In 1994, single in Chicago again after just giving back my wedding engagement ring, I did everything I could to keep busy.
I volunteered as a docent at the Clarke-Ford House. Built in 1836, it is the oldest house in Chicago. The Georgian-style mansion is one of the best examples of mid-19th-century Manifest Destiny.
For me, Clarke House was a transitional haven. In a house museum, daydreams of the past can replace worries about the future. Imaginations of life long ago can push away tears and heartaches. I felt less alone, telling other history lovers about the floor-to-ceiling triple-hung windows in the parlor and the cupola on the roof.
In October that year, Edgar Allan Poe interpreter Page Hearn, a Baltimore native, came to Clarke House. What better setting to celebrate the writings of Poe than an immaculate sample of the architecture that helped define the era when Poe penned his spellbinding poems and short stories?
At dusk, Hearn swept into the candlelit drawing room, cloaked in shadowy Victorian garb. There was someone in every chair anxiously waiting for his performance, which was highly publicized.
For a preview story for the Chicago Tribune, Hearn recounted the sad saga that Poe endured all the way up to his death in 1849 at the age of 40. An orphan who was taken in by a couple with fabulous wealth that never adopted him, he could not pay his University of Virginia tuition. Devoted to his much younger wife Virginia (a cousin he affectionately called Sissy) who suffered miserably almost every day for years before finally succumbing to tuberculosis. “Poe lost everyone he ever loved,” Hearn said.
In the Tribune story, Hearn also recounted Poe’s own death on Oct. 7, 1849, which happened while Poe visited Baltimore. He said historians believed someone in Baltimore “literally forced Poe to get drunk in an effort to get him to vote several times in a local election.”
That theory may be fueled because of Poe’s widely observed drunkenness. The Oct. 8, 1849, Baltimore Sun story about his death read: “This announcement coming so sudden and unexpected will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it.”
But because his incoherent behavior lasted for days, even after he was admitted into an asylum, others speculate that Poe might have had a glioblastoma brain tumor. The same tumor took the life of my dad. One of Poe’s biggest enthusiasts, my dad watched Hearn at Clarke House with me. I will never forget the realistic sound effects he made while he told me and my brother the story of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I can still hear the made-up sound of a heart beating against floorboards.
In summer 2013, I went to Maryland early for a week of public affairs job training at the Emergency Management Institute in Emmitsburg to experience Poe’s Baltimore, including the Patapsco riverside neighborhood of Fell’s Point where he was last seen. I had heard that The Horse You Came In On Saloon was a bar of another name when Poe was seen there shortly before his death. I found no clues there about Poe’s last days, but time stood still as I looked down Thames Street along the Belgian blocks of granite (like cobblestones), which were cut and laid just several years before Poe walked them.
At 203 N. Amity St. (originally No. 3 Amity St.), the house where Poe lived from 1833 to 1835, the home stood shuttered. It was reopened and shared with the world just a few weeks later.
At Westminster Burial Ground, Poe’s grave was a tabernacle akin to Jim Morrison’s resting place in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Little notes tucked in around piles of flowers. Lots and lots of people.
Poe’s following remains unmatched. In 2009, a copy of his first published book, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” set a record, selling at auction for $662,500 (roughly $1.13 million in today’s currency).
A literary pioneer who was instrumental in establishing new genres, Poe engineered gothic romanticism and invented the American murder mystery. In the uncharted waters of American literature in 1841, long before Sherlock Holmes and even longer before James Bond, the world met investigator C. Auguste Dupin in his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Because much of his work focuses on the macabre — including premature burials (“Berenice,” “The Cask of Amontillado” and more), people are less aware of the sensitivities revealed in some of Poe’s writings. From heartfelt letters to his wife and her mother, his aunt Maria Clemm, it is clear he expressed his vulnerabilities as readily as his morose side.
In his stories, Poe slips from deeply disturbing and grotesque tales (“The Black Cat,” “The Masque of the Red Death”); to light, uplifting prose (“Ligeia,” “The Forest Reverie”).
Poe loved to invent words, and he coined or popularized hundreds of them (tintinnabulation, supposititious, apothegm, to name just a few).
A lock of his hair was recently studied for dietary information. Scientist Stephen Macko burned the hair at 1,000 degrees Celsius, converting it to gas. He purified the gases using a gas chromatograph. Measurements of isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur revealed Poe’s diet, and the diet of his Virginia. Although rich with beans, potatoes, chicken, beef, pork and other common foods of their time, Poe’s diet consisted mostly of seafood. Christopher P. Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, where Poe was raised, highlighted the findings of the hair study in an article in the Autumn 2017 issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review.
If we can learn what someone ate nearly 200 years ago, how can Poe’s death remain a mystery?
It’s been years since I was a volunteer at Clarke House, pointing out utensils in the basement kitchen or those Georgian windows upstairs. But, I still love to share with people what life was like for Poe. We don’t have answers about how he passed, but we have his stories, forevermore.
Veronica Hinke is the author of the new book “A Ravenous Feast: Spellbinding Recipes Inspired by The Literary Works of Edgar Allan” (Weldon Owen, 2025). She has also taught history classes and is the author of “The Last Night on The Titanic: Unsinkable Drinking, Dining & Style” (Post Hill Press, 2023), among other books.
