Among his many literary achievements, Edgar Allan Poe is credited with creating the genre of detective fiction with his 1841 story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, paving the way for fictional sleuths from Sherlock Holmes to Nancy Drew. It is fitting, then, that the author’s own death in 1849 remains one of American literature’s great unsolved mysteries.
In June 1849 Poe embarked on a speaking tour to raise funds for a literary magazine he hoped to publish. On September 27, 1849, Poe was supposed to board a ferry from Richmond, Virginia, to Baltimore, Maryland, and then on to New York. The night before the ferry trip he visited a doctor in Richmond for a fever. About the next few days, very little is known for certain. Poe arrived in Baltimore on September 28, but he didn’t go on to New York. He turned up in a tavern in Baltimore on October 3. He was in bad shape, nearly unresponsive in what onlookers assumed was an alcoholic stupor. A note was sent to a local doctor, and Poe was soon admitted to a hospital. One odd detail is that the clothes Poe had on did not appear to be his own. Instead of his usual black wool suit, he was wearing a cheap ill-fitting suit and a straw hat.
In the hospital, Poe continued to drift in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and speaking nonsense when he was awake. On October 7 he died. A Baltimore newspaper reported enigmatically that the cause had been “congestion of the brain.”
Several theories about Poe’s cause of death have emerged. The most prominent is that he died from complications of alcoholism. J.E. Snodgrass, the doctor who saw Poe in the tavern, believed that Poe had been drinking heavily and that he ultimately succumbed to the tremors and delirium that can accompany alcohol withdrawal. A number of secondhand accounts seem to support Snodgrass, saying that Poe had encountered acquaintances in Baltimore and gone on a drinking bender. This would not have been entirely out of character, as Poe had engaged in bouts of heavy drinking throughout his life. At the time of his death, however, he had recently joined a temperance society. Moreover, John Moran, the attending physician at the hospital, was convinced that Poe was not drunk and hadn’t been drinking in the days leading up to his death. The duration of his final illness and the fact that he seemed to recover slightly in the hospital before worsening and dying also seemed inconsistent with alcohol withdrawal.
A number of diseases have been proposed as possible causes of Poe’s death, including diabetes, heart disease, epilepsy, and tuberculosis. One of the most intriguing possibilities, suggested by a doctor at the University of Maryland, is that Poe may have died from rabies. Poe’s delirium seemed to get better and then worsen again over the last days of his life, a pattern observed in patients with late-stage rabies. Furthermore, Poe’s hospital records indicated that Poe had difficulty drinking water. This may have been a manifestation of one of rabies’ characteristic symptoms, a fear of water.
Another theory holds that Poe may have been a victim of a violent crime. Because the tavern where Poe was found was being used as a polling place (it was common practice in the 19th century for voting to take place in drinking establishments), it has been proposed that he may have been caught up in an unusual form of electoral fraud known as “cooping.” In a cooping scheme, gangs working for corrupt politicians would grab unwilling bystanders off the street and force them to vote repeatedly for a certain candidate. Victims were often beaten or forced to drink alcohol to make them comply. Disguises were used to allow the victims to vote multiple times. This could explain the bizarre outfit that Poe was wearing when he was discovered.
With the fragmentary and sometimes contradictory evidence that exists regarding Poe’s last days, it’s hard to imagine that there will ever be a completely satisfactory answer as to what killed him. For the many armchair detectives who enjoy exercising their powers of ratiocination on his death, that might be good news.