Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (20 page)

It was Election Day in Baltimore, Maryland. Ryan's Tavern, a popular saloon bar, had doubled up for the day as a polling station, and men had been shuffling in and out to cast their votes since daybreak. Many stopped for some light refreshment before going about their business, but few of them took any notice of the resident drunks slumped in the corners, propped against tables, or generally scattered around the bar. Then, for reasons that are unclear, a voter named Joseph Walker went over to help one of them. The man, in a state of confused desperation, called out the names of people he appeared to know until finally Walker recognized one and immediately sent a note to Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, which read: “There is a gentleman, rather worse for wear, at Ryan's Fourth Ward Polls, and who appears to be in great distress. He says he is acquainted with you and I assure you he is in need of immediate assistance.”

Just five days later, on October 8, 1849, the Baltimore
Sun
published a somber notice:

Yet Poe wasn't supposed to have been in Baltimore at all; he was meant to have been in Philadelphia for a business meeting, followed by a journey to New York to meet his former mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. Edgar Allan Poe never arrived in Philadelphia, and Maria Clemm was never to see him again.

The dark events and insecurities of his life were dramatized throughout Poe's writings, and it's possible that his mysterious death was connected with someone very close to him. Edgar Poe was the son of traveling actors. He was not yet four years old when his parents died, within a few days of each other, and the three Poe orphans (Edgar had an elder brother and a younger sister) were separated and sent to live with different foster families in Richmond, Virginia. Edgar was taken in by John and Frances Allan, a wealthy, childless couple who raised him as their own. As a sign of respect for his foster parents, Poe later adopted their surname as his middle name and thereafter became known by the name for which he would become famous the world over: Edgar Allan Poe.

But a serious rift developed between Poe and his foster father when Edgar returned from college in 1827 with large gambling debts that John Allan angrily refused to pay. Shortly afterward Poe joined the army, achieving the rank of sergeant major before returning, in 1829, for the funeral of his beloved foster mother, Frances. The following year John remarried, and when the new Mrs. Allan promptly produced three sons, she became openly hostile to the grown-up foster son she had inherited.

This reached crisis point in March 1834 when Poe discovered that John Allan was gravely ill. He rushed to his bedside, only to find the route blocked by the second Mrs. Allan. When Poe angrily pushed past her, he was confronted by a furious John Allan, who cursed him from his deathbed, banishing him from the house. Poe then discovered, after Allan's death, that the man whom he had once lovingly called “Pa,” and whose affections he had relied upon as a small boy, had changed his will, removing any mention of him.

While Poe was at college, he began writing poetry, anonymously publishing his first collection,
Tamerlane and Other Poems
, in 1827. In 1831, he turned his attention to the short stories of mystery and the macabre that he was to become famous for. They were instantly popular. Before long, Edgar had progressed from mere contributor to editor at the
Southern Literary Messenger.

Throughout all this, his ties to his real family remained very strong, and they became stronger when in 1836, aged twenty-seven, he fell in love with his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. Despite Virginia's being so young, the two married within the year, with the full blessing of his aunt (and mother-in-law) Maria Clemm, who then became the third mother figure in the young writer's life.

In 1839, he accepted the job of both editor and contributor at
Burton's Gentleman's Magazine
in Philadelphia and, during his time there, wrote the macabre tales “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It was the popularity of psychological thrillers like these that saw his personal reputation flourish, and in 1841 Poe had completed his most enduring tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring, for the first time, his fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin. The story was truly unique in the sense that it introduced a new and popular genre in which a series of seemingly unconnected clues are presented to the reader and not drawn together until the final scene, in which the murderer is unmasked in front of the other characters by the detective. The style had never before been used in literature, and Poe's sleuth is credited with being the first fictional detective in the history of storytelling, paving the way for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.

However, it was Edgar's poem “The Raven,” published in 1845, that signaled his true rise to fame, with the public queuing up for Poe's lectures just to hear the writer perform his work in person. The effect in 1845 was something like a modern songwriter or musician would achieve with a number-one hit single. Other successful poems followed, and Poe's popularity continued to increase until disaster struck in 1847, when his beloved wife, Virginia, died. Edgar was heartbroken, and his grief is believed to have inspired the short poem “Deep in the earth my love is lying / And I must weep alone.” Her death was to signal the beginning of Poe's downhill struggle leading to his own mysterious death only two years later—a period that was marked by alcoholism, depression, a suicide attempt, and several failed romances. All of which was accompanied by a desperate attempt to raise funds to support his beloved mother-in-law and for the launch of his own publication,
The Stylus.
(Despite his literary success, much of his own money had been spent on drink.)

