The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential figures in all of American literature -- and his death is just as mysterious as his stories. In today's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive into the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Edgar Allan Poe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul Mission Control decads. Most importantly, you are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. Today, we are diving back through the decades.
We're exploring an historic mystery. Originally speak Behind the Curtain.

(00:48):
We became fascinated with a strange tale of modern Americana,
which we'll mention along the way here. For decades, it
seems an unknown individual individual jew Wolves probably would show
up at a certain cemetery in Baltimore to toast a grave.
But as we journey down that rabbit hole, we became

(01:10):
enamored of something else, a far stranger story, the story
about how that grave came to be in the first place.
Today's episode, which is rife with conspiracy, is about the
death of Edgar Allan Poe. Here are the facts. I mean,
I don't know how much time we need to spend
on it. But most people know Edgar Allan Poe is right,

(01:31):
or is it just Americans who know, Like if we
have some of listening in Australia, they know Edgar Allan
Poe is I think probably.

Speaker 4 (01:38):
The broad strokes, the Raven and whatnot. Perhaps the Telltale Heart,
but maybe not the deeper cuts like the Cask of
Amontiado and what of the Red Death. Yeah, Real Moore
was always one of my favorites. That one's got a
cool twist.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah, it's why Rumorg is why he's credited with inventing
the detective genre, not the story, the idea of detectives.
He also wrote. Really there's a really creepy story about
him and Arthur Gordon pim It's a story about a
very unfortunate series of events talking cannibalism, mutiny, shipwrecks. It's

(02:17):
the only complete novel Poe ever wrote, and apparent I
remember reading years and years and years ago that it
had eerie similarities to a real life incident that occurred,
even unto the names. But the problem was the uh
that Poe could not have known about it when he

(02:38):
was writing the book. So that's spooky, that's a different story.
We do want to tell you that if you haven't
heard of Edgar Allan Poe, he's best known as sort
of a king of creepy writing. He was a poet,
he was novelist, literary critic. He wrote a lot more
than horror, but he's associated with Gothic horror most of all.

(03:00):
Shout out to the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, who did
a lot for Poe's legacy when they had their send
up of the Raven or their adaptation of the Raven. Anyway,
I don't know how Edgar Allan Poe would have felt
about this. If he didn't like it, he would have
thought it was par for the course, because this man
did not have a good life, not really at all.

Speaker 4 (03:21):
No, definitely not, had some serious demons, which likely was
the kind of inspiration for a lot of his super creepy,
kind of nihilistic writings.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Well, yeah, you have to imagine if you come into
the world and within the first two years of your
life your father abandons your family, and then your mother
dies and you get shipped off to go live with
somebody else. You know, you can argue like his mind
is still developing. He doesn't even have certain attachments to

(03:52):
mother and father at that time, but you can also
argue some of the most important attachment occurs in that
zero to two years. So it's like it just depends
the type of attachment to other humans and he wasn't
able to make those early childhood attachments.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
He did have the skin to skin contact thing.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Or he got that, but then he lost it right
as soon.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
As he gets Yeah, because he's born on January nineteenth,
eighteen oh nine, in Boston to traveling actors, and his
mother dies in eighteen eleven. He gets raised by a
merchant in Richmond named John Allen spelled the same way,
probably his godfather, and I like the mention of demons

(04:35):
because we're going to interrogate that too. And his godfather
has basically adopted him, sends him off to Scotland in England,
where he gets what's called a classical education Latin, you know,
learning Greek, reading the old philosophers, learning about art and
so on. He lives in that area from eighteen fifteen

(04:58):
to eighteen twenty, and then he he goes back to Richmond.
Most of his are most of his life actually is
him going back and forth from Richmond to other places.
He's at University of Virginia for not eleven months, and
then his guardian, his adoptive father, gets kind of pissed
at him because Edgar decides that he likes gambling, and

(05:22):
he gets really into gambling with his U of v bros.
And his dad bails him out a couple times, but
then cuts him off and says, I'm not going to
keep Why am I going to keep paying for this
if you're just gambling more than you are studying? Fair point,
So he goes home to Richmond. He says, you know what,
I'm going to be a family man. I'm going to

(05:43):
marry my childhoods sweetheart, Elmira Royster also called Sarah, I think,
only to find that she has become engaged to someone else.
Real kick in the pants. So he goes to Boston.
Boston isn't super great to him, but it is where
he publishes his first work, a collection of poems called

(06:04):
Tamerlane and Other Poems. Don't feel bad if you haven't
heard about it. A lot of people didn't then or now.
I haven't read it. I'm just going to confess I
have not read I may have read Tamerlane maybe, but
I didn't read the rest of.

Speaker 4 (06:19):
It, and there are a lot of you know, biographical
resources to you know, dig a little deeper into this
pretty tragic existence that Edgar Allan Poe endured, so you know,
feel free to do some extra reading on your own.
He did come from, you know, to some degree, a

(06:39):
connected family. He had some nepotism that got him into
West Point, but maybe in some kind of early manifestations
of those demons he flunked. He you know, had a
bit of a proclivity for the drink. He bummed around
New York City a lot, which then, as you point out,
it's really something that is a good way to kind

(07:00):
of find yourself. Anyone should everyone should have a chance
to you know, bum around New York a little bit.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
And just quickly talking about the nepotism, it was John
Allen again, his godfather that has been helping him out
his whole life. He he was Edgar Allan Poe went
into the military for a little bit and was stationed
like internally within the US during that part of his life,
and he was like, man, I need to get out
of this. Dude, send me to West Point, please like
give me and lle do anything, just give me into
west Point and you know, as soon as he gets in,

(07:27):
he's like.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Uh, I don't like it, so he doesn't go to
the drills or anything. He intentionally fails out. Also, the
proclivity for drink, just like the idea of having some demons,
very interesting to reference that well.

Speaker 4 (07:41):
So yeah, yeah, and just add to that, that era
of his life where he was in West Point is
highly dramatized in the Netflix film Pale Blue Eye, where
a you know, kind of detective character, another troubled person
played by Christian Bale meets a young Edgar Allen Poe
and gets wrapped up in a somewhat of a murder

(08:02):
mystery with some occult overhows. It's not a great film,
but it's it's interesting, and the guy that plays Poe
does a pretty cool job in my opinion, that kind
of showing it. That's why that boys is a little
hard to place.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Man.

