Edgar Allan Poe Died 175 Years Ago Today. We Still Don't Know How

The final days of the American writer who waxed poetic on the macabre is a greater mystery than anything he ever wrote

American writer Edgar Allan Poe embodied mystery and the macabre in his work.

But perhaps the most mysterious thing about the legendary writer is that there's no closure on how he died, even over a century and a half later.

On Oct. 7, 1849, Poe died at 40 years old. Details surrounding the days leading up to his demise are the stuff of legend. Not even his medical records or death certificate survived, as any record of the time is nonexistent. The mystery surrounding his death is perhaps his greatest tale — sorry The Tell-Tale Heart fanatics.

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However, thanks to the National Park Service, we do know that in the days leading up to Poe's death, he had booked a trip from Richmond, Va. to New York, which included a stop in Baltimore on Sept. 28, 1849. No records tell of his exact whereabouts over the following days. The Edgar Allen Poe Society of Baltimore notes some of his colleagues claim he was headed to Philadelphia instead when the weather got bad or that he prematurely stopped in Baltimore.

He was MIA until he was found outside Gunner's Tavern, a Baltimore pub, on the city's election day, Oct. 3. Printer Joseph Walker found Poe to be in "great distress," appearing drunk and disheveled in clothes that were not his own. Poe's friend J.E. Snodgrass was contacted about his state, and the writer was taken to Washington College Hospital and was in and out of consciousness for days, pale and drenched in sweat. He died in the early hours of Oct. 7.

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But what was Poe doing between Sept. 28 and Oct. 3? One theory suggests that he was a victim of cooping, which was a system of voter fraud back in the day. Victims were captured, drugged and forced to vote several times — wearing a different disguise each time.

Gunner's Tavern was a polling location and folks who voted were given a drink as an incentive to cast their ballots. However, since Poe was very famous in Baltimore and would've likely been recognized, this theory is a bit thin.

One probable cause of death was the apparent overconsumption of alcohol. Poe "engaged in bouts of drinking" especially in the 1840s, but how he could have died via alcoholism remains unclear. Maybe booze was involved, though, and Poe drank before his train, boarded the wrong one and needed to backtrack from his error.

This still doesn't resolve why Poe wasn't wearing his own clothes.

A third posits that the writer was ill and that he had been diagnosed with "lesions on the brain and suffered from brain fever." Other possible ailments that could have killed him include tuberculosis, epilepsy, diabetes and rabies.

Months before he died, he wrote that he was "so ill" in a letter to his mother-in-law Maria Clemm. He had "the cholera, or spasms quite as bad, and can now hardly hold the pen."

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Perhaps the most uninteresting — and plausible — theory is that Poe was mugged, plain and simple.

In the meantime, Poe fans can investigate what really happened to him on their own — should they need a true, creepy story after finishing Fall of the House of Usher.

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