Yesterday, I talked about Edgar Allan Poe kind of being the “inventor” of the modern detective story. So I guess it’s only fitting that when he died, his death was kind of “mysterious.”
Most people agree that Poe was a literary genius, but much of his writings were disturbing because his stories were gruesome and involved death and/or injury. His life was short — and mostly unhappy.
He was alway known as a “hard drinker,” but when his young wife got tuberculosis and died five years later, Poe regularly hit the bottle even harder.
In the late summer of 1849, he was in Richmond, Virginia and he proposed to an old sweetheart, Elmira Shelton. On September 27, 1849, Poe left Richmond, bound for Philadelphia. What happened the next few days is uncertain — his actions and whereabouts are not known. But on October 3, a passerby noticed Poe slumped near an Irish pub in Baltimore. When Poe’s friend, Dr. Joseph Snodgrass arrived, he found Poe in what he assumed was a highly drunken state, wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes — very different from his usual mode of dress. He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he slipped in and out of consciousness. He died early on the morning of October 7. He was 40 years old.
Poe’s death left a mystery that hasn’t been “solved.” No death certificate was filed and a Baltimore newspaper reported his cause of death as “congestion of the brain” — a polite way of saying alcohol poisoning. Aside from alcoholism, historians and biographers have suggested alternative causes of death ranging from lesions on the brain, epilepsy and tuberculosis, cholera, syphilis and even rabies. Another popular theory is that Poe may have been a victim of so-called “cooping,” a common practice at the time in which Baltimore’s notoriously corrupt politicians paid thugs to kidnap down-and-out men, especially the homeless. The victims were drugged, disguised and forced to vote over and over at different polling places, then left for dead. Those that support the cooping theory point out Poe’s unfamiliar and ill-fitting clothes, as well as the fact that citywide elections were held in Baltimore the day he was found — and — the Irish pub near where he was found functioned as both a bar and a voting place.
The mystery surrounding Poe’s death would have made a good book to add to his “detective series.”
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