Speaker 4 (08:17):
It's that that that that that like old old world
Baltimore accent, it's bordering on a British accent. It's very
also reminds me of that kind of Boston accent that
what's his name, Crispin Glover does in in the episode
of of Giamo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosity. That's been

(08:38):
Pickman's model. I believe it's borderline distracting basically Lovecraft story.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, but Poe did spend quite a lot of time
as a young person as a kid growing up in England,
as we said with John Allen, So I.

Speaker 4 (08:53):
Think that's just in the nature of that era, right,
Like like you know, early immigrants, I guess, are folk
that are like hearing different accents that sort of becomes
this like regional thing that is pulling a lot from
the sound of like an English accent. For sure, you're
dead on.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
That Appalachia still has. You know, it's weird if you
want to hear the older accents until about the nineteen
seventies or eighties, you could go into isolated hollers and
hills of Appalachia and what people the way people spoke
would have a pretty uncanny resemblance to old English accents,

(09:34):
and it's a trip for people. But yeah, it's some
because he is also from Virginia, where he spends a
lot of time. He has one of those accents that
feels weirdly deep South that can be difficult to place.
He wants to be a guy of letters. He wants
to be a literary figure. He finally gets paid to

(09:55):
write in Baltimore. He wins fifty bucks from newspaper in
a con test he is. He gets a job in
the literary community. In eighteen thirty five, he's editing a
thing called Richmond's Southern Literary Messenger. He does marry his
cousin when she is thirteen. Her name is Virginia Clym.

(10:16):
They remain they're main legally married until she passes away.
But that marriage is a whole other bag of badgers.
And I've been peppering in some hints at conspiracy here,
so this is one more. As we'll see, there's evidence
that he did this not out of romantic inclination. While

(10:36):
his life continued to just suck terribly at all these
various points, he continually wrote a ton of stuff. And
his big moment comes January twenty ninth, just ten days
after his birthday. In eighteen forty five, he gains national
fame with the Raven. And would he attain that kind

(10:58):
of fame with a single word again, quoth the Raven?
Never more?

Speaker 4 (11:03):
He did? He?

Speaker 3 (11:04):
Actually, it's funny because he wrote a lot of people
made money off the Raven, and he was no different.
He didn't make as much money as he probably should have,
but he would talk about the Raven. He's published these
essays where he tried to portray the creation of this

(11:25):
poem as though it were the assembly, as though we
who were an engineer, right, And it sounds so pretentious.
I've just be honest. Sounds supertentious because there are parts
where he's talking. You could see written versions of this too,
where he's thinking. And in the spirit of great poets,
of course, I mechanically wanted a refrain, a return, and

(11:48):
something with a resonance sound through the pantheon of vowels.
Of course there was the O, and so I landed
on never more.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
It's really interesting. No, yeah, you're right, but it's really
interesting because that's the kind of thing that I would
eat up if it was somebody like teaching a class
about it, but not if it was to smell my
own farts kind of situation. And that's how I made
the Miracle of the Raven. If you don't mind, guys,
really quickly, I just want to jump back to something

(12:21):
we just spoke about. He won fifty dollars right for
publishing something, just to give context, because in my mind,
you think, fifty dollars, What the hell that's what he
got for winning that thing? Why is that even a
footnote in his life? If you do the inflation calculator,
fifty dollars in eighteen thirty three is worth one eight
hundred and five dollars today. So that's a nice little

(12:43):
prize money for some writing.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Right, fifty dollars is still a lot for a poet today.
I'm just gonna point that out as a guy who
has books of poetry.

Speaker 4 (12:54):
Well, I mean remember y'all, we were bouncing around in
LA like in Manhattan Beach and Venice Beach area. We
saw a lot of poem kind of stands, you know,
on the street, and I don't think they were charging
fifty bucks. So that fifty it's quite a good deal.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
I wonder for the public. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if
there would I mean, that's that's a fun thing to do,
but also it's probably really demanding, but it's good. It's
a good exercise. I've never personally done it. Maybe maybe
we could try it. I don't know, but we know that, yeah,
we know that Poe was making a living. It wasn't

(13:31):
making the most fantastic living, but he did have a job.
He was getting by. On October third, eighteen forty nine,
there's a guy named Joseph W. Walker who's going to
a busy public house. A public house is a bar. Basically,
it's called Gunners Hall. It's election day for the local sheriff,

(13:53):
and Gunners Hall is busy because, like so many places,
it is functioning as a pop up polding place. People
are showing up there to vote, which doesn't happen in
the US anymore. Now, it's got to be like libraries
and churches, right, Can you imagine people trying to vote
at the local.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
No, boy, that sounds fun.

Speaker 4 (14:17):
You're foreshadowing again.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
I'm for shadowing a bit, yes, sir. So what happens
when Walker arrives at Gunners.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Hall, Well, Joseph W. Walker noticed something strange, something you
wouldn't normally see. I guess you wouldn't normally see. He
saw a shoddily dressed man laying in a gutter, and
he thought to himself, oh, geez, you know, well, we
don't know what he thought, but that's that's unfortunate, right.
The other thing is the person was like, I don't know,

(14:46):
how would you put it, guys, He was in and
out of consciousness.

Speaker 4 (14:51):
It was like he was calling out for somebody.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
He was yeah, but but like almost as though, and
I don't want to put too much spin on it,
but almost as though something is wrong with his ability to.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Move right, like eat an ether high or something, or
maybe maybe a disassociative state of some sort, or maybe
an excess of drug consumption, whether that be alcohol or opiate,
something like that. Walker is approaching Gunner's Hall and he says,

(15:24):
holy shit, that's Edgar Allan Poe. And this was unusual
because Poe was not supposed to be in Baltimore at all.
He had left Richmond, like left Richmond heading for Philadelphia
five days earlier, September twenty seventh, and ever since then,
nohen had any idea where he had been. So Walker

(15:44):
picture him shaking. Poe, is you know, my good man?
Do you know of anyone nearby who could provide assistance?
And Poe's eventually able to give him a name which
sounds so made up. Eventually Poe is able to kind
of semi incoherently Joseph fe nod Grass, who was a
local magazine editor with some medical experience.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
And a fabulous last name. And Bet, I have to
point out this detail that you found in the Rouquac
counts of this, the description of his clothing as being
a stained faded only because these old timey terms give
me joy. A stained faded old bombazine coat, pantaloons of
a similar character, a pair of worn out shoes run
down at the heels at an old straw hat.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
A bombazine coat is like a thick, dark material made
from wool mixed with cotton. So a picture like Victoria
Mourning clothes.

