The Death of Edgar Allan Poe: Fraud, Disease, Or Murder?

moment to tell you about another show from rewind studios that I know you'll love.

“It's called Garmin that doesn't suck hosted by professors Lindsey Kormack and Greg Jackson”

from History that doesn't suck. Ever wonder how the weather forecast on her phone is so accurate, or how your mail still gets across the country for less than a dollar, or who actually built the highway you drove on this morning.

Each episode tells the surprising story of an American institution that you'll never look at the

same way again. Listen to and follow government that doesn't suck every other Monday, an Apple podcast, and Spotify, or watch video episodes on YouTube. This is rewind rewind. On October 3, 1849, a printer for the Baltimore sun was heading to a tavern, which doubled as a polling place that day. But when he arrived, he found something he wasn't

expecting. A man lying in the gutter barely conscious and wearing clothes that clearly weren't his. The man could barely speak, but he was able to say his name. Edgar Allen Poe, one of the most celebrated writers in America, and he was dying. No one knew where he'd been for the last five days.

He never recovered enough to explain what happened. For his later, at the age of 40, Poe was dead.

“So what happened during those missing days? And what killed him?”

Today, I'll break down every major theory, from medicine to murder to something that feels pulled straight from the pages of Poe's own fiction. I'm Dr. Hermione Bot, and this is hidden history of rewind original powered by paved studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained. An examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural and everything in between.

From fantasializations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all, and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I love it if you could rate, review, and follow hidden history. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. We're also on you, too, with full video that brings each episode to life just search @hiddenhistorypod and subscribe. Today's episode is all about the death of Edgar Allan Poe.

He's a man who gave us the Raven, the Telltale Heart, and the entire genre of detective fiction. But in October of 1849, Poe was found delirious in a Baltimore gutter wearing a stranger's clothes with no memory of where he'd been. He died four days later, and to this day, there are over 26 published theories about what killed him. Was it a medical crisis, a violent crime, or is the truth something even a stranger? Alex Prackett opened and dive in.

Let's start in Richmond, Virginia, and wait for September of 1849. Edgar Allan Poe is 40 years

“old. He's brilliant, charismatic, intense, and one of the most important writers in the country.”

By this point, he'd already changed American literature forever. In 1841, he published the murders in the room mark, which is considered the first modern detective story. His 1845 poem, The Raven, made him a national celebrity overnight. He basically invented psychological horror and laid the groundwork for science fiction. If you've ever read a mystery novel, watched a crime show or been scared by a horror movie, you owe a little something to Edgar Allan Poe. But here's something

about Poe. For all his genius, the man could never catch a break. He was one of the first American

writers to try to make a living entirely from his writing. It was a brutal existence. He also worked as an editor at a critic, but the money was never there. Magazine's paid pennies, book deals were rare. And Poe had a knack for making enemies with his blistering honest reviews. I have it that would come back to haunt him in the worst possible way. His parents were both gone by the time he was three. It's commonly believed that his mother died at a tuberculosis, and his father had already

abandoned the family. Afterwards, Poe was taken in by a wealthy merchant in Richmond named John Allen, who gave Poe his middle name but never formally adopted him, and eventually cut him off entirely. Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, but dropped out after rocking up gambling deaths. He tried West Point that didn't last either. Then in 1836 at the age of 27, Poe married his

prepare her age down as 21 for the wedding to move forward. But moving beyond the significant issues here, Virginia was devoted to him, and by all accounts Poe adored her, but in 1842 while

singing at a party, Virginia burst of blood vessel. It was the first sign at a tuberculosis,

the same disease that had killed Poe's mother. Virginia spent the next five years slowly declining, as she died in January of 1847 at just 24 years old. Poe was gutted to cope with the loss he started drinking a lot. And here's where it gets complicated, because Poe's relationship with alcohol is one of the most debated aspects of his life. Some people who knew him describe serious drinking bitches. Others is just said he could be laid out by a single glass of wine. He had periods of complete

“sobriety, and times where he clearly fell apart. And with most things, the truth is probably”

somewhere in the messy middle. But by the fall of 1849, things were actually starting to look up. Poe had just got engaged to El Maira Shelton, a childhood sweetheart who is now a wealthy widow in Richmond. He had money from a new magazine project. He was giving well received lectures.

