Burying the Mystery: The Grave of Edgar Allen Poe

BURYING THE MYSTERY

THE GRAVE OF EDGAR ALLEN POE

By Karen Alkalay-Gut

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The Montréal Review, March 2025

For eighty years, on January 19, Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday, an unknown visitor would drink a toast on the site marking the place that was determined as his original grave, and then leave the bottle of Martell cognac and three roses. Sometimes he left cryptic notes as well. He was rumored to be dressed in black, his face obscured by a white scarf, and carrying a silver-tipped cane, but has not appeared in recent years. In memory of this ceremony, someone has placed life-like flowers and a plastic raven on this spot.

The secret visitor was not the only mysterious episode - almost every aspect of Poe’s death and burial is strange or obscure.

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, outside Ryan's Tavern on Lombard Street. He had been missing since September 27, when he left Richmond, Virginia to go home to New York. What brought him to Baltimore is unknown. He died less than 4 days after without regaining sufficient consciousness to explain anything. He was only forty years old. Could the cause have been, as the curators of the museum of his birthplace in Richmond declare, diabetes shock? Could he have been mugged? Some scholars suggest he was a victim of “cooping,” a slang term for the kidnapping of innocent citizens on election day in order to force them to vote repeatedly. Often they were drugged and used like dummies to dress up as different people to vote at multiple locations. This may explain why Poe was wearing someone else’s clothes.

But there have also been other explanations. Even in the past years, researchers are still looking for an answer, and recent studies have suggested he may have been bitten by an animal and died of rabies.

In a sense he had come home, for Lombard Street where Poe was found happened to be less than a two minute walk from where his brother, William Henry Leonard Poe (1807–1831), and his grandfather, General David Poe (1743–1816), were interred. But although close to the graves of his relatives, the funeral was brief with less than a dozen witnesses. It was stormy and there was no time to inform relatives, but the legend created was that he was ignored because he deserved his death as an evil and hated drunk. Two days after his death, on October 9, 1849, Poe’s literary enemy, Rufus Griswold, under the pseudonym of “"Ludwig" published an article in the New York Tribune, one that determined the contemporary analysis of Poe’s demise and assured the anonymity of Poe’s grave in years to come. Griswold asserted that "few will be grieved" by Poe's death because he had few friends and explained the death by claiming that Poe often wandered the streets, either in "madness or melancholy", mumbling and cursing to himself, that he was easily irritated, envious of others "regarded society as composed of villains." None of it was true, but to ensure that his version of the life and death of Poe remained the official version Griswold appointed himself literary executor and wrote his biography. Not until the next biography in 1878, by William Gill, was this image corrected.

Perhaps Griswold’s biography explains why it took so long to make a tombstone for Poe’s first grave. When he was buried in 1849 his grave was not marked, and soon disappeared under the weeds. After a few years the church sexton placed a block with the number 80 on what he remembered was the spot.

Yet Poe’s fame as a writer did not disappear as easily as did his grave. Over eleven years later, Maria Clemm, Poe’s aunt, began to complain that she had heard of the state of her “poor Eddie’s” grave and begged that something be done. The author’s nephew, Neilson Poe, accordingly, ordered a suitable monument created. Unfortunately, however, before the monument could be completed, it was destroyed in an accident. The monument, placed in the stonecutter’s yard near a train track, was hit by a derailed train and destroyed. There were no funds for a second monument, and only in 1865 was a new movement begun to immortalize the remains of the poet. This was completed (by the same sculptor as the first monument, Hugh Sisson) in 1874, twenty-five years later, and was almost perfect, except for the fact that the date of birth was wrong by one day.

There were a few other complications. The stone commemorating Poe was also in a different area than where Poe had originally been buried. Since his death Westminster church had been built in front of the graveyard, so an accurately placed stone would have been invisible from the street - which would have negated the purpose of a memorial. Furthermore, there was no available room in the right section. So the memorial was situated in the most visible place, looking out over where two streets meet, the corner of what was then North Street and E. Fayette Street.

There was also a bit of a problem with the body. In attempting to transfer Poe to the newer, more significant site, the reburial crew was not informed that the stones had been turned around a few years before to face the opposite direction, and they initially dug up the body behind the spot where Poe was, exhuming instead nineteen-year-old Philip Mosher, Jr. The second time around the gravediggers went ahead, claiming that they recognized Poe’s distinguished forehead.