Then, during the summer months of 1849, things started to look up again. Poe, who was once again out on the lecture circuit, met Elmira Shelton, an old childhood sweetheart, back in Richmond and they rekindled their romance. With Elmira's encouragement, Poe joined the Sons of Temperance movement and renounced alcohol. He wrote to Maria Clemm: “I think she loves me more devotedly than any one I ever knew & I cannot help loving her in return. If possible I will get married before I start—but there is no telling.”

And it wasn't just his love life that had turned the corner. His lecture tour was also proving to be a great success and he had gathered over three hundred annual subscriptions for his proposed new magazine, at five dollars per year. This would mean Poe was in funds to the tune of at least $1,500, a considerable amount in 1849. He was due to leave Richmond for his next engagement in Philadelphia, where he had been commissioned by a wealthy piano manufacturer, John Loud, to spend two days editing his wife's collection of poems. The fee was to be $100, a large sum for two days’ work, and Poe had eagerly accepted the commission. He then intended to leave Philadelphia and continue to New York. Here he would collect Maria Clemm and her possessions and bring her back to Richmond, where he intended to settle down with Elmira.

Before leaving Richmond on September 27, Edgar visited his physician, Dr. John F. Carter, and, after a short conversation, walked to the Saddler's restaurant on the opposite side of the road, absentmindedly taking Carter's malacca cane instead of his own. There he met acquaintances, who later walked with him to catch the overnight boat to Baltimore from where he would catch the train to Philadelphia. They left him “sober and cheerful,” promising to be back in Richmond soon.

Poe had written to Maria Clemm advising her that “on Tuesday I start for Phila. to attend to Mrs. Loud's poems—& possibly on Thursday I may start for N. York.” He also asked her somewhat cryptically to write to him at the Philadelphia post office, addressing the letter to E.S.T Grey, Esq., and suggested that rather than turning up at her house, he should send for her instead on his arrival in the city. It is not clear why he needed to use a false name in Philadelphia or why he felt unable to visit the house in New York. Was he in debt, perhaps, or in some kind of danger?

Nothing more is known for sure about Edgar Allan Poe's movements until he turned up disheveled and disoriented at Ryan's Tavern in Baltimore five days later, on October 3. Apart from his failing to keep his appointment in Philadelphia with Mrs. Loud, that is. And there are various theories why he didn't. One account claims he fell ill as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia and, intending to catch another train to New York, boarded at the wrong platform and returned to Baltimore by mistake. A second account makes the same claim, but suggests that he was drunk rather than sick.

When a guard on the train to Philadelphia claimed he had witnessed Poe being “followed through the carriages” by two mysterious men, speculation arose that friends of Elmira Shelton, possibly her brothers, had followed the writer, suspecting he was having a liaison with another woman, and then had forced the writer back to Baltimore, beaten him into a stupor, and left him on the street, where he wandered into the bar and was discovered. Meanwhile another theory suggests that Poe had been in regular correspondence with a lady with whom he subsequently quarreled. When Edgar refused to give back her letters, she sent the men to enforce their return and they then beat up her former lover. Were they the two men on the train— assuming the guard's testimony is to be believed and there were any mysterious men in the first place?

Lending substance to this last claim is the suggestion that prior to meeting Elmira again, Poe had been engaged to a wealthy widow after only a brief courtship in what some regarded as a callous attempt by the writer to gain funding for his new magazine. This was broken off after a violent confrontation between a drunken Poe and his terrified fiancee, and it is possible that this lady had been the sender of the letters Poe had refused to return. In addition, rather than just being simple love letters, they may have contained a promise of funding that Poe intended to later claim as a contractual obligation. Hence the rather extreme measures the lady had to resort to in order to get them back.

Though varied and unreliable, each account is consistent with the idea that Poe did not stay in Philadelphia and possibly did not even leave Baltimore in the first place. He certainly failed to collect the letter from Mrs. Clemm addressed to E.S.T. Grey, because the post office, as was common practice, published receipt of it in the Philadelphia Public Ledger on October 3, 1849, the same day that he lay dying in the bar in Baltimore. Such was Poe's devotion to Maria Clemm, it seems unlikely he would not have made straight for the post office to collect a letter he was expecting if he
had
arrived in Philadelphia as planned.

But while there were no confirmed sightings of Poe in Baltimore during the week prior to his death, the writer's physical condition offers some clues as to what may have happened. Writing to Maria Clemm on November 15, 1849, Dr. Moran (the doctor at the hospital to which Poe was admitted) noted:

The most obvious clue lies in a reference to his clothing. Dr. Snodgrass later described what Poe had been wearing at the time he was found: