Even though it was pouring in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, ventured out to Gunner’s Hall, a lively public house.
Gunner’s Hall functioned as a temporary polling station for the 4th Ward on Election Day. When Walker got to Gunner’s Hall, he saw a man laying in the gutter, incoherent and wearing worn-out secondhand clothing.
The man was semiconscious and unable to move, but when Walker approached him, he made a surprising discovery: it was Edgar Allan Poe.
Concerned about the poet’s health, Walker stopped and inquired whether he had any contacts in Baltimore who may be able to assist him. Poe provided Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a medically trained magazine editor. Immediately, Walker wrote Snodgrass a letter appealing for help:
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 had left Richmond, Virginia for Philadelphia on September 27, nearly a week earlier, to edit a collection of poems for Mrs. St. Leon Loud, a minor character in American poetry at the time. When Walker discovered Poe in a state of delirium outside the voting station, it was the first time anybody had heard or seen the poet since he left Richmond.
Poe was never able to reach Philadelphia for his editing business. Nor did he ever return to New York, where he had been residing, to accompany his aunt to Richmond for his forthcoming wedding. Poe never left Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th century, again, and in the four days between Walker’s discovery of him outside a tavern and his death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found in soiled clothes that were not his and unable to communicate on the streets.
Instead, Poe spent his last days oscillating between bouts of insanity and visual hallucinations. According to his attending physician, Dr. John J. Moran, Poe frequently screamed out for “Reynolds” the night before his death; Reynolds remains a mystery to this day.
Poe’s death, which was shrouded in mystery, seems to have been taken straight from one of his own writings. He had spent years cultivating the image of a guy motivated by adventure and captivated by mysteries: a poet, a detective, an author, a globe traveler who had fought in the Greek War of Independence and been imprisoned in Russia.
Poe’s death certificate cited phrenitis or brain enlargement as the reason of death, but the odd circumstances surrounding his death have caused many to speculate about the real cause of his passing.
“Maybe it’s fitting that since he invented the detective story,” says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, “he left us with a real-life mystery.”
Was he beaten?
Biographer E. Oakes Smith wrote in her 1867 work “Autobiographic Notes: Edgar Allan Poe” one of the first explanations that diverged from phrenitis or alcohol. “At the instigation of a woman, ” Smith writes, “who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed. . .”
Other tales also indicate that Poe was brutally beaten by “ruffians” before his death. Eugene Didier said in his 1872 piece titled “The Grave of Poe” that while in Baltimore, Poe saw three West Point friends who convinced him to join them for drinks.
After drinking a single glass of champagne, Poe got so inebriated that he abandoned his buddies to explore the streets. In his intoxicated condition, he was robbed, assaulted, and left unconscious in the street all night.
The practice of cooping
Others claim that Poe was a victim of cooping, a kind of voter fraud employed by gangs in the 19th century in which an unwitting victim was abducted, disguised, and compelled to vote many times for a certain candidate under various disguised identities.
In the mid-nineteenth century, voter fraud was rampant in Baltimore, and the voting station where Walker saw the disheveled Poe was a notorious location where coopers took their victims. The fact that Poe was discovered delirious on election day is thus not a mere coincidence.
The cooping idea has become one of the most frequently accepted explanations for Poe’s peculiar behavior before to his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given beer as a form of prize after casting their ballots; if Poe had been compelled to vote many times as part of a cooping plan, this may explain his semi-conscious, unkempt appearance.
Alcohol poisoning
“A lot of the ideas that have come up over the years have centered around the fact that Poe couldn’t handle alcohol,” says Semtner. “It has been documented that after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary.”
Prior to his death, Poe became an outspoken member of the temperance movement, shunning alcohol with which he had suffered his whole life.
In her biography “The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe,” biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss remembers an episode at the conclusion of Poe’s tenure in Richmond that may be important to those who favor a “death by drinking” explanation for Poe’s demise.
Poe had fallen sick in Richmond, and after making a remarkable recovery, his attending physician informed him that a recurrence of his illness would be deadly. According to Weiss, Poe said, “if people would not tempt him, he would not fall,” implying that the first malady was caused by excessive drinking.
Those who knew Poe during his dying days are certain that he succumbed to this temptation and drank himself to death.
According to a letter sent by his close friend J. P. Kennedy on October 10, 1849: “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. The consequence was fever, delirium, and madness, and in a few days a termination of his sad career in the hospital. Poor Poe! . . . A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched.”
Although the argument that Poe’s drinking caused his death fails to explain his five-day absence or the second-hand clothing he was wearing on October 3, Snodgrass popularized the theory following Poe’s death.
A supporter of the temperance movement, Snodgrass spoke around the nation, attributing Poe’s death on excessive drinking. Modern science, however, has thrown a wrench into Snodgrass’ arguments: samples of Poe’s hair from after his death reveal minimal amounts of lead, adds Semtner, indicating that Poe stayed sober until his death.
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
Albert Donnay, a public health expert, stated in 1999 that Poe’s death was caused by carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas used for interior illumination in the nineteenth century.
Donnay examined Poe’s hair for the presence of particular heavy metals that would indicate the presence of coal gas. Donnay’s idea was mainly discredited by biographers and historians since the test proved inconclusive.