Speaker 4 (16:37):
Got it almost like a pea coat.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would say, so, yeah, that's what
I think of too. So yeah, he's dressed weird. And
this next part sounds really strange, so we had to
look in multiple places to verify this. But this is
the era before cell phones. Guy says, hey, is there
anybody nearby who can help you? Because can't stay at

(17:00):
my house? Basically was the implication. Walker wrote a letter
to this guy's not Grass, asking for help. So apparently
he thought Poe had just fallen down on his heels,
you know, and become itinerant or something like that. Poe
is carted off to an area of Washington College Hospital

(17:22):
when there are bars on the windows. It's restricted from
the rest of the hospital. It's tougher to visit there,
and it's for people who are suffering from really messed
up situations. Maybe mental instability. Maybe it's a drunk tank,
it's any and all of the above. Poe never recovers

(17:43):
from this state. He's always in the state Matt just described.
He's in there for several days. He's hallucinating, He's in
and out of consciousness, and the only consistent thing, according
to his doctor at least, is that he keeps yelling
the name Reynolds, sometimes muttering it, sometimes he's shouting it.
By five am on October seventh, he raises up, screams,

(18:11):
and he's dead.

Speaker 4 (18:13):
Geez, Yeah, that's nothing.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
I wonder if Always Sonny folks named those characters after that.
He just knew.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
He was so excited about the Always Sunny adaptation or
creation centuries from now. It was his greatest work, and
it was Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Maybe he he time traveled watched some episodes of Always Sunny,
and he was just thinking about Frank and Dan Dennis,
the whole time.

Speaker 3 (18:39):
I did not picture them showing up, and I'm glad
they made it. It's his death certificate apparently lists the
cause of his demise as something called frenitis swelling of
the brain. Maybe, as we'll see that doctor John Joseph
Moran was not super reliable, and to this day absolutely
no one knows what the happened except maybe us. By

(19:03):
the end of the show, we'll see we're gonna pause
for worth more sponsor, and we'll be right back. Here's
where it gets crazy. It's true no one. No one
really knows how he died. No knows famous, and no
one knows.

Speaker 4 (19:22):
We've certainly got some some possibilities, though, as you mentioned, Ben,
this is the guy who, for all intents and purpose, no, yeah,
for every intent and every purpose, invented the detective novel.
He himself was a mystery and left a mystery for
history to unravel nearly two hundred years later. We've got

(19:45):
a handful of theories, some more credulous than others, but no,
like you said, been no definitive answer or proof as
to what happened. You know, a lot of what we know?
What we should first start with this, now that a
lot of the information out there about Edgar Allan Poe
is actually what you might consider libelous. You know, a

(20:10):
lot of this stuff was put out by detractors of
his he did. He was not one who was particularly
good at making friends. And one in particular story you
hear all the time, a less talented this that or
the other, someone who covets what someone has. A less
talented writer who used to be Poe's friend, a guy

(20:31):
named Rufus Wilmot. Griswold, was putting a lot of stuff
out into the world, you know, as.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
A real hater man. He was a real piece of trash,
reputation destroying kind of stuff. He didn't have the he had.
I believe they originally got beefed up because he had
included the rave No He'd included a poem of pose

(20:58):
in one of his anthemologies. He was an anthologist, and this, this,
the whole thing sparked off when Poe published a critical response.
He that Griswold felt was talking trash about his anthology,
of which Poe is a part, and so he went

(21:22):
crazy far with it. He couldn't get revenge. While Poe
was alive. He would talk trash to anybody about Poe.
Walpoe was alive, and when ed Grallan Poe passed away,
this guy wrote the official obituary under a kind of
cowardly pseudonym Ludwig and it's nothing but a hit piece.
And then he claimed he kind of took advantage of

(21:44):
Poe's mother in law and claimed to be Poe's literary executor.
He wrote the first full biography of Poe and it
is entire. It is one of the hugest reasons people
believe that he had a kind of like a struggle
with alcohol or a struggle with drugs. It's one of

(22:04):
the huge reasons he did have a struggle with alcohol,
but it's very different from actual alcoholism. And then he's
the reason people believe that the guy was a huge
fan of incest. He said he was a platress. He
intimated that Poe was going to participate in the overthrow
of the United States. He was just adding in all

(22:26):
kinds of weird.

Speaker 4 (22:28):
Well, and we know that when things like that get
out there, it's a lot harder to put that back
in the bottle, you know, put those badgers back in
the bag, or Genie back in the bottle, which ever
matter for you before, because the salacious details are often
the ones that are the most repeated. You know, and
we know Poe was a weird cat, you know, I
mean Rita's stuff. The truth, I mean, the work speaks

(22:51):
for itself. He obviously had, you know, a proclivity toward darkness,
so it's easy to kind of believe that he was
some sort of ether sod alcoholic pediast.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
It's weird to for me, guys, Cuz well, kind of
the observation we've already made about Edgar Allan Poe like
maybe a little bit enjoying the smell of his own farts,
tiny bit just when he's talking about creating, you know,
the raven as we discussed earlier. That seems to be
one of the primary things that this rufous character didn't

(23:23):
like about Poe. Right, because you could go to it's
Boston Public Libraries website bp L dot org reads some
writing by Kim Reynolds another Reynolds uh, and she talks
about some of the intricacies there of that relationship. And
it is funny because it's like it is just two
guys who are like, oh yeah, well nah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
Well he doesn't seem to be have been a people
person necessarily, you know, so he wasn't one of like
he was one of those folks who doesn't function at
the top of him American society because he is a
genius and he's very talented, but he's not he's not
kissing ass, he's not networking. He doesn't tolerate kind of

(24:08):
the credit thievery that you're you're sort of supposed to
put up with in American society to advance socially right,
from science papers on down. So he also it's funny though,
because you're right, this seems that the pettiness was turned
up to eleven and Griswold, now that Poe cannot defend himself,

(24:30):
is just going to town and dancing on the grave.
I remember one of my old professors really really put
this in perspective when she was talking to us about
how Griswold took possession of Poe's papers right, which are
handwritten at this time, and he would literally go through
them to try to prove his point, Like there's a

(24:53):
there's some passage and I'm paraphrasing here where Poe is
writing I am marrying Virginia to save her from another
man to like keep her out of an unhappy romantic marriage,
like marriage is just a parking space he's taking. He says,
I do not desire her sexually, and this Griswold guy
would scratch out not and then he would published it

(25:16):
with Poe saying I do thought that thought desire her sexually.

