8 Places You Can Walk in Edgar Allan Poe’s Footsteps

Young Poe did well during his brief time at the University of Virginia in 1826, winning honors in French and Latin and participating in a literary society. He also invited select friends to his small room to read them his own poems and stories. Because the allowance provided by his foster father was inadequate, Poe took to gambling to make up the difference. His debts grew until he was forced to leave the university, less than a year into his studies. In a letter to John Allan, he wrote, “I will boldly say that it was wholly and entirely your own mistaken parsimony that caused all the difficulties in which I was involved while at Charlottesville.”

His room at 13 West Range, simple, small and atmospheric, can still be viewed through a glass door. A windowpane said to have been etched with a poem by Poe was removed for safekeeping and is now displayed in the Rotunda as part of the university’s Special Collections Library. It reads:

O Thou timid one, let not thy Form rest in slumber within these Unhallowed walls, For herein lies The ghost of an awful crime.

After leaving the University of Virginia, Poe traveled to Boston, where he published his first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827. Struggling financially, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. In doing so, he lied about his name (giving it as Edgar A. Perry) and age (claiming to be 22, not 18). He was stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, from November 1827 to December 1828, where he served as an artilleryman and gathered inspiration for future fiction.

Poe used Sullivan’s Island, the barrier island where the fort is located, as the setting for several of his stories, most notably and explicitly in “The Gold-Bug.” The island, once a refuge for pirates, provides the wild backdrop for the 1843 story, in which William Legrand is bitten by an unusual insect. Fort Moultrie, deactivated in 1947, is now managed by the National Park Service. Its brick walls and ramparts were modernized in the years following Poe’s service, but parts of the site have been restored to reflect the era when he was stationed there.

This house, where Poe retreated several times to live with his paternal grandmother, his older brother, his aunt and her two children (one of whom he would eventually marry in 1835, when she was 13) has been preserved as a museum dedicated to the writer. Despite the many places he lived, Baltimore became one of the cities most closely associated with Poe.

Every October, the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum hosts a popular Poe Fest, with house tours, walking and bus tours, film screenings, panel discussions and a Black Cat Ball. The 2 1/2-story brick house, which can be visited year-round, is a National Historic Landmark and has been preserved to evoke Poe’s time there. Its narrow halls and stairs remain, and it is sparsely furnished. This may feel like a loss, but the spareness of the rooms instead provides a bare stage for visitors’ imaginations.

In 1837, suffering from a bad cold, Poe received treatment at the Northern Dispensary, a recently established medical clinic in New York City's Greenwich Village. At the time, he was living with his young wife and cousin and her mother at 113 1/2 Carmine Street (since demolished).

The Northern Dispensary, now occupied by the nonprofit organization God’s Love We Deliver, is not open to the public, but even its exterior provides a fascinating glimpse of the era when Poe lived in Manhattan, as the city’s population and importance were rapidly growing. The handsome structure was built with three sides to fit an unusually shaped lot. (As an adult, Poe lived—or stayed with friends—at at least seven addresses in New York, most of which were in Greenwich Village.)

Over a long (for him) six-year residence in Philadelphia, Poe lived in five different houses. The only one that survives is the house on North Seventh Street, where he lived for about a year with his wife, Virginia, and her mother. It is now the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, operated by the National Park Service.

The family’s time in Philadelphia was, at first, a productive period for Poe. He wrote extensively (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” and “The Gold-Bug” were all published during these years), worked as an editor and literary critic for several successful magazines, and maintained his sobriety for a time. But in 1842, Virginia developed tuberculosis, placing Poe under increasing emotional and financial strain.

In its current state, the house is sparsely furnished, with exhibits about Poe’s life in an adjoining building. Between the sight of Virginia’s pitiful cot on the third floor and the word "death" carved into the plaster near the kitchen doorway, Poe’s air of desperate melancholy has survived the centuries.

Because Virginia’s health was terrible, Poe, Virginia and her mother moved out of Manhattan to the fresh country air of the Bronx. He rented a little cottage there for $100 a year. While the family lived there, Poe wrote or worked on two of his most famous poems, “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells.” Virginia died in January 1847, less than a year after the move, leaving her husband devastated.

He fled the house, leaving it in the care of his mother-in-law/aunt and moved back to Manhattan to grieve. The tiny, charming cottage, which contains several pieces of the family’s furniture, was moved to nearby Poe Park in 1913 to preserve it from encroaching development. Today, visitors can tour the cottage on weekends by appointment. You will have a difficult time imagining that this area, along one of the busiest streets in the Bronx and surrounded by massive buildings, was once countryside, with fields, orchards and fresh air.

Reeling after his wife’s death, Poe frequently visited a widowed friend, Marie Louise Shew, who had helped the family during Virginia’s final days. The cellar of Shew’s former home is rumored to have inspired Poe’s eerie 1846 short story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

The ground floor and cellar of the house are now occupied by a popular Italian restaurant, Il Buco. After opening the restaurant in 1994, the owners hired a “ghostbuster” service to rid the lower level of a spirit. In spite of the exorcism, Il Buco’s wine cellar, which can be rented for private parties, retains a decidedly spooky vibe.

After a triumphant series of lectures in Virginia, a seemingly revived (or at least reviving) Poe was found in a state of distress on a Baltimore street. Though he was taken to a nearby hospital, he never regained sufficient clarity to explain what had happened. He died four days later, on October 7, 1849.

He was buried in Westminster Burying Ground. Twice. His first grave, deep in the cemetery, is now marked by a modest headstone engraved with his name and a raven. In 1875, his remains were exhumed and reburied beneath a grander monument near the cemetery entrance, thanks in part to fundraising efforts by Baltimore schoolchildren. His aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, was reburied with him, while his wife, Virginia, was moved to the same grave in 1885. The walled burial ground is serene and shaded and open to visitors.