He even took a 10-prence pledge swearing off alcohol entirely. For the first time in years, Edgar

Ellen Poe had something to look forward to. And then he left Richmond. On September 27, 1849, the 40-year-old boarded a steamer headed for Baltimore. A stop on his way to New York where he planned to pick up his beloved aunt, Maria Clem, and bring her back to Richmond for the wedding. But there was one troubling detail. The night before he left, El Maira later said that Poe had a fever and seemed unwell. She was worried about him making the trip. And a few weeks later, while

visiting his friend John Sartin, in Philadelphia, Poe had appeared paranoid and agitated. He claimed that someone was trying to kill him, and beg John to help him disguise himself, but cutting off his mustache. Was that a warning sign a hallucination from an illness already taking hold? Or just Poe being Poe? Whatever it was, he bore the steamer anyway. He arrived in Baltimore as a September 28, 1849, and then he vanished. For five full days, nobody knows where Edgar Allen Poe

was, what he was doing, or who he was with. When he finally resurfaced, he would be barely recognizable,

“and barely alive. To understand what happened next, you need to understand what Baltimore was like”

in 1849. He was one of the largest cities in the country with a bustling port in a thriving economy, but it also had a dark side. Baltimore in this era was known as Mobtown. And the nickname was well-earned. Political violence was common, especially around elections. Games from the streets on election day, voter intimidation was rampant, and the whole process could turn genuinely dangerous for anyone caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. So picture this. It's October 3, 1849.

It's raining, it's election day, and a printer named Joseph Walker is making his way to Ryan's tavern. It public house on Lombard Street that's being used as a polling place for Baltimore's fourth ward. When Walker gets there, he notices a man slump near the entrance. The man is semi-conscious,

“delirious, and can't stand up. He's wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes that are clearly not his own,”

a stained pair of trousers, a worn coat, and a dirty palm leaf hat. Walker gets close enough to realize he is looking at Edgar Allen Poe. Alarmed, Walker asked Poe if there's anyone Baltimore who can help him. Through the fog of his delirium, Poe manages to give a name. Joseph E. Snodgrass, a physician and magazine editor. Walker immediately sends a note, and the actual wording has been preserved. Quote, "There is a gentleman, rather the worst for where,

a Ryan's fourth ward pulls, who goes under the cognitive Edgar A Poe, and who appears in great distress, and he says he's acquainted with you, and I assure you he is in need of immediate assistance." Snodgrass arrives along with Poe's uncle by marriage, Henry Herring. In sure enough, Poe is in terrible shape when they get there. Snodgrass police poe had been on a drinking vendor, a conclusion that may have been shaped by his own agenda, because he would later become a

prominent temperance advocate. So we know he was a fan of alcohol. Either way, the two men

is placed under the care of Dr. John Joseph Moran. And this is where the story gets both heartbreaking

and deeply frustrating. Because Moran is essentially our only medical source for what happened next, and his credibility is seriously questionable. Here's a problem. Moran wrote about Poe's final days, multiple times over the decades. In an 1849 letter, an 1875 newspaper article, and an 1885

“book, and the accounts don't match. Key details change between versions. Symptoms appear and disappear,”

timelines shift. This is what we can piece together. Over the next four days, Poe drifted in and out of consciousness. When awake, he was agitated, hallucinating, and largely incoherent. He couldn't explain how he got to Baltimore, where he'd been, or why he was wearing someone else's clothes. At times, he seemed to be talking to imaginary figures on the walls. At other moments, he becomes suddenly lucid, only to slip back into confusion. His cousin Nielsen Poe tried to

visit, but was turned away. The doctor said Edgar was too excitable for visitors. Moran later

wrote that he tried to get Poe to explain what had happened, but Poe could never piece the story

“together. Whatever he'd been through during those five missing days, the experience, or the illness,”

or both, had completely shattered his ability to communicate it. Then there's the detail that is haunted scholars for over 175 years. According to Moran, the night before his death, Poe repeatedly called out a single name, Reynolds. Nobody has ever definitively identified who Reynolds was. The leading candidate is Jeremiah and Reynolds, an explorer whose south-seas expedition had inspired Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon-Pin. But some scholars think Moran

may have missed her the name entirely, or simply made it up for dramatic effect, which wouldn't

be out of character for him. Either way, Edgar Allen Poe died on October 7, 1849 at somewhere

