Edgar Allan Poe: 159th Anniversary of a Strange Death

Yesterday, October 7th, marked the 159th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's death. Nearly a century and a half after the fact, the full details of Poe's strange death are still not known. Incredibly, just about all of the twenty plus explanations proposed for Poe's demise are as strange as the fiction he gave his life to. Did Poe die a victim of political thuggery commonly waged in 19th century electoral campaigns? Perhaps it was deliriously fatal intoxication after all? Or did rabies sweep down the great progenitor of weird fiction as we know it? We will likely never know, but examining the complexity of Poe's unusual death is almost as good a mental exercise as speculating about it yourself. The brief video below, taken from an old documentary about E.A. Poe, runs through some of the stranger theories, and an extensive Wikipedia article about death hypotheses is here.



-Grim Blogger