
Given such astounding and suspicious circumstances, it wasn’t long before theories as to the true cause of Poe’s disappearance and death started spreading. Some suggested Poe, known to have trouble handling his drink, had gotten drunk and been the victim of a random beating, while others suggested he’d suffered a beating that was far from random—the vengeance of a scorned woman who’d hired ruffians for the job. This theory, which has no real evidence backing it, begs the question: wouldn’t evidence of a beating be visible and obvious?
An early and popular theory presented Poe as a victim of cooping. Cooping was a popular form of electoral fraud in the US in the 1800s, specifically in Baltimore around the time of Poe’s death, that saw people kidnapped off the streets, held hostage for several days, then forced to vote for a specific candidate on election day. The kidnappers would give the victim different identities for each round of voting. This, combined with the fact that pre-Prohibition voters were often given alcohol as a sort of reward for voting, could account for Poe’s disheveled (dirtied, shabby clothes that were not his own) and disoriented (possibly drunk) state. The fact that he was found outside of a pop-up polling place on election day seems no coincidence and lends credence to this theory. Many today still believe this to be the most plausible explanation for Poe’s sudden and mysterious death.
However, it is far from the only popular theory.
From carbon monoxide poisoning to flu and rabies, a number of potential explanations have been suggested in the many years since his death. Alcohol being to blame is one theory that quickly got traction soon after Poe’s death.
To say Poe had something of a problem with alcohol may be accurate, though perhaps not in the way we’d assume. He couldn’t handle much drinking, reportedly getting staggering drunk from a single glass of wine, and often found himself confined to bed for several days after a night of excess. It’s worth taking many of the secondhand accounts of Poe’s drinking habits with a grain of salt since many were written long after the events they recounted. That said, Poe did have periods of damaging drinking that led him to lose work and relationships. He swore off drinking for periods of time, but repeatedly broke that vow. In a letter to Snodgrass, Poe said of his own drinking: “. . . I am temperate even to rigor. . . . At no period of my life was I ever what men call intemperate. . . . My sensitive temperament could not stand an excitement which was an everyday matter to my companions. In short, it sometimes happened that I was completely intoxicated. For some days after each excess I was invariably confined to bed. But it is now quite four years since I have abandoned every kind of alcoholic drink — four years, with the exception of a single deviation . . . when I was induced to resort to the occasional use of cider, with the hope of relieving a nervous attack.”
The truth of his drinking habits is difficult to decipher, but it’s known he had become a member of the temperance movement in the months before his death. With his history of returning to the bottle, it’s not farfetched to imagine his vow of temperance might not have been kept. Also in the months prior to his death, Poe had become seriously ill. After making a full, “somewhat miraculous” recovery, his doctor warned him “another such attack would prove fatal,” to which Poe reportedly replied, “if people would not tempt him, he would not fall.” This certainly suggests alcohol was the root of the illness, making it an even more likely cause of his death months later.
Just days after his death, on October 10th, Poe’s friend J.P. Kennedy wrote: “On Tuesday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at the hospital from the effects of a debauch…He fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle, which it was said he had renounced some time ago.” Where Kennedy got such apparent assurance that Poe’s death was the direct result of drinking is unknown, but he was far from the only person talking about Poe’s drinking in the wake of his death. Former neighbors also came out of the woodwork to discuss Poe’s habits regarding alcohol after he died and Snodgrass, Poe’s friend and fellow member of the temperance movement, used his death as a topic for speeches (blaming alcohol as the cause) as he went around the country lecturing on behalf of the temperance movement.
