Thinking Sideways: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking sideways. I don't understand. You've never known stories of things.
We simply don't know the answer. Too deep into the darkness,
peering long, I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams.

(00:26):
No mortal ever dared to dream before? Hey, guys, was
that singing Sideways? The podcast I Am Devin, joined as
always by Joe and Steve. Tonight we're talking about the
somehow still mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe. You didn't
know his death was an unsolved mystery, did you? Yeah?

(00:49):
I did, no. Well, I saw that really terrible John
Qusack movie The Raven years ago. I didn't see it,
so I would high recommend that you don't. Okay, okay, okay.
It starts with a letter that reads, there, sir, there's
a gentleman rather the worse for wear at Ryan's fourth

(01:10):
Ward Poles, who goes under the cogniment of Edgar A Poe,
and who appears to being great distress. And he says
he is acquainted with you. He is in need of
immediate assistance, yours in haste, Joseph W. Walker to Dr J. E. Snodgrass.
So the story goes. Poe was found either in the
street or in the tavern room of public house tavern

(01:34):
also pulling station. It was voting time. Yeah, they don't.
They multitasks back in those days. That's how you got
people to vote. Was, Yeah, you're like, drink and then
go vote. Well, no, it's the other way around. Vote
and we'll give you a drink. We should do that again.
I think they're still doing that. He was described as delirious,

(01:58):
with his appearance being quote repulsive unquote. His hair was unkempt,
he seemed unwashed and unshaven. His clothes were all ragged
and torn, which was very atypical of po He was
very well dressed, known for being well dressed on almost
all times. It's worth mentioning probably also that the clothes

(02:19):
that he was wearing were later discovered that they weren't his.
He'd for some reason, been wearing someone else's clothes. When
he was found, he was taken to a local hospital.
He spent four days and fairly incoherent stupor before dying
on October seven. In those four days, uh Poe was
never coherent enough or couldn't remember what had caused him

(02:45):
to be in the state that he was in. And
that this we're going to talk about in a minute.
But this just comes from some fairly maybe unreliable sources.
So it's hard to tell if it was that he
was so incoherent the whole time that he couldn't actually
tell people what had happened to him, or if he
just couldn't remember what had happened to him, or if

(03:05):
it didn't get recorded. Yeah. Yeah, the doctor who was
taken care of him actually, who has submitted some fairly
inconsistent accounts of the whole thing. Yeah, and we're gonna
we're going to talk about that. I wouldn't let other
people in. So maybe co maybe Pe was torobably coherent
the whole time and the doctor just gassed him and
killed him. Yeah, I know it is. I mean, that's
it's a for all we know, that's what happened. I,

(03:29):
as Joe kind of mentioned or alluded to to, wasn't
allowed visitors while he was in the hospital. He was
kept in what's described as a prison like cell. It
even had bars on the windows. It was often reserved
for drunks, you know, sleep it off. The dunk tank,
basically hospital the hospital drunk tank. Yeah, as I said,

(03:49):
he didn't have any visitors. The attending physician's name was
doctor John Joseph Moran, and a lot of people had
been saying that Poe was found drunk and that's why
he was in this stupor, but Moran said, no, Poe
wasn't drunk. He was totally sober. But then again, as

(04:09):
we already mentioned a little bit, it's hard to tell.
We just have the one account, so who knows what
was true and what was not true. Apparently Poe told
Moran when Moran said, oh, soon you're going to have
friends being able to come visit you, post said the
best thing that his friends could do for him would
be to blow out his brains with a pistol. Well

(04:31):
that's not well, it's not like Poe was known for
not being more. I mean, it wasn't he wasn't all sunshine.
That wasn't so much Poe. Mrs Harring tried to visit him,
but we later find out through letters that it was
in fact Mr Harrying, which was his uncle in law.

(04:52):
Oh so it was his uncle that was trying to
come see him, and not a woman. Okay, that it
was recorded as a missus, but again it was Moran
who recorded it. So, and we don't know how late,
how far after Poe died that he wrote it down,
So why his account might be a little mixed exactly.
Poe was said to have called out Reynolds repeatedly on

(05:14):
the night of his death. This is a huge, unexplained mystery.
There's a lot of speculation about who Reynolds might be.
There's a lot of Reynolds is a fairly common last
name in that area at that time. Could be Reynolds,
trap he just wanted something. He just wanted some foil man.
But it even occurred to me that possibly I was.
I did did a little research and couldn't find anything else,

(05:35):
but occurred to me that maybe Reynolds there was a
brand of laudanum or some other drug that was produced
by the realms. Yeah, it's always possible. He also spoke
about a wife that he had in Richmond, but more
on this later because oh, by the way, Podon actually
have a wife at the time at all, particularly not
in Richmond. He did live in Richmond. He was probably

(05:59):
confused not what was going on, although in which way
he was confused it remains to be seen. Maybe he is,
he was talking about his ex wife who had died
two years before. She died more than two years Yeah,
and he also had a fiance that lived in Richmond.
So it's as I said, well, we're going to delve
into the whole PO history a little more in a minute. Here.