The dedication on November 17, 1875, was attended by Walt Whitman, among many others, and other poets sent letters to be read aloud: Henry W. Longfellow, John G. Whittier, William C. Bryant and Alfred Tennyson.

Today the tombstone with the engraving of Poe’s face is visible immediately as one enters the cemetery. On his right side is Poe’s aunt and mother-in-law Maria Clemm, who was the first to stir up the forces that eventually resulted in the monument. Maria Clemm died ten years after the monument was first erected, and was then added.

But it is the second addition that completes the monument family: Virginia Clemm Poe, the poet’s cousin and wife. Poe married her when she was thirteen and took care of her throughout her life until her death of tuberculosis at the age of twenty four. Not only was Virginia the subject of many of Poe’s poems and stories, but her death was said by some to have been the cause of Poe’s disorientation in the two years he survived her.

She had been buried in Fordham cemetery in New York, but the area of the cemetery of her grave was destroyed in 1883, and there was no family remaining to ensure that her body be transferred.

And here is where another biographer of Poe’s stepped in. William Gill, upon hearing of the fate of Virginia’s body, went to Fordham cemetery, and, as he later wrote, discovered the gravedigger ‘with her bones in his shovel’ and claimed them. Having no obvious alternative, Gill is said to have placed them in a box under his bed. Years after the publication of Gill’s corrective biography of Poe, the box was discovered and reburied at last on January 19, 1885, the 76th anniversary of her husband's birth and nearly 10 years after his present monument was erected. This was the work of Nelson Poe, a distant relative of Edgar Allan Poe, and a group of dedicated Poe admirers who felt that Virginia should rest eternally with Edgar.

The continuity of the various changes of this monument can be found in the sexton of Westminster Presbyterian Church. The same man, George W. Spence, who had officiated at the first burial of Edgar Poe in 1849 and the two exhumations of his body in 1875, was also present at the ceremonies of the two women. Spence is the only thread running throughout the narrative of Poe’s grave, and the accuracy depends upon his testimony alone.

Had Poe not died just at that point, the story of his grave might have been entirely different. As it is, he is bound for all eternity with the thirteen-year old girl he first married. Had he lived a few more months, he may have managed to marry his first love who was also his new fiancée, the wealthy widow Elmira Royster, and moved back to the city of Richmond where Poe grew up. But the elements of the narrative of his death are so suitable to the stereotype of the tragic bohemian poet created by the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, who soon after discovered Poe’s work, that any other narrative would have been banal. Baudelaire passed on the tradition to Stéphane Mallarmé who wrote “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” on the occasion of the reburial, imagining something far more spiritual than a wealthy married middle class writer. Mallarme creates the image of the wronged genius of his era, whose tomb returns the well-earned glory.

The same sense of nobility and injustice influenced others as well.

This public stone, with no mention of his writings and little physical relation to the place of his original burial, did not satisfy everyone. The Poe Society was created in 1909 to institute an even more fitting memorial, and negotiations were made with sculptor Sir Moses Ezekiel, born in Richmond and living in Rome. But time and the war intervened, and the stone was delayed. In 1913, a Poe admirer named Orrin C. Painter who had recently financed the cemetery’s iron gates and was helping to fund Sir Ezekiel’s sculpture decided to mark the original spot of Poe’s burial with a more personalized stone. For uncertain reasons, this stone was initially misplaced completely outside of the Poe family lot and was moved to a more reasonable but still dubious location in 1921.

This tomb marking what might be the original place of Poe’s entombment sparks even more inspiration in the imagination than the larger 1875 monument. Because of financial constraints there was no marker on the exact spot of the original grave, but it is likely this marker is as close to the truth as we can get. It is at least in the neighborhood of the family plot which had been purchased by Poe’s grandfather, David Poe, and Poe’s brother’s grave is not far.

Whether it is the accurate spot or not this estimated original tomb or not, the stone seems to reinforce the Poe legend. Not only does it bear part of the most well-known poem of Poe, “The Raven,” but it also possesses a bas relief of the bird. The line " Leave my loneliness unbroken!” evokes Poe’s tragic life and death. And the answer of the raven, “Nevermore,” perhaps promises our continued re-construction and re-visiting of this site. The famed inventor of the detective story has left us forever without definite answers.

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Karen Alkalay-Gut is a poet, professor, and editor who lives in Israel and writes in English.

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