Breaking down the unsolved mystery of Edgar Allan Poe's death
The famed poet died in ‘delirium’, wearing someone else’s clothes. Over 170 years later, we’re still searching for answers.
“Edgar Allan Poe is dead,” the New-York Daily Tribune declared. “This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.” The 40-year-old poet and author—best known for his macabre detective stories and poems like “The Raven”—had died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849.
Poe’s stature as a great American writer was clear even at the time of his death. But the circumstances surrounding his dramatic demise are still rife with unsolved mysteries. Why was the poet wearing clothes that weren’t his? Why was the New York writer in Baltimore to begin with? And what caused the delirium and hallucinations that preceded his death?
“It’s tantalizing,” says Amy Branam Armiento, a professor of English at Frostburg State University and a member of the executive committee of the Poe Studies Association. But despite providing over a century of fascination and frustration, Poe’s death is still unsolved.
What we know about Poe’s death
Accounts of Poe’s last days are murky. The poet had been living in New York and was on the tail end of a long period of personal and financial struggles. Despite going bankrupt in 1842, he was again cash-poor. His wife Virginia had died of consumption in 1847, leaving him a widower. And throughout the last year of his life, his behavior became increasingly reckless and paranoid.
His friend John Sartain later recalled that in July 1849, Poe appeared unannounced, “pale and haggard, with a wild expression in his eyes.” Evidently hallucinating, Poe was convinced someone was trying to kill him and asked Sartain to cut off his moustache to avoid recognition.
Things were looking up by autumn 1849, however. Poe received a significant amount of cash from a new magazine project. He also rekindled his relationship with a former sweetheart, Elmira Shelton, a widow with a substantial fortune.
But then, on the night of October 3, Poe turned up at Gunner’s Hall, a Baltimore tavern that also served as a polling place. “We don’t know why he was in Baltimore,” says Armiento; the author was on his way from Richmond to New York and apparently stopped along the way.
It was election night, and the tavern was packed. Later that evening, Joseph Evans Snodgrass received a note asking him to come to Gunner’s Hall to help his friend Poe, “a gentleman, rather worse for wear…who appears in great distress.”
When Snodgrass arrived, he was shocked. Poe was barely conscious, sported someone else’s clothing, and “wore an aspect of vapid stupidity that made me shudder.” Snodgrass eventually took him to a local hospital.
There, the poet suffered tremors and delirium, calling over and over for a still-unidentified person named “Reynolds.” Three days later, he died at Washington College Hospital, at one point even begging his doctor to do away with him. The physician cited delirium tremens as the cause of death. But there was no autopsy, and no death certificate survives. A local paper cited “congestion of the brain” as the cause of death.
(Meet the original members of the tortured poets department.)
Did Poe die of alcohol or drug abuse?
Poe could not tolerate alcohol and became extremely drunk even after imbibing small amounts of liquor. Many of Poe’s friends and associates assumed drinking played a role in his death and his erratic behavior leading up to it.
But modern historians have contested that Poe’s hallucinations and other strange behavior during episodes of drinking may be inconsistent with alcoholism. The poet did drink, but went long periods without liquor and was an outspoken temperance advocate upon his death. Poe had also recently joined a local temperance society and gave several successful lectures.
The pro-temperance views of his compatriots may have inspired them to exaggerate the poet’s issues with alcohol as a cause of death, or his rivals may have labeled him as an alcoholic to malign him. While a pro-temperance newspaper claimed he “broke his pledge” and died of alcoholism, the theory has never been proven. Nor is there evidence he used drugs such as opium.
Was Poe ‘cooped’ or beaten to death?
Another theory involves “cooping,” a practice in which party operatives would kidnap a voter and force them to participate in voter fraud under differing names and identities. Over a decade after Poe’s death, his admirer William Hand Browne of Baltimore told Poe’s biographer that “the general belief here, is that Poe was seized by one of these gangs…’cooped,’ stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die.”
That would explain the odd clothing—disheveled, shabby garb that was distinctly out of keeping with Poe’s almost dandyish attention to dress. And voter fraud was rampant in Baltimore at the time.
Or perhaps Poe was assaulted at some point en route to Baltimore, leading to the now-obsolete “congestion of the brain” diagnosis, which could indicate everything from a mood disorder to headaches, brain injury, or seizures.
Was Poe poisoned?
Other theories claim that Poe was poisoned, either by medicine, ambient carbon monoxide from gas lamps, or some other kind of poison. But modern science has all but disproved such claims.
Poe was exhumed multiple times in the saga leading up to his final burial and monument, and in the early 2000s scientists analyzed strands of his hair and that of his wife, Virginia. Though Poe’s hair showed elevated levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, nickel, and uranium compared to modern levels, none were high enough to suggest he had been poisoned.
Disease, depression, and darker theories
Some attribute Poe’s death to a murder plot. In his book Midnight Dreary, historian John Evangelist Walsh claims Shelton’s brothers were angry at Poe’s plan to marry their rich sister, ran the poet out of Richmond, and got him inebriated in an attempt to discredit him, leading to his death by alcohol poisoning.
Other modern theories run the gamut of medical conditions, including rabies, meningitis, or a brain tumor. The tumor theory stems from a witness’s testimony that when Poe was exhumed, a large mass of unrotten tissue visibly rattled within his otherwise empty skull. (Since the brain is one of the first body parts to decompose, author Matthew Pearl believes it was a calcified tumor.)
A more common explanation is more convincing. Poe experts “lean toward the explanation that it was probably tuberculosis exacerbated by exposure to the elements,” says Armiento. Poe’s wife, Virginia, had died of tuberculosis, and Poe had multiple exposures to the disease throughout his life.
But regardless of what sent the gloomy poet to his doom, there’s no concrete evidence as to why Poe died. “We just cannot know,” says Armiento.
Ironically, the mystery surrounding Poe’s death likely played a large role in his legacy and afterlife, says Armiento. The strange demise of a man who pioneered the horror genre will probably continue to tempt future scholars and scientists, who continue to comb the historical record for clues given a dearth of physical evidence. “We can project on him our ideas of who he was and who we need him to be,” Armiento says.
So pick your favorite theory—it may reveal just as much about you and your preoccupations as it does about the life and death of the enigmatic Edgar Allan Poe.
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