While alcohol certainly seems a plausible theory, there are several problems with it. First, this theory does not account for the days Poe went missing before he was discovered in Baltimore. What are we to believe happened in the time between boarding the ship and being found in the gutter? Poe was no stranger to drunkenness and nights of excess. It seems unlikely that he’d get so drunk as to completely disappear for days with no effort to find somewhere to stay or someone to call, then reappear with only days left to live. He knew people in the city. Would he really have been so drunk he’d not make an effort to reach out to an acquaintance, even if just for a place to lay low for a few days? Perhaps, but it seems somewhat farfetched for a man who had been open, specifically with Snodgrass, about his struggles handling alcohol. Aside from the unlikelihood of certain elements of this theory, the attending physician from the hospital where Poe spent his final days didn’t believe Poe was drunk when he was admitted or that he had been drinking in the days prior. Poe had seemed to be recovering slightly in the hospital before he worsened and died. This, along with the duration of his illness and the other symptoms he displayed, was inconsistent with symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Perhaps the most important blow to this theory is that modern heavy metal testing of his hair—which had been cut after his death and was held by the Poe Society of Baltimore—revealed lead levels that were inconsistent with someone who had been drinking heavily. The sample of hair is believed to represent somewhere between the last two-and-a-half and five months of his life. According to this, Poe did not fail in his efforts to abstain from alcohol before his death.
Other theories, like the carbon monoxide one, have been disproven by this testing of his hair as well. While these tests also revealed high levels of mercury before his death, likely from the medication he was prescribed for cholera exposure, they were still 30 times below the level consistent with mercury poisoning and so that theory was disproven as well.
Poe was buried in an unmarked grave in Baltimore. Over 25 years after his death, a statue was erected and his body was exhumed in order to be moved to his new grave in this place of honor. That he might have been suffering from a brain tumor was suggested in the wake of the exhumation after a worker claimed to have seen something rattling around in his skull. This was not his brain, as newspapers of the day reported, but could have been a tumor that calcified. This theory is supported by the fact that Poe was apparently once told by a physician that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his reaction to alcohol, though, of course, it cannot be confirmed.
In a 1996 anonymous study where doctors were given patients with their list of symptoms and attempted reach a diagnosis, rabies was the clear conclusion for the case that was revealed to be Poe’s. They knew not that they were diagnosing Edgar Allan Poe, just that the patient had been a writer from Richmond. Based on the medical facts alone and without opportunity for any preconceived ideas of Poe to corrupt the process, this diagnosis was compelling and believable for many. The doctors acknowledged, however, that total certainly cannot be known without DNA testing. As possible as it may be, there was no evidence of Poe having been bitten by an animal. While he, lost to hallucinations and delirium, may not have remembered being bitten, surely the doctors would’ve found evidence of an attack on his body while in the hospital. Poe also showed no signs of hydrophobia, a common symptom of rabies, and had been drinking water until his death.
For the author of such macabre tales, it’s no shock that the mystery of his death eventually resulted in suspicions of murder, although the time it took for the theory to be presented is surprising. In his book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, published in 2000, author John Evangelist Walsh presents his theory that Poe was murdered by Elmira Shelton’s three brothers. Elmira was, you’ll recall, Poe’s fiancé at the time of his death. In the book, Walsh lays out exactly how he believes Poe’s murder came to be, using evidence from newspapers, letters, and memoirs to support his argument. According to him, Poe did make it to Philadelphia but, while there, was accosted by Elmira’s brothers who warned him not to marry their sister. Poe, frightened and wanting to lay low, disguised himself in shabby, secondhand clothes (like those he was found wearing in Baltimore) and stayed in Philadelphia for almost a week, hiding out. Then, attempting to return to Richmond for the wedding despite having not reached his aunt or fulfilled his editing duties in Philadelphia, Poe was once again accosted by the three brothers who intercepted him in Baltimore. It was here that they beat him and forced him to drink whiskey, which they somehow knew would make him deathly ill, and left him for dead in the gutter. This theory never took off. Murder by the family of one’s beloved is certainly dramatic enough for a mystery and horror writer’s demise, but it was deemed highly unlikely by Poe historians. Elmira was a wealthy widow, but would her brothers really have murdered Poe to stop their marriage when, in fact, they might not have even truly been engaged?
