On a fall morning in 1849, Poe died in a Baltimore hospital after a stranger had found him “in great distress” a few days earlier outside a polling place during an election. The 40-year-old had been missing for almost a week. His deathbed symptoms — fever and delusions — were so vague that they’ve spawned dozens of theories, including poisoning, alcoholism, rabies, syphilis, suicide and homicide.
Now an Ohio journalist has conducted an extensive investigation into Poe’s death. In his new book, “A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” Mark Dawidziak contends that the evidence points to tuberculosis, an illness that is forever linked to artistic genius and literary martyrdom. But he says there’s a co-conspirator: an affliction known as election fraud.
Dawidziak believes that Poe failed to get proper medical care because he was “cooped” — an election-rigging scheme at the time that involved snatching someone from the streets, confining and perhaps drugging him, then trotting him out to vote again and again.
“It’s a very Baltimore explanation,” Dawidziak said. “It was a tough, tough town, nicknamed Mobtown because they took their rioting seriously.” Poe knew this as well as anyone: In 1835, when he and his family lived in the city, a three-day riot over the failure of a local bank left prominent houses burned and at least 12 people fatally shot.
While Poe will forever be linked to Baltimore — his final resting place and the home of an NFL team named in honor of his poem “The Raven” — he was only passing through the nation’s second-largest city right before he died. (Baltimore, in an overwhelmingly rural country, towered over Philadelphia, Boston and New Orleans in 1850 with a population of 169,000.)
On Sept. 27, 1849, Poe appears to have boarded a steamer in Richmond, where he had been wooing a childhood sweetheart. A day later, he disembarked in Baltimore, apparently to catch a train to Philadelphia, where he had a temporary poetry-editing gig lined up, before going on to New York City, the only U.S. city with more people than Baltimore.
Poe didn’t make a habit of disappearing. He was lively and fun-loving, not the “dark and brooding” author of legend, nor a “drug-crazed madman wandering out at night howling at the moon,” said Poe scholar Hal L. Poe, a theologian at Tennessee’s Union University whose great-great-grandfather was Poe’s cousin. But vanish he did.