“between three and five in the morning. His reporter last words were, quote, "Lord help my poor soul,"”

and quote. No autopsy was performed. A Baltimore newspaper enlisted the cause of death as, quote, "congestion of the brain," and quote. In our cake, catch-all term that can mean anything from a brain injury to seizure to a headache. The funerals held the next day. About 10 people came. Poe's uncle provided a simple mahogany coffin Moran's wife, so the shroud, there's no eulogy, no reading of his poetry, no ceremony to speak of. The whole thing lasted about three minutes. One of the

attendees later described it as, quote, "cold-plated and un-Christian." For a man who changed the chorus of American literature, who gave us detective fiction, psychological horror. In some of the most haunting poetry in the English language, it was a strangely quiet goodbye. But the silence wouldn't last. Because within 48 hours, Poe would be attacked again, and this time, by someone who wanted to destroy him permanently.

On October 9, 1849, two days after Edgar Allan Poe's death, a scathing obituary appeared in the New York Daily Tribune. It was written under the pen name Ludwig. It opened with a line that wasn't exactly generous. "Edit your Alan Poe is dead. This a NASA will sorrow many but few will be greeted by it." The obituary painted Poe as a friendless, morally bankrupt, drunk, who stumbled through life in a haze of addiction and self-destruction. It was vicious, personal, and widely reprinted

across the country. And, we know who wrote it. The man behind Ludwig was Rufus W. Griswald. Griswald was a competing editor and literary critic, and he and Poe despised each other. The rivalry went back years. Poe had publicly trashed Griswald's poetry and theology. Griswald had replaced Poe at Grant's magazine at a higher salary. They'd both been interested in the same woman. The poet Francis Sargent Osgood. It was ugly and personal on both sides.

Griswald cut up the grudge even after Poe died, and though obituary was just the tip of iceberg. And, a move that honestly feels like it belongs in one of Poe's own revenge tales,

which gave him control over Poe's written works. Using that position, Griswald published

“a biography of Poe that was packed with fabricated letters invented scenes of jeopardy,”

and character description he'd literally borrowed from a fictional villain in a novel called The Cactons. He'd thought the character mirrored Poe closely enough, that instead of writing his own descriptions, he'd just use someone else's fiction to describe a real person. The image of Poe as a drug-addled alcoholic madman, the one that still lingers in popular culture today, was largely Griswald's creation. And because Griswald controlled Poe's

literary estate, his version of events came packaged alongside Poe's actual works. If you bought

a collection of Poe's writing, you also got Griswald's poisonous memoir as the introduction.

It took over 25 years before other scholars started dismantling Griswald's lies, but by then,

“the damage was done. Poe's reputation had been dragged through the mud. Although ironically,”

Griswald's defamation ended up increasing public fascination with Poe, rather than destroying it. The more scandalous Poe seemed, the more people wanted to read his work, and the more they wanted to know what killed him. So here's where we stand with the clues. Poe was found at a polling place on election day, wearing someone else's clothes. He was already sick before leaving Griswald. Five days of his life are completely unaccounted for.

There was no autopsy. His attending position was unreliable, and his most prominent biographer

was a man who actively wanted to destroy him. With over 26 published theories and accounting, let's look at the most compelling explanations. Let's start with the medical theories because

“there are a lot of them. The most headline-grabbing one came in 1996, when a cardiologist,”

named Dr. R. Michael Benitez, was participating in a medical conference at the University of Maryland. These conferences work like diagnostic puzzles. Doctors are given an anonymous patient's symptoms and asked to figure out what was wrong. The anonymous patient was described as EP, a writer from Richmond. After reviewing the symptom progression, delirium hallucinations, confusion, possible difficulty swallowing, and rapid neurological decline, Benitez landed on a diagnosis.

