It’s been 175 years since Edgar Allan Poe died, but the circumstances surrounding the famed author’s final days and the precise mode of his death remains unknown. Perhaps because of this lack of closure, there are numerus theories about how Poe ultimately met his demise, some of them speculative, some thought-provoking, and still others unfathomable.
“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.”
Although Poe was only forty when he died, in the mid-19th century four decades was precisely the life expectancy for men, compared to today when an adult male can be secure knowing that he will reach an age nearly double that of Poe and his contemporaries, at least statistically. Actuarial tabulations aside, Poe’s death was not only unexpected but cryptic, even conspiratorial, due to the fact that so much about his last hours remain shrouded in rumor and speculation.
In this article, we will be considering the shocking number of possible reasons and contributing factors behind his premature death.
To be thorough, Poe’s downward spiral began seven years before his death when his wife Virginia contracted tuberculosis in 1842. She suffered with the disease for five years before dying, after which some say Poe’s already hard drinking only got worse.
Fast forward to late summer1849, Poe was in Richmond to explore a possible magazine venture. He arrived there supposedly suffering from the lingering effects of what he described as a cholera attack accompanied by hallucinations, but insistent that he had not been drinking. He seemingly had recuperated sufficiently to give well-received readings and lectures to pay his expenses.
When Poe departed from Virginia on September 27, it was with the decision to relocate there for an editor job at to marry an old sweetheart who was now widowed, Sarah Elmira (Royster) Shelton.
Just when Poe’s future was looking up, this was when things got mysterious, and deadly. The details of his actions and whereabouts over the next week aren’t entirely known, although he had been bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Marguerite St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. But Poe never made it to Philadelphia, and then on October 3 Joseph W. Walker, a printer for the Baltimore Sun, observed a stricken Poe slumped outside Ryan’s Tavern, sometimes referred to as Gunner’s Hall, an Irish pub and public house in Baltimore. Poe was semi-conscious, and when Walker recognized the literary figure, he asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore who might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor who had some medical training. Immediately, Snodgrass was summoned and arrived to discover Poe in what appeared to be drunken stupor, wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes that clearly did not belong to his friend.
Poe was transported to nearby Washington College Hospital where he was cared for by Dr. John Joseph Moran, who denied his prominent patient visitors and confined him in a prison-like room with barred windows in a section of the building reserved for drunks. Poe lingered there for four days, slipping in and out of consciousness and never becoming coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in such a state of being.
Moran reported that Poe’s final words were, “Lord, help my poor soul,” before passing away.
Poe’s much mulled-over death certificate sites phrenitis as the cause of death, which is an abnormal swelling of the brain. This is most certainly an entirely accurate postmortem finding, but the question remains as to just what caused this brain swelling, and there are many possibilities.
Alcohol has long been a suspected culprit, as Poe was known to frequently imbibe. However, much about Poe’s drinking habits may have been intentionally exaggerated by his rivals. People close to Poe have acknowledged that he could not handle any amount of alcohol, asserting that just a single glass of wine would have a profound effect on him. His sister was said to have the same problem, making it a hereditary predisposition.
Poe had even been an active member of the temperance movement at the end of his life. One biographer by the name of Susan Archer Talley Weiss wrote how Poe had fallen ill in Richmond, and after recovery he had been warned by his attending physician that another such attack would prove fatal. Allegedly, Poe had replied that if people would not tempt him, he would sustain from drinking entirely.
In an 1872 article by Eugene Didier, an American writer and a recognized authority of Edgar Allan Poe, wrote that on the night he was found in Baltmore on October 3, 1849 he encountered several acquaintances from his days at West Point. The old school chums visited several Baltimore bars together and at the end of the night an intoxicated Poe left his friends and stumbled out on the streets alone, where he was subsequently beaten to near death by unknown assailants.
This theory holds more credence than you may think if you are willing to consider some rather interesting and unusual pieces of information.
Because Poe was found on the day of an election, it was suggested that he was the victim of cooping, a common voter fraud practice that was extremely common at that time in Baltimore, where notoriously corrupt politicians paid “election gang” thugs to kidnap down-and-out men, especially the homeless. These cooping victims were then used as pawns to vote for a political party multiple times. The victims were imprisoned in a small room, beaten, drugged, or plied with alcohol to get them to comply, then they would be given disguises, including different clothes, wigs, fake beards, or mustaches to fool voting officials and vote over and over at different polling places for the chosen candidates. Afterward they would be left for dead.
Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe’s strange demeanor before his death. And the fact that a disheveled Poe was found wearing unfamiliar and ill-fitting clothes on Election Day outside an Irish pub that served as a pop-up polling site for the 4th Ward and was a known place where coopers brought their victims may not be a mere coincidence. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward. Poe being forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain him being found in the gutter, in a semi-conscious state, and dressed in shabby, secondhand clothes.
