On this Day: Edgar Allan Poe Found Drunk and Delirious

While the circumstances surrounding Poe’s Oct. 7 death are unknown, his reason for being in Baltimore is known. On a lecture tour to raise interest in his magazine, Stylus, Poe traveled from his home in New York to Philadelphia, Richmond and Norfolk, Va., and then to Baltimore. He had planned to travel on to Philadelphia to complete more business transactions.

Although the official cause of death given by the Baltimore Commissioner of Health, Dr. J.F.C. Handel, was “congestion of the brain,” there are several theories surrounding Poe’s death, the most popular of which include “the alcohol theory,” disease and other medical problems, and the cooping theory. 

According to the E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore, the most widely held theory in the “vast majority” of Poe’s biographies is the cooping theory. In this particular version, it is believed that Poe was kidnapped by a political gang, held in a room called the “coop” and forced to vote repeatedly while being “plied with liquor and beaten.” John R. Thompson, a publisher in Poe’s time, supported this theory; the E. A. Poe Society asserts he offered this as a possible answer “to explain Poe's condition and the fact that he was wearing someone else's clothing.”

In 1996, doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center offered yet one more theory on Poe’s death: rabies. “No one can say conclusively that Poe died of rabies, since there was no autopsy after his death,” said Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center who reviewed Poe’s case. “But the historical accounts of Poe’s condition in the hospital a few days before his death point to a strong possibility that he had rabies.”

Dr. Benitez found several of Poe’s reported symptoms to be consistent with rabies: he was delirious, had tremors, slipped into a coma, emerged calm, then became delirious and combative.

Matthew Pearl, author of “The Poe Shadow,” has one more theory to add to Poe’s mysterious death: brain tumor. In an interview with The New York Observer, Pearl explains how Poe’s body had been exhumed when it was moved to its current spot in Baltimore more than 25 years after he was first buried. He decided to do more research and found accounts stating that Poe’s brain was completely intact and visible during the exhumation. Pearl brought these findings to a coroner, who immediately disputed them. “[T]he brain is the first thing to liquefy,” she said, unless it was a brain tumor, which could calcify.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston in 1809, and as a young man, attended the University of Virginia for less than a year. After leaving the United States Army and being expelled from West Point, he worked on his stories and poems. In New York he wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839, and published “The Raven and Other Poems and Tales” in 1845.

According to the Poe Museum, 1846 was a hard year for Poe. The journal Poe was working on, The Broadway Journal, failed, and his wife, Virginia Clemm, became sick and died a year later. It is believed that Poe indulged his weakness for alcohol around this time, a problem he had battled with throughout his adult life.