Rabies. It actually makes a ton of sense. Rabies attacks the central nervous system and can cause hallucinations, agitation, and delirium that comes and goes exactly what Miranda described. You don't have to be been recently either. Rabies can incubate for up to a year. Poe had a beloved cat stray dogs from Baltimore freely in the 1840s, and the Rabies vaccine wouldn't be created until 1885. With the Rabies diagnosis runs into a major problem, and it's the brand problem again.

This theory hinges partly on hydrophobia, a classic Rabies symptom where the patient can't swallow water. In his 1875 article, Miranda wrote that Poe had difficulty drinking. But in his 1885 book, Miranda wrote that Poe quote "drink half a glass without any trouble." If Poe could swallow water normally, the Rabies case falls apart, and we have no way of knowing which version of Miranda count is accurate. Then those tuberculosis. This is a theory before by Mark DeWidziac,

in his 23 book, A Mystery of Mysteries. tuberculosis was one of the most common killers in 19th century America, and Poe had been surrounded by it his entire life. Poe's family was devastated by TV, his mother, his brother Henry, his wife Virginia, and his foster mother all died from it. Given that kind of repeated exposure, the odds of Poe contracting it himself aren't small. In tuberculosis meningitis where the disease attacks the membranes around the brain,

causes fever, delirium, confusion, and brain swelling. The symptoms can come on gradually and then accelerate dramatically, which is consistent with probing ill, but functional enrichment before rapidly deteriorating in Baltimore. And the official cause of death, congestion of the brain, is actually consistent with that diagnosis. Add in the fact that Poe was already running a fever before he left Richmond, and you got a plausible medical explanation that doesn't require

any foul play at all. It's not the most exciting answer, but medically it may be the most plausible one. Then there's the old standby, alcohol. The most common theory in pobiographies

complications, either acute intoxication, withdrawal, or organ failure. Poe's friend Joseph E. Snodgrass

“believed this, and a 2010 academic review also concluded that alcohol-related cause of death”

best faced available evidence, and Poe's medical history. But Moran said Poe was not drunk when admitted to the hospital. In Poe had reportedly taken a temperance pledge just weeks before. The alcohol theory also cares the extra weight of Rufus Griswell's decades-long mirror campaign, making it hard to entangle the medical facts from the myth. Without a clear answer, scientists even tested strands of Poe's hair for heavy metals in the early 2000s. They found

elevated mercury, but was likely from a medicine called Calamil, that Poe had been given during a cholera epidemic in Philadelphia that July. The mercury levels were elevated, but still well below

the threshold for poisoning, so again, not a likely culprit. The bottom line with every medical theory

“is the same. No autopsy was performed in our primary source change story multiple times.”

We're diagnosing at a distance of over 175 years using contradictory evidence. Any answer we land on comes with a very large asterisk. So if it wasn't purely medical, what does someone did this to Poe? The most compelling theory in this category is called "couping." And once you hear what it is, you'll understand why it fits so well. In 19th century Baltimore, elections were borderline war zones. Political gains often working for a specific candidate would roam the streets

looking for vulnerable people. The unhoused people struggling with substance abuse, free black men, and strangers who wouldn't be missed. These gains would kidnap their targets, drag them to a basement or back room, apply them with alcohol or drugs, and then dress them in different outfits. So why are the costume changes? Because they'd marched these people to different polling places, voting over and over again for the gains chosen candidate. A different outfit at each stop meant

a different voter. This was a documented practice. It was common enough to have a name, "couping" because some of the victims would be kept in literal "coups." And Baltimore, aka "mob town" was one of its epicenters. Now look at the facts. Poe was found at a polling place on election day wearing someone else's clothes. He'd apparently been drugged or intoxicated and was incredibly disoriented. He fits the profile of a "couping" victim almost perfectly,

and Poe would have been an easy target. He was a stranger in town, already ill with no one looking out for him. A "couping" gang wouldn't have known or cared that they grabbed one of the most

“important writers in the country. They just needed another body to stuff in a voting booth.”