Additionally, Poe was said to have repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds” the night he died. Henry R. Reynolds happened to be the name of one of the judges overseeing the Fourth Ward Polls at Ryan’s Tavern. Did Poe have an encounter with this judge on that election day in Baltimore? Perhaps, but there are a couple factors that contest this theory, one being Poe’s status in the city. Being so recognizable, this scam was unlikely to have been perpetrated against him. Also, modern science recently revealed very low levels of lead in hair samples taken from Poe, indicating that he was stone sober at the time of his death.
Technology has also been used to debunk another mode of death theory, this one being carbon monoxide poisoning. In 1999, a public health researcher made a claim in that Poe was killed as a result of inhaling too much coal gas, which was used for indoor lighting during the 19th century. However, tests on Poe’s hair for certain heavy metals, which would be able to reveal the presence of coal gas, were inconclusive. Although these tests didn’t reveal levels of heavy metal consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning, they did show elevated levels of mercury. The cause for the presence of mercury led to speculation that Poe may actually have contracted cholera that summer in Philadelphia. For such a condition, a doctor would have prescribed calomel, a mercury chloride mineral. Calomel was known to cause mercury poisoning in patients, which could very well explain Poe’s hallucinations and delirium at the time of his death. However, the mercury detected in Poe’s hair measured well below the level consistent with mercury poisoning.
Sticking with infectious disease as the culprit, cardiologist R. Michael Benitez wrote an article, published in the Maryland Medical Journal in 1996, about his hypothesis that Poe lost his life due to rabies, a fairly common disease in the 19th century. He supports this conclusion based on Poe’s delirium as well as conflicting reports regarding Poe’s difficulty drinking water while hospitalized. Hydrophobia, a fear of water, is a symptom of rabies. Other symptoms include confusion, lethargy, wide variations in pulse rate, rapid and shallow breathing, delirium, and hallucinations, all of which Poe had experienced.
After the onset of rabies symptoms, the victim dies within four days, the median length of survival. Poe was found in a state of delirium on October 3 and died on the 7th.
However, without DNA evidence, it’s impossible to say with 100-percent certainty that Poe was infected with the rabies virus.
Another medical theory about Poe’s death suggests that he had succumbed to a brain tumor, which would account for his strange behavior. How this theory could even be suggested is an interesting one, and rather grisly. Upon his death, Poe was unceremoniously interred in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore cemetery. Twenty-six years later, a statue honoring him was erected near the graveyard’s entrance and his coffin was exhumed so that it could be relocated at its new location. In the process, the original coffin was destroyed and Poe’s corpse exposed. To the horror or witnesses, the effects of decomposition left little of Poe’s body, but one cemetery worker remarked that some kind of mass was rolling around inside his skull. Since it could not be the brain itself, as it is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death, it was postulated by a forensic pathologist that it could be a brain tumor, which calcified after death.
Furthermore, at least one second-hand account cites that a New York physician once told Poe that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his adverse reactions to alcohol. However, without tissue samples, this condition is unverifiable.
A far less sinister theory of Poe’s undoing suggests it was the flu, which turned into deadly pneumonia. In the days leading up to Poe’s departure from Richmond, the author was alleged to have visited a physician, complaining of illness, with his soon-to-be wife noting that he had a weak pulse and a fever at the time. Both suggested that he not travel to Philadelphia, but defied their wishes.
There is no doubt that it was raining in Baltimore the night Poe was found unkempt and disoriented. The cold, wet weather could have exasperated the flu he already had, leading to deadly pneumonia. A high fever would explain his hallucinations and confusion.
This article wouldn’t be complete without the prospect of Poe being murdered, and John Evangelist Walsh presented just such a scenario in his 2000 book, Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. He suggests that Poe was killed by the brothers of his wealthy fiancée who did not want Poe marrying their sister. Through information gathered in newspapers, letters and memoirs, the author contested that Poe actually made it to Philadelphia, where he was approached and threatened by Shelton’s three brothers. Frightened by the experience, Walsh speculated that Poe disguised himself in secondhand clothes and hid out in Philadelphia for a week before starting back to Richmond to marry Shelton. Her brothers, however, got to Poe first in Baltimore, where they beat him and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would send Poe into a deathly sickness.
Additional theories as to what cased Poe’s death include encephalitis, meningitis, heart disease, hypoglycemia, syphilis, diabetes, apoplexy. epilepsy, and suicide.
In the end, Poe’s death seems ripped directly from the pages of his own works. What really happened in those few days before his death, we will never know. The one thing we can be certain of is that additional theories about how Poe died will continue to emerge.
Published 10/31/24