Speaker 4 (25:21):
Wow. Yeah, because that's that's one of the big things
that you always hear is that he had like this
child bride, you know, who was the the bit of No,
I know he did. But what I'm saying, but what
I'm saying is when it's repeated, it's kind of repeated
in this like as if he was some sort of
you know, sexual predator and and and and you know,

(25:44):
and based on what we're what we're discussing here, that
wasn't necessarily that wasn't the case.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
Well we still, I mean that's the thing too, We
still we still don't know because this all came out,
Like you said, the lurid headlines spread much more quickly, right,
lie is around the world twice before the truth gets
up in the morning, you know. So it does seem
that there are some at the very least they are

(26:09):
very serious questions about whether or not Poe deserved this image,
and it seems that someone defamed his character just very
well and very efficiently. And we have to remember that
when we talk about the theories surrounding his death, there's
already one layer of conspiracy at play.

Speaker 4 (26:27):
I under sent And it didn't help that Virginia Clem
was his cousin and was thirteen.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, yeah, that didn't help. Let's okay, let's go to
the theory. So one of the first and for a
long time the most popular is alcohol. People said, okay,
Edgar Allan Poe drank himself to death. Oh, I read
that first biography that came out. Also, Griswold lectured on this.
He made money talking about it. So they believed what

(26:56):
they heard, that this guy had just drank himself into
the grave. If we go to Chris Sempsner, the curator
of the Poe Museum in Richmond for quite some time
west see he puts it this way. A lot of
the ideas that have come up over the years have
centered around the fact that Poe couldn't handle alcohol. It
had been documented apparently multiple times since me here, that

(27:18):
after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His
sister had the same problem. It seemed to be something hereditary.
So it wasn't like he was who is that other
guy John Updike level who's hound like just downing fifths
of vodka? Oh right, we're an audio podcast.

Speaker 4 (27:39):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
I'm raising my hands as though, like this is what
people down vodka like, but it looks more like an
awkward club dance. It wasn't that he was drinking an
unusual anomalous amount. Apparently he had some genetic quirk, some
kind of allergy that made him incapable of handling alcohol,

(28:00):
so drinking any at all really knocked him on his ass.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
It's such a weird thing to be because anybody who's
good at hiding how much they drink, and we've met
several of them over our years, he could be having
one drink in public, but that's not all he's drinking, right,
So it's just so tough for me when you're looking
back at history in this way that isn't documented that well,
the way we kind of have to just go on

(28:25):
faith to some degree about what we choose, the version
of events or reality that we choose to seem.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
So if yeah, I mean, and that's a good point.
There are all these these questions that remain, but we
have to look at the problems with the theory. You know, Okay,
if we drank himself to death, could that explain how
he disappeared for five days and then showed up in
a totally different city in totally different clothes that weren't
his own, Like, I don't know how Probably those vendors last, right,

(28:56):
is that it could somebody drink so much that they're
gone for a week and then they're if.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
You're on a train, right, or if you're trying to
get on a train and you get on a train
and now you're in a different place and now you're
trying to get somewhere else. I don't know. It could
be a that sounds like a movie plot to me.

Speaker 3 (29:15):
Here's another issue. I mean, I did get drunk and
one day wake up on a landing on a plane
to Chile. So that's yeah, mistakes were made, but that
was in the course of twenty four hours. But the
other thing, now we should mention to that point we're
talking about with defamation Snodgrass, that magazine editor who finally

(29:42):
after a week replies to the appeal for help. Snodgrass
wasn't just a magazine editor in Baltimore. He was a
incredibly vocal member of the temperance movement, and he, likes
so many other people, made bank off PO dying. So

(30:04):
he got on the lecture circuit and he traveled around
speaking at temperance events, assuring people that alcohol led to
Poe's death because it helped his narrative. And so the
weird thing is, I think we talked about this a
little bit. In two thousand and six. Someone conducted hair

(30:28):
test on PO. They still had because you know, this
back in the time where it was normal and not
creepy to give people locks of your hair. Have you
guys ever done that? Do you ever give someone to
lock your hair? Noel's face for spotted to that.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
That was great. And I remember the first time we
got a manscaped sponsorship.

Speaker 4 (30:47):
No never mind.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, I don't no judgment, you know, I know people
keep it to commemorate important things, but I don't. I
just I feel anyway, this was historical hair, so maybe
it's a little different. They conducted these hair tests, and
it seems that Poe had kept it caused them to

(31:12):
think that Poe had kept a vow of sobriety for
some time, long enough for it to affect you know,
the levels of chemicals you will find in his hair.
Of course, this being the eighteen hundreds, As we'll see,
the level of mercury and heavy metals were much higher
for everybody, basically so that it seemed that he would

(31:35):
have been maintained sobriety up to the time of his death,
unless he was drugged and or forced to drink. And
let's go to the second theory where Noel, you alluded
to something that I think is a very plausible theory.

Speaker 4 (31:48):
Actually, oh yeah, the this is something we've talked about,
I think probably on this show as well, but certainly
on Ridiculous History. The idea of election rigging. Let's just
call it, right, I mean, let's call it what it is.
Various forms of it. Stuffing ballot boxes, you know, intimidation

(32:08):
of voters, you know, asking people to like, forcing people
perhaps at gunpoint or you know, club point, I guess
to vote multiple times before it was you know, a
lot harder to commit that level of voter fraud. But
there was a practice in the nineteenth century wherein gangs
of folks you know, associated with a certain political campaign,

(32:29):
likely for pay, would round people up and ply them
with booze, like literally force them to drink right and
in order to kind of loosen them up a little bit,
and then have them vote vote multiple times while also
this kind of silly sounding, but it's really messed up

(32:51):
if you think about someone that's been essentially drugged and
then forced to wear various disguises and then going back
to the the ballot box, you know, under the guise
of a new person out of a new identity. In
Baltimore in particular, this was a huge problem.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Well, what did we talk about was going on at
the place where Poe was.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
Found voting for the sheriff.

Speaker 4 (33:16):
So this.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
There's also the argument that Gunner's Hall in particular was
a hotbed of this activity, and like you said, Nolan's
super common in Baltimore. The fact that Poe was found
delirious on election day, then it starts to look like
we're making a lunchable stack of coincidence, right.

