Poe's Baltimore Death: The Mystery Nobody Has Solved

On October third, eighteen forty-nine, a man was found on the street near a polling place on Lombard Street in Baltimore, barely coherent, unable to say where he had been or what had happened to him. He was wearing clothes that were not his own. His name was Edgar Allan Poe. He had been missing for approximately five days. Nobody, in the one hundred seventy-six years since that morning, has established where he had been or why.

He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later on October seventh. Witnesses reported that in his final hours he called out repeatedly for someone named Reynolds. No one has been able to identify who Reynolds was. His death certificate listed the cause as phrenitis, meaning brain inflammation, a category broad enough to cover almost anything. No autopsy findings were retained.

What followed was one hundred and seventy-five years of speculation. More than a dozen causes have been proposed by physicians and historians. Cooping was among the earliest theories: a practice in which men were kidnapped by political operatives during elections, kept sedated, and forced to vote repeatedly under different names, which would explain why he was found near a polling place in unfamiliar clothes on election day. Other physicians have argued for rabies, presenting the symptoms of his final days as consistent with the disease's late stages. Alcoholic poisoning, syphilis, and a brain lesion have each had scholarly advocates. None has been confirmed.

He is buried here, at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in downtown Baltimore, under the monument that was installed in eighteen seventy-five. The cause of his death is not on the monument. It is not on the death certificate either, not really. Whatever happened to Poe in those five lost days between Philadelphia and this polling place is not established in the public record. The mystery is, at this point, older than any person alive.