Gunners Hall, Baltimore, October 3, 1849
On October 3, 1849, a Baltimore printer named Joseph W. Walker found a man slumped outside Gunners Hall, a tavern at 44 East Lombard Street being used that day as a polling place. The man was, in Walker’s phrase, “in great distress.” He wore a cheap suit and a straw hat that did not fit him and were not his own; his usual black wool suit was gone. Walker recognized him as the writer Edgar Allan Poe, age 40, and sent word to a local doctor, Joseph E. Snodgrass, saying Poe needed “immediate assistance.”
Snodgrass arrived with Poe’s uncle, Henry Herring. Poe could not say where he had been. He had left Richmond, Virginia, by steamer around September 27 or 28, headed for New York by way of Baltimore, and no one could account for the days between. Instead of taking him home, the two men had him carried by carriage to Washington Medical College, a hospital near the eastern edge of the city.
The debt that came before: Virginia
To understand why Poe turned up outside that tavern with no fixed address and no one to call, it helps to go back to May 16, 1836, when he married his cousin Virginia Clemm in Richmond. He was 27. She was 13, her age falsified as 21 on the marriage certificate because her real age required her father’s consent.
Poe’s drinking did not start with the marriage; friends and later biographers trace serious bouts back through the 1830s. But on January 30, 1847, Virginia died of tuberculosis at age 24, and the household that had held his life together for eleven years went with her. Biographers describe a man who, in the time afterward, seemed to be looking for someone to fill what he had lost.
Two courtships at once
Through 1848, Poe pursued two women at the same time. One was Elmira Royster Shelton, a Richmond widow he had loved as a young man, before her father blocked the match. The other was Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet in Providence, Rhode Island, who had first written to him with an admiring poem. Poe met Whitman in person in September 1848 and proposed marriage within days.
Whitman was older than Poe and a literary figure in her own right. Most of the courtship was carried on by letter and through mutual acquaintances, which meant a great deal rode on what each side chose, and did not choose, to put in writing.
The overdose and the broken engagement
Whitman did not answer quickly, and her letters through the autumn of 1848 stayed inconclusive. Waiting on them, Poe attempted suicide with an overdose of laudanum; accounts differ on how serious the attempt actually was. In November 1848, Whitman agreed to marry him, on one condition stated outright: that he stay sober.
He did not. In December 1848 he arrived at her home in Providence drunk. A confrontation followed; Whitman used ether to the point of collapse, and her mother, who had concerns about his drinking and his finances, ended the engagement in her daughter’s place. It had lasted a little over a month.
“A life wasted”: Richmond and the ring
By the spring of 1849, at 40, Poe was writing to friends in bleak terms about a wasted life and no prospects ahead. That summer, in Philadelphia, heavy drinking left him with ten days of hallucinations and derangement.
In July 1849 he borrowed money to travel to Richmond, where he took up again with Elmira Shelton. She reportedly accepted a proposal of marriage, though how firmly she meant it is disputed among his biographers; some read it as a comfortable arrangement between two lonely people rather than a genuine romantic commitment. Poe joined the Sons of Temperance, a pledge-based abstinence society, and bought a wedding ring. Those who saw him that summer still described him as despondent, ring and pledge notwithstanding.
Six days unaccounted for
Late in September 1849, Poe left Richmond by steamer, meaning to go on to Philadelphia and then New York. He reached Baltimore around September 27 or 28 and was seen there drinking with friends. After that, the record simply stops. For roughly six days, no letter, ledger, or witness places him anywhere. Nothing written at the time explains where he went or what happened to him before Walker found him outside Gunners Hall on October 3.
Five days at Washington Medical College
Poe was admitted on the evening of October 3, arriving around 5 p.m. in a stupor. For most of his stay he could not give a coherent account of himself. According to Dr. John Joseph Moran, the physician who attended him (his later recollections are treated with some caution by historians), Poe drifted in and out of consciousness over the following days, hallucinating and, at points, talking to people who were not in the room.
He died early on the morning of October 7, 1849, sometime between 3 and 5 a.m., reportedly saying, “Lord help my poor soul,” near the end. He was 40. He was buried without ceremony at the back of Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore; his remains were moved in 1875 to a new grave with a larger monument, though it has since been questioned whether the right body made the move.
What’s disputed
The six missing days have never been explained. Theories over the years have included that he was robbed, that he went on a drinking binge, that he was a victim of “cooping” (a practice in which men were plied with drink and marched from poll to poll to vote repeatedly under false names), or that an old illness had returned. None of these has ever been established as fact, and this account does not pick among them.
Whether Elmira Shelton genuinely meant to marry him is an open question too. His cause of death was never officially settled; the surviving records list it as undetermined, and theories since have ranged from alcohol poisoning to rabies to a brain tumor. The French poet Charles Baudelaire, who later translated and championed Poe’s work, called his death “almost a suicide, a suicide prepared for a long time.” That is a critic’s reading, offered after the fact, not a medical finding. The clothes that did not fit him, the six days with no record, and the ring he had already bought: those parts are documented. The rest is the part no one, then or since, has been able to fill in.