Just as fascinating are Poe’s burial and his reburial 26 years later, an exhumation that adds to his mystique, even if the raw particulars of that reburial do nothing to justify the urban legend of his living entombment. Appropriate to the popular conception of the morose genius, Poe’s initial 1849 funeral, held amidst the October gloom, was sparsely attended. His coffin was simple and his grave unmarked. The presiding minister elected not to deliver a funeral sermon; dirt was shoveled on top of the mahogany box only three minutes after the service began. An impressive marble monument paid for by a relation had been destroyed when a train derailment near the masonry yard pulverized the marker, so Poe received a number on a sandstone grave. The few mourners walked away beneath the crooked, treeless oaks and hickories of the Westminster Presbyterian burying ground.
By 1875, Poe’s critical fortunes had improved. With much ceremony, he was to be exhumed and reinterred at a more prominent location in the same graveyard, a large, marble monument finally marking Poe’s final repose. When the gravediggers hoisted the decayed coffin aloft, they didn’t find a cracked lid with boney fingers jutting out or any panicked scratches on the underside of the coffin, but they did drop the box, which splintered apart (some relic-stealing lollygaggers filched moldy, rotted fragments of the wood), the poor condition of the coffin possibly contributing to the dark rumor about the author’s supposed premature burial.
While the cemetery sexton discovered that Poe’s skeleton, still wearing those preserved mourning clothes and with a few greasy locks of black hair clinging to his pate, was in relatively good condition, there was a strange sound coming from inside his skull. As they shifted the corpse from the ground, some small and hard artifact clanged about as if a rattle. It’s been hypothesized that it might have been a calcified tumor left behind as the rest of the soft, grey tissue of his brain decomposed, the last remnant of his thinking reduced to this stony nugget that very well may have been responsible for the erratic nature of his final days. Perhaps some accidental truth in the contemporary obituary from the Richmond Semi-Weekly which claimed that Poe perished from “congestion of the brain.”
Adequately hoisted from the earth then, on an autumn morning 150 years ago today Poe was reinterred into the Maryland ground, now marked by a memorial decorated with a bronze frieze depicting the author. An unsigned article in The New York Herald celebrated this “Tardy Justice to the Memory of One of America’s Greatest Poets.” A ceremony was held a month later; civic leaders and family attended, while many prominent poets were invited but only Walt Whitman showed up (Alfred Lord Tennyson sent a dedicatory verse).