Beneath your feet lies one of American literature's most unresolved deaths, its cause still argued 175 years later. Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, under circumstances that remain unexplained 175 years later. He was found delirious on a Baltimore street on October 3rd, wearing clothes that were not his own, and died four days later at Washington College Hospital without regaining coherent consciousness.
He was forty years old. No autopsy was performed; the death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis — inflammation of the brain — which was a catch-all diagnosis of the era. Proposed explanations have included rabies, cooping (a form of electoral fraud in which victims were drugged and forced to vote repeatedly), syphilis, epilepsy, and murder.
The Westminster Presbyterian Church burial ground, established in 1786, is one of the oldest in Baltimore. Poe was buried here in an unmarked grave; the memorial monument you see today was erected in 1875 through a campaign by Baltimore schoolchildren who raised money penny by penny. Since 1949, a mysterious figure known as the Poe Toaster appeared annually on Poe's birthday, January 19th, left three roses and a cognac bottle on the grave, and departed into the darkness.
The tradition ended in 2009, no explanation given. Westminster Hall, the church built on brick arches over the cemetery in 1852, hosts concerts and events in a setting that Poe himself would have found entirely appropriate.