(06:21):
This is just kind of the brief synopsis overviews, super brief, right,
it's just ten minutes, have the warm up. This is
me dribbling the ball around. I also, so let's let's
talk about quickly the whole problem with Moran. Doctor the doctor,
doctor John Joseph Moran, the only witness to pose final

(06:44):
four days because he denied all visitors who tried to come.
And it turns out there were a couple of people
who tried to come visit PO. Family members and such
who heard about his condition and tried to visit him,
and Dr Moran said no, no, he's not well enough. Yeah.
They said he said it was excitable and violent or
something like that that. I'm not really clear on this either.

(07:07):
Did were there any nurses that attended Poe in those
four days? It sounds like it was just Miran. I
seem to remember something about a nurse, but it was
very vague. And I think again, the problem is that
their accounts were not recorded. Moran is the only one
who wrote this stuff down, and as we're going to

(07:29):
talk about, talked at length about it. But I think
that there was probably nurses, but they just right, well, who, yeah,
who writes the records down at that time, right now, nurses.
Everything's tracked, Yeah, but not in these days, not in
the mid eighteen hundreds. Miran, it turns out, changed his

(07:51):
story more than a few times, and very drastically. Some
say that, you know, Poe was famous, the death was unexplained.
It was he was just trying to kind of add
some romantic drama to the whole situation. For example, one
of the great examples of that is that it's generally

(08:12):
accepted that pose very last words where Lord helped this
poor soul, or help my poor soul. But later Moran
claimed that his last words were he took a deep
breath in and then said, the arched heavens encompassed me,
and God has his decree legibly written upon the front
lists of frontlets of every created human being and demons

(08:32):
incarnate their goals will be the seething waves of blank despair.
And then died, so as you can see somebody that
was incoherent for days. Yeah, so it's it's worrying that
he changed all of that stuff. And yeah, I think
for you can a little bit say, yes, he was
trying to make the story sound so much more romantic.

(08:55):
But on the other hand, he also changed pose admittance
state four different times, and that prose style does not
sound like POSE. So I because I I have issues
with it, just because he changes his stuff so much
and that just doesn't sound like the things that we know.
The the cadence in the style of all the writings

(09:18):
of PO that doesn't really match it. I know he
was feeling a little bit under the weather, though, and
that always throws up. Yeah, your style drastically changes what
was I thinking. I don't know. Moran also lied about
having tried to contact pose aunt slash mother in law. Listen,
it's it's complicated, and again we'll talk about this later,

(09:39):
but yes, his aunt and mother in law were the
same person. And most troubling for me, of course, is
that there's no records or death certificate for PO, which
of course means that we don't have a cause of
death officially. Officially, there are some theories out there, which
we shall speak of in the theory section, but I
want to talk about pose super tragic life first. Ready, Yeah,

(10:03):
let's do this, Okay. Edgar Allan Poe born January nineteenth,
eighteen o nine, in Boston to two actors. His father
abandoned the family when he was a year old, and
then his mom died when he was two years old.
And I don't know how he got connected to John

(10:24):
and Francis Allen of Richmond, but they took poor little
Edgar in for pretty much the rest of his life.
I don't have a clear recollection, but I think that
they were either friends of the family or they were
some kind of relative aunt, uncle, something like that, and
that's how they took him in. It wasn't just some

(10:44):
random couple that said, will take this poor orphan boy. Sure,
I'm sure, I mean, surely there was a connection, but
I don't know what There was a family connection. I'm
almost positive of that. I don't think they were relatives. Okay, Again,
I'm a little fuzzy on that because I've read this
so many times. I've kind of glossed over there. Yeah,
there's and there's you know, and then more family comes
in later, and it's just yeah, I think I think

(11:05):
that kind of arrangement was pretty common in those days
because people died like flies, and so there are a
lot of kids left orphans. Yeah. Yeah, So the Alan's
never formally adopted Edgar, but he did live with them
and they did support him for pretty much like well
into his twenties. Yes. Uh, the father, John Allan was

(11:31):
kind of a jerk. He reports are that he fluctuated
between just spoiling the crap out of Edgar and being abusive,
both emotionally and physically. So is that like pendulum swing?
And so they fought a lot, as you can imagine,
and Edgar joined the army under a pseudonym. I'd have

(11:54):
to look it up, Captain James T. Kert. Nothing like that.
Nothing so awesome is that, I know, But I don't
think it really matters that much. But you know, through
his life, Poe did have a penchant for using pseudonyms.
He did it a lot, So I can only imagine
that this was, you know, his early stages of doing that,

