On October 7th, 1849, in Washington College Hospital in Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe uttered his final words: “Lord, help my poor soul.”
Or, at least, that’s how the typical story goes. Many are skeptical about the circumstances of Poe’s death; while I don’t personally care about the truth all that much, I think the conspiracy theories are kind of interesting!
The famed writer authored around seventy short stories, nearly fifty poems, and is credited with the creation of the detective fiction genre, decades before Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. As strange as his death was, it seems only fitting that the “father of mystery” should have died under suspicious circumstances.
Let’s review the facts of the case, and then we can get to the possible explanations.
In July of 1849, four months before his death, Poe traveled to Richmond, Virginia in the hopes of getting his work published in a magazine there. There is no account of this journey, but upon his arrival he said that he had contracted cholera and had experienced hallucinations while on the road. On his final day in Richmond, Poe met with Dr. John F. Carter, a local physician. This interaction is most likely irrelevant to Poe’s death, but a strange occurrence during their meeting is cited in multiple arguments as evidence for how Poe really died, so bear with me. Accounts of Poe’s travels during this time always listed him as using a walking stick, one that he never went anywhere without. Accounts cite Carter as having a similar cane, but with a sword hidden inside, which Poe swapped with his walking stick when he left Carter’s home. Poe may have been planning to return the cane and retrieve his own, but he did not return to Carter’s residence.
On September 27th, in the very early morning, Poe left Richmond for New York City to start a new job as an editor – Carter’s cane-sword still in his possession. He never arrived, instead turning up a week later in a tavern (that day being used as a voting location) in Baltimore on October 3rd. He was discovered delirious, dirty, and wearing someone’s else’s clothing—uncharacteristically complete with dingy shoes and a straw hat. A letter was sent to his friend Joseph Snodgrass, who came to visit him. Poe still held onto Carter’s cane, but his trunk and other belongings were missing. John Joseph Moran cared for Poe at Washington College Hospital as his attending physician, but he was kept in a wing of the hospital for those recovering from intoxication in a room with bars on its windows. Poe is not believed to have been drunk at the time, but his condition was disturbing enough that he was denied any visitors and kept in his cell-like hospital room.
As Poe died over the following days, the details get a lot fuzzier. The only person confirmed to have even seen Poe in the days leading up to his death was Moran, so most of the evidence from this short period comes from him directly. To complicate the matter, Moran was famously unreliable, listing three different dates on three separate occasions when Poe was admitted to the hospital: October 3rd, October 6th, and October 7th at “10 o’clock in the afternoon.” When even is that? It has been suggested that Moran was senile, which isn’t super nice, but his accounts are certainly lacking. Moran reported that in his last hours Poe yelled the name “Reynolds,” or possibly “Herring.” Neither a Reynolds nor a Herring close to Poe has been identified for sure, and the lack of similarity between these names certainly suggests (to me, at least) that Moran wasn’t entirely there. Moran also attributed multiple long and theatrical monologues regarding his coming death to the dying Poe, but in his delirious state it seems unlikely that Poe would actually have been able to speak in this way, and that these final words were possibly fabricated by Moran himself. In one of the only reports from Moran that I actually believe, Moran reported telling Poe that some of his friends were coming to visit him in the hospital. Poe replied that “the best thing his friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol.” That sounds more like our guy. Poor Poe.
When Poe did die on October 7th, the matter didn’t get any less complex. To this day, no one has been able to unearth Poe’s death certificate or any of the medical records from his stay in Washington College Hospital, leading many to suspect there was never any documentation regarding his death in the first place.
As convoluted as the story is, those are the facts. Now, let’s put them together! How did Poe really die?
There are a few theories posited by Poe’s many biographers. One such writer, Jeffrey Meyers, believes that Poe died of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), but this natural explanation doesn’t really do it for me. It fails to account for Poe’s bewildered condition, misplaced possessions, and the stranger’s clothing he was wearing. Some claim he was the target of a murderous conspiracy (but who doesn’t like Poe?), others believe it was suicide (his writings from the time revealed no more depression than usual), and still others believe the famous Gothic writer and father of modern mystery had a case of rabies (WHAT?!). Snodgrass, Poe’s aforementioned friend, was a member of the temperance movement and attributed his death to alcoholism, though Poe had recently sworn off drinking and joined the Sons of Temperance, which was essentially what we’d call an Alcoholics Anonymous group.
The most pervasive and by far the strangest theory is that Poe died from… voting fraud. At the time, and specifically in Baltimore, a strange form of voting fraud called cooping was quite common. Cooping involved a group of armed people kidnapping an innocent voter off the street, forcing them to drink alcohol, beating them, and dressing them up in multiple outfits, then sending them out to vote multiple times for the “right” party, changing their clothing each time to fool poll workers. The cooping theory suggests that Poe died from the effects of being “cooped” as part of a mass election fraud campaign throughout Baltimore. This theory is obviously insane, but it actually might make sense! Why else would Poe have been wearing someone else’s clothing or been found confused at an active polling location in Baltimore, the cooping capital of the world?
I personally ascribe to the cooping theory, but something doesn’t quite add up. Testimony from cooping victim J. Justus Ritzman states that cooping victims like himself were often robbed and severely injured, Ritzman himself being held captive and drugged for days before being sent out to vote. Poe did not display marks of serious physical injury, and was still in possession of Dr. Carter’s cane-sword when he was taken to the hospital. Opponents of the cooping theory assert that Poe could’ve defended himself against his kidnappers with this sword, or that his continual possession of it proves he was never robbed and cooped at all.
Whatever the truth of Poe’s death, it’s clear there is no easy answer. In fact, it’s just like he said in his short story The Angel of the Odd: “The avenues to death are numerous and strange.” It seems Poe was more right than he knew.