The Strange Death of Edgar Allan Poe

On the 27th of September, 1849, a 40 year old Edgar Allan Poe set out from Virginia. His destination was to be his home in New York City. Stopping on the way to edit a collection of poems in Philadelphia. The poet and author simply vanished along the way.

He resurfaced on October the 3rd in Baltimore. Delirious, he was at first mistook for a drunk. Joseph W. Walker, the man who found Poe lying in the gutter, described him as semi-conscious and dressed in shabby second hand clothes.

Patiently, he pried out of Poe his identity and the name of a friend who could help him.

Dr J.E. Snodgrass. A magazine editor with medical training. A letter was penned and dispatched to the good doctor. The Doctor duly arrived and started to treat Poe. Poe, despite the help, never regained consciousness again. He died on October the 7th. Just four days after being found. His death has remained a mystery ever since.

Strange Death of Edgar Allan Poe – Theories

Edgar Allan Poe is known for his dark poems and stories. The Raven and the Tell Tale Heart are two that always stood out to me in their beauty and horror. Poe’s death could so easily have been written by him.

It is thought that Poe’s death certificate listed the cause of death as swelling of the brain. But we cannot know for sure. Primarily because it has been lost. Over the years, speculation has grown as to what actually killed one of the greatest story tellers of all time.

Cooping

Cooping is a form of voter fraud used during the 19th century. A group would kidnap an unlucky chap and force them to vote multiple times for their candidate. Also at the time it was a common practise to give voters alcohol after they voted.

Poe was indeed found in the gutter outside of Gunner’s Hall, a polling station, on election day. He also very famously could not handle his alcohol. In fact, he supported the temperance movement after struggling with alcohol all his life. Could this combination have proven a deadly cocktail? Had Poe just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and found himself an unwilling pawn in a voting fraud scheme? It would certainly explain his shabby clothes as the fraud gang would dress you in different outfits before sending you back in to vote.

Brain Tumour

After his death, Poe was buried in an unmarked grave. Realising that this would never do for such a prolific and well loved author, a statue was commissioned to stand with his grave. This necessitated digging up his coffin and moving it. This action came nearly three decades after Poe’s death. As you can imagine, little was left of his coffin or body.

A strange feature was noted by the workers though. Inside his skull, a lump rolled around. At the time it was speculated that even after being dead for so long, his brain had yet to rot away.

Matthew Pearl, an author picked up on this many years later. After discussions with a pathologist, he concluded that while brains do in fact rot rather quickly, brain tumours calcify into hard lumps. Could this be the reason for Poe’s dishevelled and confused last few days on earth?

Alcohol and a Fight

As mentioned above, Poe struggled with alcohol his entire adult life. Drinking was a demon he tried to shake many times. Couple this with his genetic ability to get drunk really quickly and you have a powder keg. His friends believe that this is what happened to him when he disappeared the last week of his life. He met a woman and slipped into a drinking stupor. Add to this the 1867 article from Elizabeth Oakes Smith, writing in Beadles Monthly, she wrote that Poe was cruelly beaten to a pulp on the instigation of a woman who he had apparently offended.

It might be that the mystery of Poe’s death is that there is no mystery. He got drunk, offended someone and was beaten for it. A tale as old as time and one that is still repeated every single day across most of the world.

Other theories have ranged from carbon monoxide poisoning, murder and rabies. But in all honesty they have all been largely dismissed so I won’t cover them here.

It seems to me that the author of the first detective story will never really have the case of his own death solved.

Maybe it’s better that way.