(12:14):
and then he just continued that on through his life
because it worked for it, because well, you remember we
see early eighteen hundreds. There's no way to verify who
you are, Jeff Papers, No, I lost him. Okay, I
guess you're you're that guy, ye, easy enough. Yeah, he
lied about his age. He was eighteen. He said he

(12:35):
was twenty one, and then he used the money that
he made in the army to kind of start his
publishing career as an author. His adopted mother died in
eighteen twenty nine and John that caused John Allen and
Edgar to kind of reconcile. It was that, among a
lot of other things. It's very involved story. Wikipedia will

(12:58):
be a friend if you actually hair to know well.
And there's all kinds of histories on po out there
that are in not necessarily Internet form, but printed from
a litany of books about the guys. I can pick
up any of them. Yeah. So, after Poe got out
of the army, he moved in with his widowed actual

(13:19):
aunt like blood relative aunt and her daughter, Virginia Clem.
Virginia was fourteen years younger than Poe, but that didn't
stop him from marrying her at the young age of thirteen. Sorry,
having a momentary. This practice is so weird that I

(13:39):
understand that it wasn't uncommon, but it still doesn't stop
me from being skeeved out. But there's actually there's a
bit of speculation around this. There's some kind of mystery
around this marriage as well, because since the aunt was widowed,
she didn't have any income. The only soul income maker died.

(14:03):
Pretty much everybody in that family died and it was
just Virginia and her mom, and Poe wasn't making a
lot of money, but he was making money and he
lived with these people, and it's speculated that the relationship
with Virginia could have been more of like a sister relationship,
and that he saw a way to be able to

(14:24):
provide for them by marrying Virginia. On the other hand,
there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that says actually they
were like crazy in love. He once wrote to a friend,
I see no one among the living as beautiful as
my little wife. Okay, right that just okay, I'm ignoring that. Yeah, no,

(14:45):
you should, because Poe had a couple of scandals with
other poets of the time, lady poets. But Virginia and
Poe were married for eleven years. She got cholera and
died at twenty four. That's three very important women to
po dead. And you know before he was forty, man,
no wonder he was depressed his mother's stepmother and his wife.

(15:08):
Yeah that's that's yeah, that's but I thinks Joe pointed
out this is actually not uncommon at the time. Edgar
Allen to Post seems to have been a little more
sensitive to it than I think a lot of dudes.
I'm not saying people in general, but dudes of the
time were about that kind of stuff at that time,

(15:29):
A few years after she had died. I believe I
don't have the actual dates in front of me because
I don't know why, because I don't know why I
didn't write them down. But he po reconnected with a
childhood friend named Sarah Royster, who he may or may
not have actually been engaged to before he left for
the army. They were friends when he was living with

(15:50):
Alan's and she had accepted his proposal. I think within
a month of his death. Something around that. Can I
ask a question, because I know I've speculation about this
is that when pose adopted mother died and then his
father eventually died, he had expected to get an inheritance

(16:13):
from his father, but his father had remarried, and after
he'd remarried, written him out of the will. So I
know that there was stuff about, well, I've I'm really
broke and this is really hard, and I've heard some
stuff that said that his engagement to her, to Sarah

(16:36):
was some ploy to get him back into money. We'll
actually talk about that. There's some stuff about that in
the theory section. Yeah, but it is worth mentioning that
Poe in his entire life, was paid nine dollars for
the Raven. Like that's the total sum of the money
he made off of that, which, granted, that's the equivalent
of two million dollars today, granted it is more right

(17:00):
then we think of it would buy you more than
just a meal. That maybe it was a couple of
months pay back in those days, but that's like, that's
incredible to me. The Raven. You guys, just like pause
the podcast for a second, take a moment to think
about that. Okay, you back, Yeah, have you thought about it? Okay.

(17:21):
I mentioned that Poe was found on October three outside
a polling station which was sometimes called Gunner's Hall but
usually called Ryan's Tavern. Just again in the eighteen hundreds,
you just kind of call stuff what you call stuff.
That's true. I mean, that's how a lot of places
got named. Oh that's uh, that's Billy's Canyon over there,

(17:43):
because Billy lives in that canyon, and then years later
it's called Billy's Canon. It's just how it happens. This
his discovery on the third was actually after about a
week of totally unaccounted for time. It's one of the
other things that makes this such a big mystery. Nobody
knows at all where Poe was for that week at all.