Speaker 4 (33:39):
Yeah, I really love the fact that you point out
that something that I wasn't aware of, and I'm interested
and seeing maybe where there's some corroborating sources on this.
We know that that's a little bit tricky sometimes. For Poe,
this condition that he may have had that was hereditary,
potentially that would have caused him to become much more
intoxicated than the amount of alcohol he consumed. Might have

(34:00):
led one to become in a situation where, you know,
folks are literally forcing you under duress to drink too
much that could easily result in in an overdose death.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
Sure, yeah, and you know we're not we're not doctors.
We do know, without disclosion too much, we do know
some people in our lives who have some sort of
alcohol allergy, you know. And thank goodness, you know nowadays
in the US, you are hopefully not going to be
in a situation where someone forces you to drink if

(34:35):
you don't want to, or force tries to force you
to do any kind of substance you don't want to do.
If you're in that situation, a sanctimoni says, it might
sound just remove yourself from it because anybody's trying to
push you in that direction there, they don't have your
best interests at heart.

Speaker 4 (34:53):
No, No, it's a bit's a they're either after something nefarious,
they're trying to manipulate you, or it's just a product
of their own security and they don't want to like
be the only one getting messed up.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
It's not for your benefit, right right and so and hey,
if you're afraid, if you've got fomo of missing out,
I guarantee some of the best house parties I've ever
been to are when I was the DD because when
I was driving folks home, that's when it all that's
when it all came out, some of it being puke.

(35:24):
But you know, live and learn. So this is a
pretty plausible theory, the idea that he was somehow gang
press ganged into these voting schemes which were very common
in the day, distressingly so. And there's another theory which
is also sadly plausible. So he's got swelling of the brain, right,

(35:47):
that's the medical diagnosis. What if someone just beat the
crap out of him, because he definitely, again was not
great with people. He seems like the kind of guy
who might chewed his mouth off to the wrong person,
could rub somebody.

Speaker 4 (36:03):
The wrong way, even just by like being a little
too flowery with his pros. What is this guy talking about.
Let's kick his ass also, you know, even if he
was you know, I mean, this is really sad to
even think about, but these kind of roving gangs of
nerdy wells that would have been associated with these cooping schemes,
they're the kinds of folks that would just kick the

(36:25):
crap out of a homeless person that might have just
been passed out drunk on the street. If you remember
the scene in a Clockwork Orange where there's like a
kind of like a you know, an unhoused fellow that
Alex and his you know drugs beat the crap out
of just for fun.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
That's real people do that, the old ultra violence. Yeah,
it's quite possible that he was beaten to the point
where he received a traumatic brain injury and died as
a result. That's another reason why most of the people
you know who or who have experience in marcial arts

(37:00):
or professional fighting will do everything they can to stay
out of a physical altercation, because it's very easy to
accidentally get someone in a situation where they hit their
head with permanent and or fatal damage. Heads are fragile, man,
So you know, to your point, somebody walking by, even
if something already happened to him, even if he got

(37:22):
cooped and he's laying there and somebody just walks by
and kicks him in the head for fun, that could
cause that brain swelling, or take a nasty fall, or
just slip, just had a slip and slide. Quite possible
because it's cold and rainy in Baltimore at this time.
This theory, the beating theory, first gets traction, and this
is according to Edgar Allen Poe. Society of Baltimore, which

(37:45):
collects a lot of Pope papers, first gains prominence when
another biographer named e. Oakes Smith claims in nineteen seventy
two that she has the scoop. She said, as Poe
was talking to some lady basically at the bar who
considered herself insulted by him, get away from me, creep,

(38:11):
and that he was beaten then by a guy who
was trying to try trying to save the woman's honor
or something like that, and that that caused a brain fever.
There's another version where Poe runs into his buddies from

(38:31):
West Point from his short time at West Point where
he refused to do anything, and that they said, oh, man, ed,
it's so great to see you, bro Are you still
writing poems. Well, that's what's up. Hey, Come have a
drink with us, and we know how you get man crazy. Eddy,
just have a glass of champagne. And that he had

(38:52):
one glass of champagne and it got him fifty eight
sheets to the wind.

Speaker 4 (38:56):
Went straight to his head, went straight to his.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Yeah, that's what they say, champagin right, we's straight to
his head. And then he just wandered around the streets
of Baltimore like a lunatic till someone robbed him and
beat him senseless. But when I see those from those
reports and like the you know, in the late eighteen hundreds,

(39:19):
there's not a ton of first hand evidence.

Speaker 4 (39:22):
Right.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
The closest we could get is the biographers saying this,
and we don't necessarily know who they spoke to. We
don't have that necessarily showing up in a ton of
other places being See, that's the case for a lot
of things we have for many years because people didn't
have the same technology to bring to bear on this.
You couldn't test for substances and hair and so on.

(39:46):
So people were doing the best they could, just like
detectives and detective novels, they were trying to solve the
crime with a minimum amount of clues, and that's why
we have a lot of theories that were popular for
a while that are kind of discredited now.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
So, Ben, there was a point that you made earlier
about hair tests in two thousand and six, right, showing
that you know, Poe was largely sober.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
Right, Yeah, that's the that's the argument. So the study
was funded by Alliance Atlantis, an outfit out of Toronto,
and they were producing a series called dead Man's Tails
that was going to go on the Discovery channel Discovery Health.

(40:35):
So they had legit folks out of DC test these samples,
and most of what they were finding regarded heavy metals.
But it appears that the hair test itself showed that yeah,
he wasn't He wasn't a raging boozhound either.

Speaker 4 (40:51):
And the heavy metal thing is interesting because I believe
all of those levels were within limits that would not
have been life threatening. And we know, you know, back
in those days, there were heavy metals that were used
in manufacturing processes that were you know, kind of people
were just exposed to them a little more often, like
felts and hats and stuff like that. Yeah, that's one

(41:13):
of the mercury rather mercury being used to treat felt
in hats. Yeah, that's one of the theories that was
in the running for a while was heavy metal poisoning.
And it's kind of sad to look back, especially that
hair test, and realize that Po had highly elevated levels
with certain heavy metals.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
But so did everyone else, you know, arsenic, mercury, you
name it. The thing is in mercury. In particular, PO
did not have the levels that would be associated with
mercury poisoning. He just had too much mercury.

Speaker 4 (41:51):
But wasn't that a thing though, I mean, the whole
expression Matt as a hatter, like ye would kill you,
but it would maybe make you a little off right, Yes, yeah,
that is true, was part of part of the danger.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
And then other people, you know, there were again they
were working with limited information. It's not a ding on them.
There were people who saying maybe he had carbon monoxide poisoning,
because that's dangerous and they used coal gas to light
things indoors. This doesn't seem likely for some pretty basic reasons. Right,

(42:22):
everybody else is in the room that nobody else is
outside semi conscious, Right, what was he just huffing the
lamp and see like, hey, guys, I don't really drink,
but let me snarf on this. I like to party.

