The Last Days of Edgar Allan Poe

The biggest mystery of all: why did he die the way he did?

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a great American writer who left us with some our best-loved mystery stories. But there is no bigger mystery in the Poe collection than why he died. We know how he died, we just don’t know why it happened the way it did.

Let’s start out like any good mystery story with what is unequivocally known. Dr. Joseph Snodgrass found his friend, Edgar Allan Poe, half-dead and barely responsive in a pub in Baltimore on October 3, 1849. Poe was wearing a rumpled, dirty, ill-fitting suit that was not his normal attire. Dr. Snodgrass got him to a hospital where Poe died on October 7, never becoming well enough to even explain what had happened to him. His last words were reportedly, “Lord, help my poor soul.”

A few more details will make this even more perplexing. Poe did not live in Baltimore; he was just traveling through on business. It might be presumed he was in good spirits as he was planning on getting married to an old flame named Elmira Shelton in the next couple of weeks. Poe had been widowed a couple of years earlier and he had reconnected with Elmira, an old girlfriend who was likewise recently widowed. Poe was traveling alone through Baltimore, and he was found at a polling place at election time. (In Baltimore in 1849, many polling places were taverns.) His clothing was the weirdest thing. Poe favored somber dark suits and was known to be careful to the point of fastidiousness about his appearance. The dirty, ill-fitting, rumpled suit did not suit him—and the straw hat was definitely not something Poe would have chosen for himself. Due to his unresponsive state, he offered no clues as to what had happened.

So what happened?

Some wonder if Poe had taken ill. A brain tumor, stroke, heart failure, epilepsy, tuberculosis, rabies, syphilis, and doubtless other diseases have all been suggested. Since Poe was traveling and expecting to be married in a couple of weeks, it is unlikely he was in an advanced state of illness. But a sudden affliction such as a stroke or heart attack could have caused his swift death. But the illness theory does not explain the clothing.

Poe had a history of alcohol abuse and was known for going on multi-day benders. Alcohol was immediately suspected, since he was a drinker found half-dead in a pub. There are two flaws to this theory. First, Poe had recently taken “the pledge” and joined a temperance society, perhaps to please his soon-to-be new wife. In other words, Poe was on the wagon. The physicians who attended him at the hospital reported Poe had not been drinking at the time of his death. Second, alcohol toxicity does not explain the clothes and hat.

Another theory is that his new bride’s family did not like him and that Elmira’s brothers stalked Poe all the way to Baltimore in order to kill him. There is no evidence to suggest any of this is true. If we started arresting men who didn’t like their sister’s boyfriends, we’d need bigger jails. And even if the Royster boys wanted to get rid of their sister’s future husband, it still leaves some loose ends: the rumpled clothes, the straw hat, and the failure to get rid of the body. (Elmira was born a Royster and married a Sheldon and used the Sheldon name.) Most murderers do not leave their victims half-alive in taverns. The Royster boys were never arrested or even investigated for this crime, that’s how pitifully weak that allegation was.

Now prepare for the “baseless allegations” as I suggest Poe may have died of election fraud. In Baltimore and other American cities, there was a notorious practice called “cooping,” which was a violent crime and indicates that Americans have never really been good with clean voting. In cooping, a corrupt politician would hire a gang of thugs to kidnap random people from the street and incentivize them to vote for a certain candidate. These men (women couldn’t vote then) were often beaten up and threatened with worse bodily harm, but when once they voted, they were sometimes given a drink as a reward. This was a convenient arrangement since in the 1800s, many polling places were in saloons. But the fun didn’t stop there.

Even in Baltimore, there was a limit to how many times one man could vote, so the cooping thugs made their “voters” wear disguises so they could vote again and again. Polling places must not have been very strict, since these disguises could be comical. Cooping disguises included ill-fitting wigs and big hats and fake beards. Much of the clothing the victims had to wear had probably been fished out a trash bin somewhere or taken from other cooping victims. Cooping is the only theory that explains the ridiculous get-up Poe was wearing when he was found.

The goal was to get real live people to vote as many times as possible, usually culminating when they were too drunk to stand up. In the case of Poe—who apparently had not been drinking at all—he may have been nearly beaten to death if he put up much resistance.

There was no autopsy, although a newspaper suggested that death was caused by “congestion of the brain,” which was a euphemism for alcohol poisoning. Poe had been a heavy drinker in his day, but the doctors attending to him in Baltimore said he had not been drinking at the time he died.

No death certificate was ever found; it is possible none was issued. Elmira Royster Shelton wrote letters to Dr. Snodgrass to get the details of Poe’s death and mourned his mysterious death. She died in 1888, living her later years as a recluse, never remarrying, and refusing interviews about her relationship to Poe.

To this day, no one knows why Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital right before his second marriage. I believe that illness might have played a role in this demise, but I think he was a victim of election fraud because of the clothing.