Yesterday, I talked about Edgar Allan Poe kind of being the \u201cinventor\u201d of the modern detective story. So I guess it\u2019s only fitting that when he died, his death was kind of \u201cmysterious.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 and mostly unhappy.\u00a0
He was alway known as a \u201chard drinker,\u201d but when his young wife got tuberculosis and died five years later, Poe regularly hit the bottle even harder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 his actions and whereabouts are not known. But on October 3, a passerby noticed Poe slumped near an Irish pub in Baltimore. When Poe\u2019s friend, Dr. Joseph Snodgrass arrived, he found Poe in what he assumed was a highly drunken state, wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Poe\u2019s death left a mystery that hasn\u2019t been \u201csolved.\u201d No death certificate was filed and a Baltimore newspaper reported his cause of death as \u201ccongestion of the brain\u201d \u2014 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 \u201ccooping,\u201d a common practice at the time in which Baltimore\u2019s 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\u2019s unfamiliar and ill-fitting clothes, as well as the fact that citywide elections were held in Baltimore the day he was found \u2014 and \u2014 the Irish pub near where he was found functioned as both a bar and a voting place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mystery surrounding Poe\u2019s death would have made a good book to add to his \u201cdetective series.\u201d
\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, I talked about Edgar Allan Poe kind of being the \u201cinventor\u201d of the modern detective story. So I guess it\u2019s only fitting that when he died, his death was kind of \u201cmysterious.\u201d Most people agree that Poe was a … Continue reading