A perpetually happy dude.

It had all the hallmarks of a blood-curdling tale: a man dying in a tower, delirious and combative, having arrived there after a mysterious disappearance. Attempts to glean information from him fail; he shouts out incoherent words, thrashes for a few more hours, and finally expires in agony.

Around the middle of the 19th century, that kind of story would’ve been printed on cheap paper, along with a few stark illustrations, and sold for pennies to a public eager for macabre tales. In this case, though, the dead man himself might have done something literary with it.

His name was Edgar Allan Poe, the 40-year-old poet, editor, and author of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and other works of detective and horror fiction. He’d met his end on the morning of October 7, 1849, in the ward reserved for alcoholics at Washington College Hospital, four days after being found alone and confused on the streets of Baltimore.

While the circumstances of Poe’s life are well-documented — authors, if nothing else, tend to leave quite a paper trail — his death has remained a mystery for over 150 years. The lack of an autopsy or other postmortem examination, not to mention a death certificate, has led to the rise of many theories: that Poe was murdered or died of alcohol poisoning; that he had rabies; that he succumbed to tuberculosis or heart disease. It’s a case to test the wits of even C. Auguste Dupin, Poe’s famous detective creation. It’s one for the ages.

Baltimore 1849

The Man of the Crowd

After spending the summer of 1849 traveling up and down the East Coast in search of funds for a new magazine, Poe arrived by boat in Baltimore on September 28 and promptly disappeared. His exact whereabouts for the next several days are unknown, but he appeared again on October 3, when one Joseph W. Walker sent a note to Dr. J. E. Snodgrass:

“Dear Sir, — There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance…”

From “Ryan’s 4th ward polls” — a voting place that doubled as a tavern, also known as Gunner’s Hall — Poe was taken by carriage to Washington College Hospital. When he died (his last words, supposedly, “Lord, help my poor soul”), the official cause of death was listed as “congestion of the brain.”

Poe’s clothing had changed since he was last seen, his black wool suit replaced with “a rusty, almost brimless, tattered and ribbonless palmleaf hat [and] a sack-coat of thin and sleazy black alpaca,” according to Dr. Snodgrass. Interestingly, Poe still had a friend’s cane he had left Richmond with a few days before.

The change of clothes, combined with his death taking place around election time, led to the theory that Poe was the victim of “cooping” — forced by a political gang to go from poll to poll and vote, often while being beaten and plied with alcohol. Hooligans might have forced him to change clothes in order to fool poll workers. Poe, already not in the best of health, could have died from the mistreatment.

Indeed, this theory held weight with some of the author’s contemporaries.

“The general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, ‘cooped,’ stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die,” William Hand Browne, a friend of Poe, wrote to biographer J.H. Ingram in 1874.

However, no reliable eyewitnesses ever mentioned seeing Poe cooped, and no criminal ever admitted to having kidnapped him. What exactly happened during his disappearance remains unanswered.

The Black Cat

Other death theories take a stranger turn. In September 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center, published an article hypothesizing that Poe had died of rabies, possibly given to him by one of the cats he kept as pets. During his hospital stay, Poe lapsed in and out of tremors, confusion, and delirium, all symptoms of the last stage of rabies. In addition, the study suggested, Poe showed signs of hydrophobia, by one account swallowing water only “with great difficulty.”

Dr. Benitez also eliminated alcohol as the probable cause of Poe’s death. “It is unusual for patients suffering from alcohol withdrawal to become acutely ill, recover for a brief time, and then worsen and die,” he said at the time.

However, the accounts of Poe’s final days in the hospital vary wildly. In one of them, Dr. John J. Moran, the attending physician, wrote, “He drank half a glass [of water] without any trouble,” which undermines hydrophobia…and also the idea that Poe had rabies.

The Masque of the Red Death

Poe’s problems with alcohol have entered the popular lore. Indeed, Dr. Snodgrass felt drinking was ultimately responsible for Poe’s demise, using it as the basis for a series of temperance lectures for years afterward.

While many accounts from the time suggest that Poe died after a binge, none explain how. Indeed, his final days in the hospital more fit the profile of someone suffering from rabies or trauma — periods of lucidity followed by confusion — than delirium tremens. Dr. Moran even fluctuated over the next few decades on whether Poe was drunk, ruling himself out as a reliable source on the matter.

However, Poe’s lifelong battles with the bottle, combined with the accounts of friends that it was indeed his “fatal weakness,” mean the theory can’t be completely dismissed.

The Tell-Tale Heart

Alcohol or not, Poe had been unhealthy long before his fateful trip to Baltimore. “I have seen the scar of the wound in the left shoulder,” Marie Louise Shew, a nurse who cared for Poe’s wife, Virginia, during a long illness, wrote to Poe biographer John Ingram in 1875. “I asked him if he had been hurt…in the region of the heart and he told me yes, and the rest as I wrote to you.”

Poe’s own correspondence frequently mentioned symptoms of a worrisome nature: spasms, weakness, even “the cholera.” He certainly suffered from nervous exhaustion at some points, and perhaps even tuberculosis or heart disease. Still, the record is unclear.

No matter how mundane, whatever happened to Poe on the streets of Baltimore — an accident, a brutal beating, a sudden illness — may have aggravated these pre-existing conditions and produced the convulsions and delirium of Poe’s final days. In many ways, his death may have been a long time coming.

Poe was buried in the cemetery of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, leaving writings but no money or property. (From 1949 until 2009, his grave also received a mysterious visitor: the famous “Poe Toaster” who always left a bottle of cognac and three red roses; Poe would have appreciated it.) Years passed, and Washington College Hospital was shut down before being reopened much later as Church Hospital. Any records of Poe’s ill-fated stay, if they ever existed, were lost to history.

But no Poe story would be complete without a touch of the supernatural. At the Horse You Came In On, a saloon in Fells Point near where the master of the macabre was found dying, rumor has it that a ghost — affectionately named “Edgar” — still bangs its way around the premises to this day.