It’s true—Elmira and Poe might not have been engaged. Their engagement has been presented as fact in all accounts of his death that I’ve read. It’s widely accepted and believed that Poe had reunited with the love of his youth, Elmira, and they were due to marry the very month he died. While Elmira reportedly took up the role of grieving fiancé in the wake of his death, even writing to his attending physician for every detail of his final days, there’s no true evidence of an engagement. Stories of Poe and Elmira’s relationship in youth is largely based on stories from J.H. Whitty (who edited The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe) and Hervey Allen (who wrote Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe) that cannot be verified. The only “proof” of a relationship in their youth comes from notes of a Richmond journalist who claims to have had a conversation detailing the relationship with Elmira in 1875. These notes, which leave several questions about the supposed relationship unanswered, were eventually given to biographer John H. Ingram who also reached out to Elmira to speak to her directly, but was denied. Interesting.
No one had heard of the engagement from either Elmira or Poe when he was still alive. The journalist’s notes show that Elmira denied having been engaged at the time of his death. According to these increasingly suspicious notes, Elmira said the only thing that existed between the two of them was a “partial understanding” after Poe had shown up at her front door, after more than 20 years without any contact, and begged for her hand in marriage. Whatever the “partial understanding” defined, the notes make it clear that Elmira did not think she and Poe would have ended up married if he had lived. In letters from Poe to his aunt (the one he was supposedly bringing back to Richmond for the wedding), there are references to a potential marriage between the two, but with a sense of dread about them: “my heart sinks at the idea of this marriage.” He also warned his aunt that the marriage might never happen. Considering Poe was in financial stress and Elmira was a wealthy widow, the implication that any marriage between them would be for financial gain and security on his part cannot be ignored. That said, Elmira herself wrote to Poe’s aunt during his Richmond visit, going so far as mentioning her jealousy when she saw Poe and Virginia (his wife and his aunt’s daughter) together soon after their wedding many years before, yet never mentioned an engagement between the two of them now. Brief mention of his engagement within his obituary—“It was universally reported that he was engaged to be married”—is the only evidence suggesting this engagement was ever widely known and publicly acknowledged.
Is it possible Poe desired a marriage to Elmira for her money and planned on trying to convince her after he’d been initially denied? Sure. Might this have angered her brothers? Perhaps. It’s not difficult to imagine three brothers growing protective over their wealthy sister when a man with little money of his own comes sniffing around with marriage on the brain after 20 years without speaking, but if they planned on murdering Poe to keep him away, they did a rather poor job of it. Who was to know with any degree of certainly that he’d die days later in the hospital?
Even with the layer this “engagement” between Poe and Elmira adds to the mystery of his life and death, it is still a stretch to assume Poe was murdered for whatever connection he had to Elmira at the time of his death. Her silence, except for those questionable notes from the journalist, on him for the forty years she lived after his death speaks volumes, but leaves most questions unanswered.
Why was Poe writing to his aunt as if this engagement were already agreed upon (if unlikely to end in a marriage)? And if they were not to be married soon, why is it widely believed that he died on a trip he set out on with the intention of bringing his aunt to his wedding? If not for that, what was the point of his trip? His obituary suggests it was simply a trip to New York to publish his work, so again why is it widely believed that he died while on a trip to bring his aunt to his wedding? When he was hallucinating in the hospital, who was the “Reynolds” he called out for? Was it the talk of a man lost to delirium or hinting at something more?
Like some of his most compelling stories, the mystery of Poe’s death leaves us wanting more. Was it simply a medical issue that went undetected by the physicians of the time or was Poe truly the victim of a crime? What happened to him in those five days he was missing? If not alcohol, which his attending physician contradicted, what caused hallucinations and such a state of semiconsciousness? No theory accounts for every detail of Poe’s five-day disappearance or the state he was in when he was found in the gutters that grim October day. For a writer so profoundly impactful in creating a genre of mystery, atmosphere, and horror, an eternity as the subject of a great mystery himself seems almost fitting. But perhaps to delight in the ironic mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s death is too macabre, even for the darkest readers among us.