It’s appropriate that during the month of Halloween we’re also remembering the death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7th in 1849. But, just like one of Poe’s own detective thrillers, fans of the pioneering author are still wondering about Poe’s demise. Exotic theories abound, but my favorite explanation emerged in the 1990s: it illuminated Poe’s last days by explaining that the author had contracted rabies while living homeless on the streets of Baltimore. There are lots of ideas here, but rabies is my fave…
October 7th, marks Poe’s deathday, and in honor of his macabre sensibility, we visit the morbid mystery of how Edgar Allan Poe died…
Most of you have probably heard some version of the story. On October 3, 1849, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, Joseph Walker, found Poe lying in a gutter. The poet had departed Richmond, VA on September 27, bound for Philadelphia “where he was to edit a volume of poetry for Mrs. St. Leon Loud,” the Poe Museum tells us. Instead, he ended up in Baltimore, “semiconscious and dressed in cheap, ill-fitting clothes so unlike Poe’s usual mode of dress that many believe that Poe’s own clothing had been stolen.” He never became lucid enough to explain where he had been or what happened to him: “The father of the detective story has left us with a real-life mystery which Poe scholars, medical professionals, and others have been trying to solve for over 150 years.”
Check out all of the theories at Open Culture and watch this biography about the writer to get in the mood for the spookiest of seasons…
Stay Awake!
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.
