Edgar Allan Poe found delirious in Baltimore

On October 3, 1849, writer Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious and wearing another man’s clothes outside of a Baltimore tavern being used as a polling place. Poe died in a Baltimore hospital four days later, yet the exact cause of his death and the sequence of events that led to it remain a mystery.  

Poe was found on the street outside Gunner’s Hall by Joseph W. Walker, a Baltimore printer. October 3, 1849, was Election Day in Baltimore, and it was common in the 19th century for taverns like Gunner’s Hall to double as polling places.  

When Walker found him, Poe was dressed in shabby, ill-fitting clothes and barely responsive. There’s no mention in historical records that Poe was found “in the gutter,” as is often repeated. Walker pressed the poor stranger for his name and that of a friend who could help. Poe asked for Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor and acquaintance.  

“Dear Sir,” Walker wrote Snodgrass. “There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.” 

Snodgrass arrived and was joined by Poe’s uncle, Henry Herring. Believing that Poe was drunk, they took him to Washington College Hospital to sober him up under medical supervision. According to Poe’s attending physician, the writer lapsed in and out of consciousness for three days until he died on October 7. No death certificate was issued, although a local paper reported the cause of death as “congestion of the brain.”  

There are multiple competing theories as to how Poe came to be found delirious on a Baltimore street. One of the most popular is that he was the victim of “cooping,” a type of 19th-century voting fraud in which people were kidnapped, plied with alcohol and forced to vote multiple times under different identities. Poe was famously sensitive to alcohol—a glass of wine could allegedly make him violently ill—so the cooping theory could explain his condition and the strange clothes.  

Another theory is that Poe wasn’t drunk but suffering from rabies. In 1996, a Baltimore cardiologist diagnosed Poe’s symptoms as typical of encephalitic rabies, also known as “furious rabies,” which is characterized by alternating episodes of confusion, hallucinations, agitation and hydrophobia, the fear of water. According to later accounts by Poe’s attending physician, Dr. John Moran, Poe was perspiring heavily, yelling at imaginary companions and too agitated to take visitors. He could only be convinced to drink water with great effort.  

However, neither of these theories explains why Poe was in Baltimore in the first place. Although Poe had lived in Baltimore for several years, he was living in New York City in 1849. After the death of his first wife, Poe reconnected with an old girlfriend who lived in Richmond, Virginia, and they were engaged. On September 27, Poe boarded a steamship from Richmond to New York with a stopover in Baltimore. No one knows what Poe did in Baltimore for five days from September 28 through October 3, when he was found semiconscious on the street.