Speaker 4 (42:39):
I doubt it. I just have a question, like I
really did believe that, you know, that Poe was some
kind of opioid you know, opium addicted alcoholic. And I
understand why now it's because of a lot of these
accounts you know from from this Ludwig fellow. But he
was not at all. He didn't dabble in any kinds

(42:59):
of drugs or and then the alcohol stuff really is
just kind of this is the information we have.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
Well, we have to be careful with the with our
sources too, because the Edgar Allen Poe Society of Baltimore,
which is amass many and many of these papers. If
I have a horse in the race, you know what
I mean. But according to the correspondence that we can see,
he tried laudanum under the advice of a doctor and

(43:26):
like a couple of like one or two isolated incidents,
and he didn't vibe with it. Apparently, I think maybe, uh,
I guess a lot of I guess it makes sense though,
because we think of writers of that time doing just
on the stuff right, and writing poetry especially, So I
feel like such a sucker.

Speaker 4 (43:46):
This is really important and educational for me, and I'm
sure some listeners out there were in the same boat.
Thanks for digging all this stuff up.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
Then we have to be honest, though, because we may
be falling into the grips of apola. Just oof, that
was a rough one, get it, iologist religious? Oh yeah,
I got now. It just sounds like a weird accent,
all right. But but yeah, so that original conspiracy distorts stuff.

(44:14):
Then another discredited thing is the flu. Poe hadn't been
feeling well, right, so he like we know, he went
to a doctor before he left for Richmond.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yeah, well, at least according to what we know about
his wife's statements at the time he was he had
the clear signs of somebody with a flu. He had
a weak pulse, right at least if when she was
feeling him and he was around her before he left.
And also he had a fever. I mean that's pretty clear.
If you're super warm to the touch, you might just

(44:46):
needed more count you know, that's it's fever. Yeah, that
is it. But then you're traveling. Everybody knows when you've
got the flu. You need to get in bed asap.
That's it. Well, I mean, not only because you're gonna
get every body else sick. You gi everybody else the flu.
Come on, now, you can't want to get traveling in
the rain.

Speaker 5 (45:06):
You picture Poe as this weedy, pale, little sickly man.
That's how he's depicted, you know, in illustrations, and you know,
as just being him.

Speaker 4 (45:17):
He was, you know, a sort of prone to ill health,
wasn't he isn't?

Speaker 3 (45:23):
That?

Speaker 4 (45:23):
Is that not true either? I just I don't know
what to believe.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Well, you got to look at the de gerotype.

Speaker 3 (45:28):
You gotta look at the to gerotypes. It's all about
the de guerotypes. What we need is a law and
order spin off. Let's get some copaganda set in the
eighteen hundreds and have them investigate these weird deaths. We
also need to take an ad break.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
I think, Oh okay, but well, let's say at least
the doctor told him, hey, maybe don't travel with the flu.

Speaker 4 (45:51):
Pal.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
Yeah. Yeah, And I was laughing too, because I thought
you said, you know what you gotta do. I thought
you were about to say, you know what you got
to do when you get get the flu? Gott to
hop on the train.

Speaker 4 (46:00):
Yeahda hit the road the shinto Wellsville, baby.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
And write it till two am in the morning when
you riot.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
Sorry, no, I don't want anything from the sandwich cart,
but please come closer. I'd like to cough on it, but.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
The doctor told him not to go. He could have
gotten super sick from that travel, from the weather, from
the temperatures out there, and all the other things. Could
have caught something else on top of the flu while
traveling with all those people. That could be it. Right,
you can get hallucinations from that stuff, being in that
fugue state we talked about.

Speaker 4 (46:37):
No question. You can get hallucinations from just being dehydrated,
you know, I mean no question, Like I mean, you
hear about people being in the desert or whatever and
being dehydrated and sun worn and then having like all
kinds of visions all of that. So there's no question
there's certain things that could cause you to fit to
actually see things that aren't there.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
Absolutely. Well, let's call that theory, though, the flu theory
a bit of a long shot, and take a look
at a few other things. After a word from our sponsors.

Speaker 4 (47:13):
And we're back. We've mentioned the idea of swelling of
the brain and the unfortunate case of the passing the
demise of Ed Grallan Poe. We have talked about how
that could have been the result of him receiving a
vicious beating. But what if it wasn't a beating or
a drugging, you know, or you know, a sensitive system

(47:37):
reacting poorly to too much alcohol. What if it was
something else, a more sinister laying in wait.

Speaker 3 (47:44):
Well, a ticking time bomb of cancer, you know. We
know that sometime before his final trip, another physician had
diagnosed him at one point with quote lesions on the brain.
Of course, this is before the days of MRI and
cat scans and so on, so they can't see into

(48:04):
the brain. And I guess unless they conducted trepidation, right,
which is drilling the little hole, little Heidi hole in
the back, people can survive it. But he did not
have that operation. There's a weird thing that happens. Like
a lot of writers, he becomes famous after his death.

(48:26):
He's posthumously appreciated. Fast forward twenty six years after he's buried,
the town says, we decided that we like him. We
are going to put a statue of him in the graveyard,
and we're gonna also exhume his remains and move them
closer because he was buried in a not great part

(48:47):
of the graveyard.

Speaker 4 (48:49):
You know, now that he's not around all the time,
weirding up the joint, you know, we'll remember him fondly.
Little revisionist history there.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
Yeah, now that we just have to deal with the
idea of him instead of the actual person. He's aces.
So the problem is Decay is a brutal, constant beast,
So his coffin's very fragile. As people are trying to
move it. The story goes, it fell apart. It coffin flopped.

Speaker 4 (49:18):
God, I'm trying to say coffin flops on a show, Ben, They're.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
Trying to say coffin flops, not a show. It's just
body after body.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
They don't got no souls.

Speaker 4 (49:29):
They don't busting through it.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
Sorry, we got to keep it all.

Speaker 4 (49:33):
Can't wait for the.

Speaker 3 (49:34):
So this is pretty soon now, right, it's like the
season threes on the way. So there's definitely a coffin
flop situation. According to this story, pose corpse is you know,
not going to survive twenty eight plus years decay very well,
and a worker notices one weird thing in his skull.

(49:56):
He says, there's a mass rolling inside. Newspaper papers claimed
the clump was pose brain.

Speaker 4 (50:02):
That's rude.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
It was shriveled but still around after three decades in
the dirt.

