Edgar Allan Poe's Last Five Days: The Missing Week Before His Death

On the morning of September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond, Virginia, on a steamer bound for Baltimore. He was forty years old and had just renewed an old engagement to his childhood sweetheart, the widowed Elmira Shelton. The acquaintances who walked him to the Baltimore boat that night later said he was "quite sober and cheerful to the last," promising he would soon be back in Richmond. The plan was Philadelphia, a paid job editing a book of poems, and then home to New York to fetch his mother-in-law.

He reached Baltimore on September 28. Then he disappears.

For five days, nobody can say where Edgar Allan Poe was. His own cousin in Baltimore, Neilson Poe, wrote afterward that he had been unable to find out "where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances." There is no letter, no receipt, no hotel register, no witness who can be placed with him. And when he finally surfaces, it's in a note scribbled by a printer who found him somewhere he should never have been.

The note from Ryan's tavern

October 3, 1849, was Election Day in Baltimore. Taverns doubled as polling places, and Ryan's on East Lombard Street—known locally as Gunner's Hall—was the polling station for the Fourth Ward.

That afternoon a compositor named Joseph W. Walker sent a hurried note to Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, an editor who had known Poe for years. The original survives, and the wording matters:

"Dear Sir — 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, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance."

Rather the worse for wear. In great distress. Not drunk—Walker never says drunk. That word came later, from Snodgrass himself.

Snodgrass arrived with Poe's uncle-by-marriage, Henry Herring. They found the most famous writer in America semi-conscious, unable to explain himself, and dressed in clothes that did not belong to him. In place of his usual black wool suit he wore what Dr. Moran later described as "a stained, faded, old bombazine coat, pantaloons of a similar character, a pair of worn-out shoes run down at the heels, and an old straw hat." Herring and Snodgrass put him in a carriage and sent him to Washington College Hospital.

Four days behind a closed door

The resident physician was Dr. John J. Moran. From the moment Poe was admitted until he died, almost nobody else saw him. His cousin Neilson Poe came to the hospital and was turned away because the patient was "very excitable." He sent fresh linen the next day.

So nearly everything we "know" about Poe's last days comes from one man. And Moran's story changed over the years.

In a letter to Poe's mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, written that November, Moran said Poe drifted between tremors, hallucinations, and long stretches of incoherent talk. He said that on the last night Poe called out, over and over, for someone named "Reynolds."

Nobody has ever proven who Reynolds was. Candidates include the explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds and Henry R. Reynolds, one of the judges at the Fourth Ward polls. In 1987 the scholar W. T. Bandy argued that Moran's "Reynolds" may really have been "Herring"—the surname of the uncle who had put Poe in the carriage. Poe may simply have been calling for his family.

In the small hours of Sunday, October 7, 1849—accounts put it at about three or five in the morning—Poe died. Moran gave his last words as "Lord help my poor soul." Later, in his 1885 book, Moran offered a far grander deathbed speech—the kind of embellishment that makes historians nervous about everything else he wrote.

No autopsy is recorded. Death certificates weren't required in Baltimore then, and none is known to have been filed; a researcher who combed the archives for one in the late 1960s, along with any hospital record, found nothing. The only public cause of death was a two-word line in the Baltimore Clipper: "congestion of the brain." Poe was buried the next day in Westminster Burying Ground.

The five days nobody can fill

Here is the hard edge of the mystery: the record runs from a Baltimore wharf on September 28 to a tavern on October 3, and in between there is nothing solid.

That gap is why the theories exist. The main ones, in plain terms:

Cooping. Baltimore elections in this era were notorious for gangs who grabbed strangers, held them in a room called the "coop," plied them with liquor, sometimes changed their clothes, and marched them from poll to poll to vote again and again. A Baltimore paper dated the same day as Walker's note, October 3, warned readers that "coops have been started." Finding Poe at a Fourth Ward polling place on Election Day, in someone else's clothes, is why this theory has never gone away. It's circumstantial—Poe was well known in Baltimore and might have been recognized—but it's the theory that best explains the costume.

Alcohol. Poe had a documented history of binges and a low tolerance. Snodgrass, a temperance campaigner, later pushed this story hard—and misquoted Walker's note to do it, swapping "rather the worse for wear" for "beastly intoxication." The original note doesn't support him.

Disease. Over the years, researchers have argued for rabies, a brain lesion, heart disease, diabetes, and more. A 1996 rabies paper made headlines, but it leaned on a version of Moran's story in which Poe struggled to swallow water—and in Moran's later version, Poe "drank half a glass without any trouble." Every disease theory is a reconstruction from one physician's shifting memories. None can be tested without records that were never kept.

Foul play. A 1998 book argued that Elmira Shelton's brothers followed Poe to Baltimore to break up the marriage. There is no documentary evidence for it.

What you're left with is a man who walked off a boat and came back five days later as a stranger—wearing a stranger's clothes, carried out of a voting hall.

What's documented, what's claimed, what's unknown

Documented: Poe left Richmond on September 27, 1849, and reached Baltimore on the 28th. Joseph Walker's October 3 note survives with its exact wording. Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital and died there on October 7.

Claimed (single source): The tremors, the hallucinations, the "Reynolds" cries, and the last words all come from Dr. Moran, whose accounts shifted over the decades. The borrowed clothes are described by both Moran and Snodgrass, but nobody recorded whose clothes they were.

Unknown: Where Poe was between September 28 and October 3, why he never continued to Philadelphia, and what killed him.

Why it still gets under your skin

Poe spent his career writing about people buried alive, about narrators who lose days and can't account for them, about the horror of a mind that can no longer explain itself. And then his own story ends that way—with a lost week, a borrowed suit, and one doctor's word for what he said at the end.

You can still visit his grave in Baltimore. He was moved to a larger monument there in 1875. The missing five days were never found.

Watch the iRunReality Short on Poe's missing days above, then tell us in the comments which theory you think the evidence actually supports.