The problem is, there's no direct evidence that Poe was actually couped. Nobody came forward

saying they sought happen. And "couping" victims were typically released after election day. They weren't left to die. Something else had to be going on beneath a surface for Poe's condition to be as dire as it was. Then there's a more targeted theory, proposed by John Evangelist Walsh in his book "Midnight Dury." Remember, Poe had just gotten engaged to Almyra Shelton with a lot of money. Walsh argues that Almyra's brothers, who stood to lose control

of her fortune if she married Poe, followed him to Baltimore and beat him badly enough to cause his death days later. It's a dramatic theory with some circumstantial logic, although there's

no hard evidence to support it. And there's always a simple possibility of robbery. Poe was

caring cash from his lectures in Richmond, below traveler, already unwell wandering the streets of a rough city, easy mark. But robbery doesn't explain the clothing swab or why he ended up at a polling place. Here's how most scholars agree on. The answer probably isn't just medical, and it probably isn't just criminal. Something happened to Poe during those last five days, maybe coooping, maybe assault, maybe something will never know. It compounded whatever illness he was

already battling, and the combination was fatal. But there still might be more to the story. Stick with me here, because this last part isn't about ghosts or aliens. It's about something that might be even stranger. What if Edgar Allen Poe's death was the most

died under circumstances, no one can explain. He created the detective story and left behind an

“unsavovable mystery. And he wrote about narrators who lose their grip on reality,”

then spent his final days in delirium, supposedly calling out a name Reynolds. The nobody has ever been able to identify. Even his doctor turned out to be an unreliable narrator. You literally cannot make this up. And the strange just started before Poe even got to Baltimore. Remember his visit to John Sartaine in Philadelphia where Poe was paranoid, agitated, and convinced someone was trying to kill him. He literally begs Sartaine to cut off his mustache to avoid being recognized.

Sartaine later called that Poe's eyes were wild, and then he was acting frantic. Was that a hallucination from an illness already taking hold, a premonition, or someone genuinely after him? Then there's a Reynolds mystery. The only person that came to mind was Jeremiah and Reynolds. The explorer who advocated for a U.S. expedition to the south seas, and whose work helped inspire the narrative of Arthur Gordon-Pin. Was Poe in his final moments, or treating into his own fiction,

“calling out to a figure from his imagination as the real world slipped away?”

Some scholars think Moran made the whole thing up. Others think Poe might have been saying Harry, his uncle Henry Herring's name, and Moran was heard. Either way, Reynolds has become inseparable from the Poe legend. But perhaps the strangest chapter of all came after Poe's death. Mark DeWizzyac had argued that Poe suffered not one death, but two. A physical death,

on October 7th, and a second slower death of his reputation at the hands of Rufus and Griswald.

The fabricated biography, the forge letters, the portrait of a madman that eclipse the real person for decades. The master fiction didn't just die mysteriously, he became the victim of someone else's fiction. It's a kind of irony Poe himself might have written if it didn't happen to be true. And then, there's a Poe Toaster. Supposedly starting around 1949, the 100 year anniversary of Poe's death, a mysterious figure dressed in black with a wide brimned hat, and a white scarf of

scary his face, started visiting his grave at Westminster, bearing round in the early hours of January 19th, Poe's birthday. Every year, this person would kneel at the grave, poor a glass of Martell Cognac, raised a toast, and leave behind three red roses. One for Poe, one for Virginia,

and one for Maria Clem. Nobody knew who the toaster was. He never spoke, he never asked for attention,

for roughly 60 years. This anonymous figure made the pilgrimage witnessed by a small, and growing group of onlookers, including Jeff Jerome, the longtime curator of the Poe House Museum, who watched from inside the church. It went on like this until 1993, but a note was left with the roses, quote, "the torch will be passed," and quote. Then in 1999, another note said the original toaster had died, and his sons were continuing the tradition. But the visits became less

consistent after that, and by 2009, the toaster stopped coming all together. Although, in 2016, the Maryland Historical Society revived the tradition by selecting a new toaster through an audition process. Poe created mystery in its fiction, his death created a real-life mystery, and his grave became the setting for yet another one. It feels fitting, doesn't it? You know a hazy the most about this story? It's not how Poe died, it's what happened afterward. Rufus Brouswell saw a dead man,

and decided to rewrite his legacy from scratch. He forged letters, he stole descriptions of fictional villains, and applied them to a real person. If for 25 years, his version of Poe was the only one most people had access to. One man with a garage and a pen nearly succeeded in erasing the real Edgar Allan Poe from history. And that's not a 19th century problem. It's a human problem. We do this all the time. We let the loudest voice define someone's story, even when

“that voice is lying. We're drawn to the most dramatic version, but the truth is usually quieter,”

and it takes a lot more effort to hear. The good news is that Rufus Brouswell failed. Not right away, but eventually Edgar Allan Poe's work was too good, too original, too necessary for one man's

more curious about Poe, not less. In trying to destroy him, Griswell made Poe immortal.