Speaker 4 (50:07):
Yeah, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
Wouldn't it decay the same as.

Speaker 4 (50:14):
Squish to go as?

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Yeah, the human brain is one of the first components
to rot completely after.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
Death because it's soft and wet, right, I mean those
those parts go away quick.

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Yeah. Yeah, So there's what newspaper of note was printing this.
That's what I want to.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
Know, right, the brain pan quarterly fake news, I say,
fake news. Agreed, so say we all.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
But something was found right inside his skull.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
We don't have it, We don't know. It would change
the conversation if that someone had physical possession of that mass.
But apparently this worker didn't have the juice or the
inclination to say, hang on before we honor this great ride,
or let me get my fingers up of this cranium.
I feel like I can dig something out of here, respectfully, guys, respectfully?

Speaker 4 (51:08):
Is the idea that it would maybe, Okay, we know
it wasn't this shriveled brain. But like a tumor is
also made of tissue. It's just malignant tissue that grows
out of control. It's not like special or you know,
lasts longer or something.

Speaker 3 (51:22):
Right, right, Yeah, So this is where a novelist named
Matthew Pearl comes into play. Matthew Pearl is writing a
novel about Poe. He gets really interested in this aspect
and he speaks to a pathologists. They can't remember the name,
but he speaks to this pathologist and he says, well,
we know this thing in the skull couldn't have been

(51:44):
a brain thirty years later, but could it be a tumor?
And the pathologist said, yeah, because under the right circumstances,
tumors can calcify to hard masses.

Speaker 4 (51:56):
Interesting, I didn't know that. Okay, there you go.

Speaker 3 (51:58):
So that could explain the IRA behavior. That could explain
some of the difficulties with cognition. But again, it's a
it takes a bridge of assumptions to reach that, right.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Yeah. But it's like the movie Phenomenon, but in the
opposite direction. Instead of its miracles, he's writing poetry.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Like Phenomenon.

Speaker 4 (52:23):
No, No, not to be confused. There's another movie with
the similar title also like Phenomenon and Powder came out
at the same time, and they were very similar plots,
but one of them was written by a pedophile. John
has John Travolta in it. Oh but yeah, the Powder
guy who also did the Jeeper Screepers movies. His name

(52:44):
is Escaping Me Convicted. That probably can't have nice things.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
But John travolt also has a litt new sexual assaulta.

Speaker 4 (52:58):
Just don't don't don't mean your heroes if anyway. My
question to you Ben, though, is, or to both of
you Fellaws, is can't brain lesions form over time and
even perhaps be responsible for weird directions and creativity?

Speaker 3 (53:19):
It can, It can happen, but it's a lot like
it's like winning a lottery because you can. You can
read cases where someone has received an injury and like
the most extreme comic book version of it would be
called acquired savant syndrome. If you've heard of that, someone

(53:42):
has really profound injury and all of a sudden they
emerge from this traumatic brain injury or this illness with
a weird newfound skill like they now I am an
amazing painter, or now holy crap I can play the
glockenspiel like nobody's business. Now it is rare. I guess

(54:08):
we should say those people still don't necessarily have the
best lives because it traumatic range injury comes with a
lot of you know, trauma on the side. But it's
possible then with that, I like that line of thought.
It's possible that maybe there was some kind of brain
leision driving his obsession with letters that developed over time. Maybe,

(54:29):
but just asking questions, it's a great question.

Speaker 4 (54:32):
This is a conjectury type of episode. Which speaking of that,
let's move on to another option. That is certainly something
that can cause erratic behavior and deteriorating physical health.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (54:47):
You guys ever had a rabies shot? Do you get
it in advance or do you get it like after
you've maybe been bitten? I forget you get it in advance.
I think it's a it's it's an inoculation, right, vaccine. Yeah,
now that's Rebellum's is Rabi's like a it's an early one,
you get I think as we obviously can can cure
it with the vaccine, but back in these days, it

(55:08):
was maybe something that would be a little more nefarious,
something people could potentially die from because lacks of lack
of medical science, you know, having a way to cure it.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Well, the symptoms of rabies were certainly close, at least
in resemblance to what Edgar Allan Poe was going through
or reported to be going through just before he died.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
Right, Yeah, and here here is another tale. This is
pretty fascinating. So it's nineteen ninety six. There's this cardiologist
in Maryland named R. Michael Benitez, and Benitez goes to
a conference where he and fellow pathologists play some reindeer

(55:54):
games pathology. The games that pathologists play, aside from sound
like an off Broadway production, is a it's really interesting.
They're each give they're given a mystery, and the mystery
is a list of symptoms from an anonymous patient with
a pseudonym often initials, and then based on the symptoms

(56:18):
and some contemporary reports, these pathologists attempt to make a diagnosis.
So Doc Benitez reads about this mystery patient and he's
ticking the boxes off in his head and he goes,
I'm certain there's an example of rabies. Imagine his surprise
when he learns his anonymous patient ep is Edgar Allan Poe.

(56:41):
His diagnosis is published in the September nineteen ninety six
issue of the Maryland Medical Journal, and it still has
some problems though it's still not solving it, like where
are all the wild animals? Why was it? Why didn't
the medical examiner see a bite on Poe?

Speaker 4 (56:59):
That's the Actually I could imagine there. It would have
been maybe street dogs, you know, like I mean, that
may have been rabbid, but I just just I kind
of was just guestimating. But the rabies vaccine was not
successfully created until eighteen eighty five, so we're just before
that and lose Louis Pasteur and his colleagues that actually

(57:22):
used rabbit spinal cord suspensions that contained inactivated rabies into
a nine year old patient, Joseph Meister. So this definitely
would have been, you know, an issue.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
And there's no DNA evidence that the doctor could use.
The doctor's very fair about this. He also says there's
no evidence of hydrophobia, which is that when people have rabies,
especially when you're when you're in the fully a yeah
it fell fully developed stages of it, you are afraid

(58:00):
to drink water. But Poe was drinking water up until
his death, at least if you can believe his original
doctor hmm, yeah, yeah. But the reason fans of Poe
like this theory is because it is the first time
a modern physician was able to look at this case
without implicit assumptions based on Poe's identity and all the

(58:23):
other public reputation stuff. So we have one at least
one guy looked at it without knowing who who the
story was about. Based on that, they said, probably rabies.
That's not the most fun one, the most fun when
for a lot of people the crowd today is going
to be murdered, murdered most fail I.

