Edgar Allen Poe died mysteriously after having been missing for six days. Though still alive when he was finally found, he was wearing someone else’s cheap clothes and not coherent enough to tell where he’d been. He had disappeared en route to his own wedding.

The Riddle of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death

Despite his macabre literary genius, Edgar Allan Poe’s life was short and largely unhappy. After his young wife, Virginia, got tuberculosis in 1842 and died five years later, the already hard-drinking Poe apparently dove deeper into the bottle. In the late summer of 1849, he was in Richmond, Virginia, where he proposed to an old sweetheart, Elmira Shelton. On September 27, 1849, Poe left Richmond, supposedly bound for Philadelphia. The details of his actions and whereabouts over the next few days remain uncertain, but on October 3, a passerby noticed Poe slumped near an Irish pub in Baltimore, Maryland. When Poe’s friend Dr. Joseph Snodgrass arrived, he found the 40-year-old writer in what he assumed was a highly drunken state, wearing chea… Continue Reading (2 minute read)