How did Edgar Allan Poe die?
Edgar Allan Poe
January 19, 1809 — October 7, 1849
Baltimore, Maryland
Edgar Poe was born in Boston to two actors, orphaned before he was three, and taken in but never adopted by a Richmond tobacco merchant named John Allan, who gave him the middle name and very little else. He was expelled from West Point on purpose, married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, and watched her die of tuberculosis over five years in a house where they sometimes could not afford a fire. He was forty when he died in a Baltimore hospital, four days after being found in the street in someone else's clothes.
He invented the detective story, wrote the most famous poem in American English, and was paid nine dollars for it. He was fired from every magazine he worked at and was better than every magazine he worked at. He drank in a way that one glass undid him, and he knew it, and he kept doing it. In the last year of his life he had stopped, joined a temperance society, and gotten engaged to a widow in Richmond. He was on his way to New York to collect his aunt and bring her to the wedding.
He is buried in Baltimore, where for seventy-five years someone left three roses and a bottle of cognac on his grave every January 19 and never said who they were.
The record
What is established, from the authorities and the people who were there.
Official cause: "Congestion of the brain" (reported by the attending physician, Dr. John Moran; no death certificate survives)
On September 27, 1849, he left Richmond, Virginia, by boat for Baltimore, intending to continue to Philadelphia and New York. What he did for the next six days is unknown.
On October 3, Election Day, a printer named Joseph Walker found him outside Gunner's Hall, a tavern that was being used as a polling place, semi-conscious and in distress. He was wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes that were not his own: a straw hat, a soiled shirt, someone else's coat. Walker sent a note to Poe's acquaintance Dr. Joseph Snodgrass: "a gentleman, rather the worse for wear ... who appears in great distress." Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital.
He was there for four days, in and out of delirium, never coherent enough to say where he had been or what had happened. The attending physician, John Moran, later wrote that Poe repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds," which no one has ever explained. He died early on Sunday, October 7. Moran gave the cause as congestion of the brain. No death certificate has been found. No autopsy was done.
Two days later, Rufus Griswold, a rival who had been named his literary executor, published an obituary under a pseudonym describing Poe as a friendless drunk and madman. It was reprinted everywhere and shaped how he was seen for a century. Most of the specifics were invented.
What happened
The family hasn’t confirmed a cause. These are the community’s theories, in the order the community finds them most likely. Everyone here is anonymous.
He vanished for six days, turned up in someone else's clothes outside a polling place on Election Day, and died four days later saying a name nobody knew. What happened to him?
The page creator
- Most likely37 of 47 readers find this likely
He was 'cooped': kidnapped by an election gang, drugged and beaten, and made to vote in borrowed clothes
Cooping was a real Baltimore practice in 1849: gangs seized men off the street, kept them in a back room (the "coop"), plied them with liquor or drugs, and marched them through the polls in different clothes to vote again and again. Poe was found on Election Day, outside a polling place, in someone else's clothes, in a state no one could explain. For a man one drink could flatten, a few days of forced drinking would be lethal. This has been the leading theory since the 1870s and nothing has displaced it.
Anonymous. Says they are a historian.
ReportThe page creator can confirm or correct this. - Also raised30 of 42 readers find this likely
Alcohol, one way or another: a binge, or withdrawal from one
He had been sober for months, which in 1849 meant he would have had no tolerance. One drink in Baltimore, offered by a friend or forced on him, could have started a binge; and delirium with fever a few days later is what severe alcohol withdrawal looks like. This doesn't contradict the cooping theory, it's the mechanism inside it. It also fits his whole adult history. Griswold used it to smear him, which is why his defenders have resisted it ever since, but that doesn't make it wrong.
Anonymous.
- Also raised19 of 36 readers find this likely
Rabies
In 1996 a cardiologist at the University of Maryland, given Poe's hospital course without the name, diagnosed rabies: the fluctuating delirium, the fever, the difficulty with water that Moran noted, death on the fourth day of symptoms. Rabies fits the hospital record unusually well and explains why he couldn't say where he'd been (the incubation is weeks, so the bite would have been long before). Against it: no bite was recorded, he had no known animal contact, and Moran's accounts are not reliable enough to diagnose from.
Anonymous. Says they are a physician.
- Also raised13 of 29 readers find this likely
A brain tumor, or a stroke
When his body was moved in 1875, a worker reportedly saw a hard mass rattling inside the skull, which some have read as a calcified tumor. Poe's mood swings, headaches, and the fact that tiny amounts of alcohol affected him so badly would all fit a brain lesion. A stroke would fit the sudden collapse and the four-day course. Both are plausible and both are unprovable; the 1875 observation was never examined by anyone qualified.
Anonymous.
- Unlikely4 of 37 readers find this likely
He was murdered by the brothers of the woman he was going to marry
A 2000 book argued that Elmira Shelton's brothers, who opposed the engagement, followed him from Richmond and beat him. It explains the clothes and the week-long gap. It rests on no document from 1849 and on family hostility that is itself only thinly recorded. Here for the record.
Anonymous.
When the family confirms the cause, the confirmed answer moves to the top and gets this mark. Theories stay, but are labeled as what people thought before the family knew.
"Congestion of the brain" was the nineteenth-century phrase for a death that involved the head and that the doctor couldn't otherwise explain. It covered stroke, meningitis, alcohol withdrawal, drug overdose, and a dozen other things. It is a label, not a diagnosis.
What is actually known: he had a documented history of being made seriously ill by small amounts of alcohol; he had a fever and delirium for four days; he was found in clothes that weren't his, on an election day in a city where it was common for gangs to kidnap men, drug them, and march them to vote repeatedly in borrowed clothes. Every theory on this page is an attempt to fit a mechanism to those facts. None can be tested, because the body is 175 years in the ground and was never examined.
Dr. John J. Moran's accounts (1849 letter to Maria Clemm; later lectures, which grew less reliable over time) Joseph Walker's note to Dr. J. E. Snodgrass, October 3, 1849 R. Michael Benitez, "A 39-Year-Old Man with Mental Status Change," Maryland Medical Journal (1996), the rabies hypothesis Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1991) Wikipedia, "Death of Edgar Allan Poe"
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