Heavy Metal Poisoning
While Donnay’s testing did not indicate heavy metal levels indicative of carbon monoxide poisoning, they did reveal high mercury levels in Poe’s system months before his death.
According to Semtner, Poe’s mercury levels were presumably raised as a consequence of his exposure to a cholera outbreak in Philadelphia in July 1849.
Poe’s doctor recommended calomel, or mercury chloride. According to Semtner, mercury poisoning might explain some of Poe’s hallucinations and delirium before to his death.
However, even at their greatest, the amounts of mercury detected in Poe’s hair are still 30 times below the threshold associated with mercury poisoning.
Rabies
In 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez participated in a clinical pathologic conference where physicians are given patients and a list of symptoms to diagnose and compare with other doctors and the written record.
The symptoms of the unidentified patient E.P., “a writer from Richmond,” were unmistakable: E.P. had died of rabies. Dr. J.J. Moran, E.P.’s supervising physician, said that E.P. had been hospitalized due to “lethargy and confusion.”
As soon as E.P. was hospitalized, his health rapidly deteriorated, manifesting as delirium, visual hallucinations, large changes in pulse rate, and quick, shallow breathing. E.P. died within four days, the median survival time following the beginning of severe rabies symptoms.
Benitez quickly discovered that E.P. was not an ordinary novelist from Richmond. The cardiologist in Maryland described Poe’s death as a definite case of rabies, a very prevalent virus in the 19th century.
Benitez’s diagnosis, published in the September 1996 edition of the Maryland Medical Journal, went opposed to all prevalent hypotheses at the time. Without DNA proof, it is hard to declare with absolute confidence that Poe died to the rabies virus, as Benitez noted in his paper.
There are a few flaws in the argument, including no proof of hydrophobia (people with rabies develop a dread of water; Poe was believed to have been drinking water in the hospital until his death) or an animal bite (though some with rabies do not recall being bitten by an animal).
Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House Museum in Baltimore, concurred with Benitez’s diagnosis at the time of the article’s publication. In October of 1996, Jerome told the Chicago Tribune, “This is the first time since Poe died that a medical person looked at Poe’s death without any preconceived notions.”
“If he knew it was Edgar Allan Poe, he’d think, ‘Oh yeah, drugs, alcohol,’ and that would influence his decision. Dr. Benitez had no agenda.”
Brain Tumor
One of the most current ideas about Poe’s death is that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which affected his conduct before to his death. Poe was buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave at a Baltimore cemetery after his death. Twenty-six years later, a statue commemorating Poe was constructed at the entrance of the cemetery.
Poe’s casket was unearthed, and his bones were excavated so that they could be relocated to the new place of honor. However, more than two decades of deterioration had not been kind to Poe’s coffin or the body inside it, and the device broke apart when workmen attempted to relocate it to a different section of the cemetery.
A worker observed a peculiar characteristic of Poe’s skull: a rolling mass inside. Newspapers of the time reported that the clump was Poe’s brain, which had remained intact despite being buried for over three decades.
Today, we know that the mass could not have been Poe’s brain, which is one of the first organs to decompose after death. American novelist Matthew Pearl, who authored a book on Poe’s demise, was still interested by this cluster. He called a forensic pathologist, who informed him that while the mass could not have been a brain, it may have been a brain tumor, which can calcify into hard lumps after death.
Pearl is not the only one who believes Poe had a brain tumor, according to Semtner; a New York physician allegedly informed Poe that he had a brain lesion that caused his unpleasant responses to alcohol.
Flu
On this deathbed, a far less menacing scenario posits that Poe died to influenza, which may have developed into fatal pneumonia. As Semtner writes, in the days before Poe’s departure from Richmond, the author complained of sickness to a physician.
“His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia,” says Semtner. “He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick.” According to newspaper reports from the time, it was raining in Baltimore when Poe was there—which Semtner thinks could explain why Poe was found in clothes not his own. “The cold and the rain exasperated the flu he already had,” says Semtner, “and maybe that eventually lead to pneumonia. The high fever might account for his hallucinations and his confusion.”
Murder
In his 2000 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, author John Evangelist Walsh offers another another explanation about Poe’s death: that he was killed by the brothers of his rich fiancée Elmira Shelton.
Walsh contends, based on evidence from newspapers, letters, and memoirs, that Poe truly arrived in Philadelphia, where he was accosted by Shelton’s three brothers, who advised him not to marry their sister.
Poe was so frightened by the incident that he disguised himself in new clothes and hid for about a week in Philadelphia before returning to Richmond to wed Shelton. Walsh hypothesizes that Shelton’s brothers stopped Poe in Baltimore, beat him, and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would kill Poe.
Walsh’s idea has not gained much momentum among Poe historians or book critics; Edwin J. Barton, writing in the magazine American Literature, described Walsh’s account as “only plausible, not wholly persuasive.”
“Midnight Dreary is interesting and entertaining,” he concluded, “but its value to literary scholars is limited and oblique.”
Conclusion
Semtner believes that none of the explanations adequately explain Poe’s peculiar ending.
“I’ve never been completely convinced of any one theory, and I believe Poe’s cause of death resulted from a combination of factors,” he says. “His attending physician is our best source of evidence. If he recorded on the mortality schedule that Poe died of phrenitis, Poe was most likely suffering from encephalitis or meningitis, either of which might explain his symptoms.”