Speaker 4 (58:46):
Mean, even the rabies one fits the actually, I mean
I could see a lot of these having a bit
of an allure, you know, to Poe fans, just because
it's like the guy's writing is severely dark and damaged,
you know, and it's like bordering on the obsessive psychotic,

(59:06):
and like. Of course, writers don't actually have to live
the lives that they write about or have their minds
don't necessarily exist in a constant state of darkness, you know.
It's like a thing, a switch you can flip like
you're writing pretend, you know, but there's a reputation, a
lot of it. As we've discovered, it's sort of falsely,

(59:26):
you know, put out there of Poe being this kind
of damaged, you know, looney to So a lot of
this stuff really kind of tracks. But murder would obviously
be the cherry on top.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
You know.

Speaker 4 (59:39):
Guy wrote about murder all the time, people getting killed
in elaborate and punitive ways.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Oh and I've got to correct myself. This is the
Sarah story, not the I was confused when I was
thinking about that girl he wanted to marry, who was
already engaged when he came back to Richmond. This story
comes from an all Their named John, evangelist Walsh. In
two thousand, John writes a book called Midnight Dreary The

(01:00:06):
Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, and proposes that Poe
was murdered because his first wife died in eighteen forty
seven and he wanted to he became engaged to the
lady would have been his second wife, her name Sarah
Elmira Shelton, and that her three brothers were very much

(01:00:28):
against it and threatened him. And the theory is they waylaid
him in Philly, you know, what you think about this.
They waylaid him in Philly. They scared him so much
that he disguised himself apparently by wearing different clothes and
hid out for a week before he was heading back
to Mary Shelton and the brothers found him in Baltimore.

(01:00:50):
They beat him, they forced him to drink, knowing of
his allergy to the stuff, and they left him for dead.
This theory is generally considered more thought experiment because that's
a crappy disguise, right, That's like Clark Kent level disguise.
You with the straw hat. Have you seen a big

(01:01:11):
headed man who looks like he's aiming to marry our sister?

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
You know? Yeah? Well, look, I just want to put
this out. I think I could understand why maybe the
family of miss Royster Shelton did Sarah person why they
might be upset because similar to his thirteen year old cousin,
apparently Poet started hanging out with Sarah when she was fifteen,

(01:01:36):
which is a little older, and especially at that time,
like depending on where you were, it was a little
more accepted to be around fifteen years old to begin
at courtship, right, But still, maybe it didn't go, well,
that was back when he was going to the University
of Virginia. That's when he met Sarah when she was
much younger. And apparently the father of Sarah is the

(01:01:58):
reason why they weren't together anymore. So he was already
like I don't like this Poe character.

Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
No, sorry, they were engaged in two different occasions, right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
Mm hmm, So I can imagine why the family is like, no,
not this guy, not this guy.

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
M And he died just ten days before the wedding date.
And and I think at that point Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, Now,
I think at that point her husband had died.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
Yeah, she was already widowed, and she had always a
bit of money. So I don't know, man, they're like, oh,
Poe's trying to come in and get our money now,
because it's our family's money now. In some respects, that's.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
Definitely have motive. I think that's a really good point. Yeah,
they definitely have motive. But all we can say is
that none of the brother Shelton or the Royster clan
were ever prosecuted for a crime. They were never questioned,
there were certainly never rested. So again, almost two hundred
years later, the question remains, will the case ever be solved? Folks,

(01:03:07):
here's the kicker. Probably not BRep. It's not looking good.
There's just too many mysterious aspects, too many missing pieces.
The medical records disappeared, if they ever really existed. The
doctor responsible for determining the cause of death changed this
story multiple times over the years. John Joseph Moran n

(01:03:32):
was the last person to hang out with Poe as
far as we know. He also made a buck talking
about it for the rest of his life, and his
story evolved multiple times over the years. The one thing
that stood out to me a lot was, okay, changes
dates which you could get. You know, as you wax
on in the years, you might remember things. It gets

(01:03:54):
a little hazy, you know, was that October nine through
October tenth? Totally understand that. Sometimes he said Poe arrived
at the hospital on October third at five, sometimes the
next day at nine pm. And then sometimes he said
he arrived at October seventh at ten o'clock in the afternoon.

(01:04:15):
Whatever the hell that means ten o'clock.

Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
In the afternoon. I arrived places at that time all
the time.

Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
Wait, what do he lived Sous's world. What kind of
magic Harry Potter stuff is this? But yeah, ten o'clock
in the afternoon. I mean maybe I'm just maybe we
just don't know, you know, the the idioms of the
day or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
If it was afternoon and it was ten o'clock, that
would be ten pm.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
You're right, You're right, I'm being unfair.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
I'm confused by two man. I'm just like, guy, you're.

Speaker 3 (01:04:48):
Right, though, it's technically it's afternoon.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
It is afternoon.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
He just had he just had one of those weird
technically the truth kind of understandings of the world. It
was it's eleven fifty eight pm in the afternoon. Yeah,
so okay, anyway he did this. Doctor did seem to
keep changing, rewriting the story up until he himself died

(01:05:13):
in eighteen eighty five. He is sixty five years old.
At this point, no one can find ed Grollan Poe's
death certificate. We just have accounts about what it's said,
and most people, most of us are still laboring under
the poison spread by that old enemy, Wilma Griswold, who
conspired against him so effectively. This is a conspiracy that worked.

(01:05:37):
Unless you are a person who has insider information, unless
you're maybe that mysterious Poe Toaster. Let's end it there.
What is the Poe toaster that's set us on this
weird journey.

Speaker 4 (01:05:49):
It's a novelty toaster in the shape of a ground
Po's head.

Speaker 2 (01:05:52):
Yeah, that's it, That's all you need to know. No,
it's a mysterious group of people that toast the grave
of Edgar Allan Poe, and nobody really knows who they are, right, Yeah,
they used to.

Speaker 3 (01:06:02):
They stopped recently, I think, but they would go up
the yeah would They would show up an anniversary and
they would toast to him. And generally the people who
watched this happen were very respectful. It just became a
cool tradition. I think only a few times did someone

(01:06:23):
try to figure out the identity of this person. It
appeared to be a male, at least the first one.
They might have passed it down to their children. But
if you're the po toaster, let us know. Let us
know also what you think about these theories. It really
is unsolved. Maybe there's a piece of evidence out there
that can prove which of these conspiracies is true. And

(01:06:49):
then yeah, let us know your favorite creepy pofacts.

Speaker 4 (01:06:53):
Yes please, oh yes, by all means let us know.
You can find us on the internet where we are
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Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
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Speaker 3 (01:07:29):
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Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
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