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Baltimore, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia

What Happened to Edgar Allan Poe?

In October 1849 Edgar Allan Poe was found at a Baltimore polling place in clothes that weren't his. What the record shows of his last week, and where it stops.

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The story

Baltimore, Wednesday, October 3, 1849. Election day. A printer named Joseph Walker sends a hurried note to a doctor he knows: "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 is in need of immediate assistance."

The doctor found him in the tavern's bar-room, wearing a thin, cheap coat and someone else's hat. He had been robbed of his clothes, the doctor decided, or cheated in a swap. Four days later, Edgar Allan Poe was dead.

A week before that note he had been in Richmond, Virginia, newly pledged to temperance and, as he had written to his aunt, about to be married. So where was he that week, and what killed him? Here is what the record can tell us, and exactly where it stops.

A summer in Richmond

In 1849 Poe was forty, famous for "The Raven," a widower, and broke. He had come back to Richmond, the city that raised him, to lecture and to find backers for a magazine of his own. On August 27 he took the temperance pledge. He had also been going up Church Hill to see Elmira Shelton, his sweetheart when they were teenagers and now a widow.

Around September 22 he wrote to his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, that he and Elmira would marry. That letter is lost and known only secondhand. On the 22nd Elmira wrote to his aunt herself: he was "all that you could desire him to be, sober, temperate, moral, and much beloved." Years later she would say there had only been "a partial understanding." But that September it looked like a new life.

The last sure night

On Wednesday, September 26, he went up Church Hill to say goodbye. Elmira wrote that he had a fever. Later that night, by the account of a young Richmond doctor, John Carter, Poe dropped by his office and walked out with the doctor's cane by mistake. Carter wrote that down fifty-three years later. The owner of a restaurant nearby told Carter that Poe left his place at midnight, with some companions, for the Baltimore boat.

Early the next morning Elmira went to ask after him and was told he had already left on the boat for Baltimore. That is where the sure record ends, and it isn't a sighting. It's something Elmira was told.

No one recorded which boat he took, and no witness saw him board or land. A steamer from Richmond did reach Baltimore on Friday the 28th. He may have been on it, or on a boat that came in the next day, but that is worked out from boat arrivals, not from anyone who saw him. The famous "five missing days" only works if he landed on the 28th. From his goodbye in Richmond to the note in Baltimore is a full week.

His cousin Neilson Poe, who lived in Baltimore, tried afterwards to find out. He wrote to Poe's aunt: "where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances, I have been unable to ascertain."

Election day and the hospital

"Ryan's 4th ward polls" was a tavern called Gunners' Hall, on East Lombard Street, serving that day as a polling place. The doctor Walker wrote to, Joseph Snodgrass, found Poe in the bar-room. No witness put him in a gutter.

At five that afternoon he was admitted to the Washington College Hospital. Its doctor, John Moran, wrote to Poe's aunt six weeks later, describing days of delirium. On Saturday night, by Moran's account, Poe called out again and again for someone named Reynolds. No one has ever worked out who that was.

He died before dawn on Sunday, October 7, 1849. Moran wrote that his last words were "Lord, help my poor soul." But over the next thirty-six years Moran told the story several different ways. By 1875, Poe hadn't been found at a tavern at all, but on a bench by the docks, with no smell of liquor on him.

What the record shows, and what it doesn't

Every story that fills the missing week came later. A visit to a Baltimore friend is first found in print in 1885. A trip on to Philadelphia and the wrong train back is secondhand, with no dates. A return from Havre de Grace is Moran's version, told in 1875. None of them can be checked.

Four explanations come up most, and each runs into trouble.

  • Cooping. On election days in Baltimore, some gangs grabbed men, held them in a room called a coop, and marched them out to vote again and again. That was real: that very day, a Baltimore paper warned voters that the other side's "coops have been started." But nobody has ever shown it happened to Poe.
  • Drink. The people who found him thought he was drunk. He had taken the pledge five weeks before, and how drink alone killed him has never really been explained.
  • Rabies. A doctor suggested it in 1996. His key clue, trouble swallowing water, traces back to Moran's 1875 retelling. In another version Moran says Poe drank half a glass of water without any trouble.
  • Poison. Tests on a lock of his hair, published in 2006, found no toxic levels of the metals they looked for. But that hair probably doesn't cover his last weeks.

A Baltimore paper gave the cause as "congestion of the brain," a vague phrase of the time. No death certificate for him is known. The honest answer is that nobody knows.

How the legend grew

He was buried the next afternoon in his grandfather's lot in Baltimore. The day after, a New York paper ran an obituary signed "Ludwig." It began: "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it."

Ludwig was Rufus Griswold, the editor who became Poe's literary executor. A year later his memoir painted Poe as a drunken wreck, and he even forged letters from Poe. Later tellers added the gutter, and the doctor's cane in Poe's hand. The legend kept growing. The record never did.

Seeing it today

Nothing of Gunners' Hall survives. In 1875 Poe's remains were moved to a new monument at Westminster in Baltimore.

We know where he went to say goodbye, and we know where he was found. Everything in between is a week nobody wrote down. Watch the film above for the whole story.

Sources

Credits

Images in the film: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (E. Sachse, View of Richmond from the Church Hill, 1851; L. A. Ramm, Richmond, Va., c. 1856; W. J. Bennett after G. Cooke, Richmond, from the Hill above the Waterworks, 1834; Wharf at Rocketts, April 1865; Richmond from Manchester, c. 1865; a steamboat drawing, c. 1860–65; Leaving French Town, head of Chesapeake Bay, 1846; C. T. Tatman, photograph of the 1848 daguerreotype, 1904); Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division (Sidney & Neff, Plan of the City of Baltimore, 1851; A map of the medical topography of Baltimore, 1851; Andrew Talcott, map of Richmond showing dock facilities and canal, 1851); Library of Congress, Chronicling America (Daily Richmond Times, Aug. 17 and Sept. 22, 1849; Richmond Enquirer and New-York Daily Tribune, Oct. 9, 1849). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons: William A. Pratt, daguerreotype of Poe after the September 1849 Richmond sitting; Poe, daguerreotype, Providence, November 1848 (original: American Antiquarian Society); L. A. Ramm, Exchange Hotel & Ballard House (New York Public Library); E. Sachse & Co., Westminster Church, Baltimore (c. 1857); Poe's monument, photo by AndrewHorne (2010). Public domain via Internet Archive: John J. Moran, A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe (1885), title page and hospital engraving; John F. Carter, "Edgar Poe's Last Night in Richmond," Lippincott's Monthly Magazine (Nov. 1902). Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Eli Pousson / Baltimore Heritage, 2017 (CC0); Natalie Maynor, 2008 (CC BY 2.0). The calendar and route diagrams were made for the film. Poster: the 1848 daguerreotype via C. T. Tatman's 1904 photograph (Library of Congress). Original score.