“So after all of that, what do I really think happened to Edgar Allan Poe? Honestly, I think the”

answer is a combination of things, and is heartbreaking because of how ordinary the individual pieces are. I think Poe was already ill when he left Richmond. He had a fever. He may have been dealing with lingering effects from the cholera treatment. He received that summer, or from tuberculosis that ran deep in his family. He wasn't in good shape to be traveling alone. And I think something happened to him adoring those lost five days. The election day location, the polling place,

the stranger's clothes, the cooping theory, is hard to ignore. Even if we can't prove it, the circumstantial

evidence is strong. Picture a man who's already sick, grabbed off the street by political gang,

forced to drink, then marched through the rain from polling place to polling place. That kind of trauma, layered on top of a pre-existing illness, could absolutely push someone over the edge. As a doctor also say, the way Miranda scribes posed a climb, the alternating lucidity and oblivion, the agitation, the eventual loss of consciousness, is consistent with several things including a cepalitis or meningitis. Conjection of the brain might be in precise, but is pointing

at something real. But I don't think it's that post-symboly drain himself to death. That narrative is too tangled up in Griswell's lies and Snowdgrass's temperance agenda for me to take it at face

value. But here's the truth. Without autopsy or reliable medical records, we'll probably never know

for sure, and maybe that's the most fitting legacy for the man who invented the detective story. He left us all one last puzzle, and this one doesn't have a solution in the back of the book.

“So what would this look like in the modern world? I think in a lot of ways we don't have to”

imagine because something remarkably similar already happened. In January of 2013, a 21-year-old Canadian tourist named Eliza Lam checked into the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Over the next few days, she exhibited erratic behavior. Then, she vanished. Three weeks later, her body was found in a rooftop water tank at the hotel. The parallels to Poe are striking. Both were found in a state that nobody could fully explain.

Both had mental health factors that may have contributed. Poe's possible illness and drinking, lands by polar disorder. Both had a gap in their timeline that couldn't be accounted for. In both, had a single piece of ambiguous evidence that raised more questions than it answered. For Poe, it was a borrow close in the name Reynolds. For Eliza Lam, it was the now famous elevators surveillance footage that showed her pressing every button, gesturing at something

unseen, and behaving in ways that no one has ever been able to fully explain. Both gests also spawn competing theories ranging from medical prices to foul play to the outright paranormal. The Cecil Hotel had a dark history, including ties to multiple serial killers, which only fueled the speculation. In Lam's case, it was officially rolled in accidental drowning, related to a mental health episode. But the internet has already decided that answer

wasn't dramatic enough. And that is the key difference. Poe had one Rubus Griswell crafting a false narrative over months. Eliza Lam had thousands of amateur detectives dissecting the elevator footage frame by frame, accusing hotel staff of murder and spinning conspiracy theories about government experiments, all within hours of the footage going viral. Netflix made a four-part dark series about it, an innocent musician was publicly accused based on nothing. The Mr. Machine

of the internet is a lot faster than Griswell's printing press, but the impulse is exactly the same. We filled the gaps with the most dramatic story we can imagine, and one more thought. The Poe Toaster that mysterious figure in black managed to visit Poe's grave anonymously for roughly 60 years. What that tradition survived today, almost certainly not. Someone would follow the figure with a drone, live stream the whole thing, and pose their identity before sunrise.

“The mystery would be solved in a single new cycle. And honestly, something beautiful would be lost,”

because sometimes the mystery is the tribute. If you ask me, Edgar Allan Poe understood that better than anyone. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Hidden History,

What do you think really happened to Edgar Allan Poe? Was it disease, election fraud,

“or something only the master of mystery himself could have dreamed of? Let me know in the comments”

and I might talk about it in a future episode. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate,

review and follow if you're listening to an audio, so we can keep building this community together.

See you next time for our next episode.