(18:05):
They're literally, well, we'll talk about that in theories. Poe
had left his home in Richmond, Virginia on September a
week prior. Pose fiance Sarah remarked that he looked ill,
so he visited a doctor who was also his friend,
named John Carter. Carter advised Poe that he should not

(18:26):
travel on in his condition. This was, in fact the
day before. He actually visited Carter the day before he left.
So Carter said, hey, don't travel, and Poet said, I'm
gonna I'm leaving bye. What do you remember? What was?
What was it was that the heart condition? He said,
had a heart condition? He didn't. He said he had

(18:47):
a condition and that had recently suffered an attack and
if he had another such attack, it would kill him.
He didn't never define what it was or anything. They're
so vague about that kind of stuff. Back in those days,
an attack of you know, the hebbs or something like that,
that would have been an official it would have this

(19:09):
is these are the days of lady vibrators for you know, hysteria. Yeah,
but I do. I do know that there is. There's
letters from Poe that talk about having been ill before
this trip, and he said something, I think I have
the cholera or the spasms, and he had evidently been

(19:30):
taking medication for cholera. So it's it is evident that
there was something not right some what it is I
don't know, but he did have something going on exactly,
So this isn't just out of the blue one guy's
diagnosis of note, just to bring it back to Carter
here is that when Poe left Carter's house, he who

(19:55):
buy a mistake air quotes included, took Carter's walking stick
walking Hayne in place of his own. Carter's walking stick
had a sword concealed in it. That's so cool. There's
a letter from Carter about this whole incident, and it
says Poe was just standing there playing with it, the cane,

(20:17):
and just kind of looks at Carter and says, I'm
just gonna go down to the tavern for a minute.
I'll be right back, and just like walks out with
the cane, never to return, but not to be kind
of absent minded. And he had brought his own walking stick,
and he had actually remarked on he had said, oh,
this is really nice, had remarked on it. Carter had

(20:40):
been like, yeah, I'm super proud of it. But they
had a conversation about it, and Poe just kind of
looked at it and said, I'll be back. It seems
The thing that I want to make apparent to people
is that it seems from the accounts that this was
an intentional thing that Poe did not necessarily that he thought, oh,
this is my walking stick, I'll take it. He looked

(21:04):
at Carter's and said, I will have that, thank you.
This is very cool, and I will take it now,
thank you. Obviously, his life was on his threat. And
we'll talk about there's some dispute, like we talked about earlier,
about what Carter told Poe was wrong with him. Some
people say that it was a brain tumor. Some people

(21:25):
say it was a heart thing. Some people say it
was the cholera. If I remember correctly, the cholera had
been resolved a month or so prior so recent. But
because there's there's a span of time and his letters
to people where he says I'm so ill, I can
barely hold a pen or the quill, and then there's

(21:46):
letters after that which you're dated weeks later. I feel
so much better. I'm a different man. So yeah, there's
definitely some time. Yeah. He also apparently had an irregular heartbeat,
which it is not always problematic. I have any regular heartbeat,
my doctor says, and it's fine. Yeah, And so it depends.

(22:08):
I don't know. Uh. He also Poe fun fact, and
pretty much everything you've heard about Poe being a drunk
came from his rival writing about how drunk he was
all the time after his death. Wasn't that Clark? Yeah, Poe,
Actually it wasn't Clark. Almost all of the accounts from

(22:28):
the time Paul was actually part of the Tembrance movement,
like he death. At the time of death, he had
had about of drinking years and years and years and
years and in his very early life. And it turns
out that when Poe drank, he was taken by terrible
bout bouts of insanity. He was such a lightweight that

(22:52):
one glass of wine would just do him totally in.
He was just smashed after one glass of wine, apparently.
I I do want to raise that I didn't really
find any accounting of that other than from all of
this official stuff from his rival, so I have to

(23:13):
question that. Yeah, there was I can't remember the guy's name. Now,
I should have written this down. I was researching this,
so somebody else who knew him, not for many years.
He said that they would occasionally drink together and there
was nothing bizarre or anything like that. They'd get drunk.
But that's because he sat around and drink brandy for
an hour. Yeah, but distance, Yeah, nothing nothing about and

(23:33):
and and awesome. But they also did not appear to
be an alcoholic, because he would go for months without
a drink. Yeah. Yeah, I think that, as far as
I can tell from the accounts, there is some evidence
to suggest that he was a lightweight, that he couldn't
really handles alcohol. His sister had the same thing, so
we'll talk about that a little bit in theories as well.

(23:54):
I brought that up to mention that the night that
he visited Carter, where he said he was going was
down to a tavern, a local tavern, and the tavern
owner reports that Poe left totally sobering, in high spirits
and seemed totally fine. That does not explain why Poe
left his luggage in his rented room and said tavern,

(24:16):
but that's fine. This actually caused some controversy during the
time because when Poe was found, he obviously wasn't coherent
enough to say like where his luggage was or anything,
and it turned out that it was still in Richmond
in this tavern. His nephew went to Baltimore once he
found out, yeah, once where where Poe was found. Once

(24:36):
he found out about po and he and harrigr Harring,
Sorry I don't know why I keep saying harrogast started
they started searching for the luggage as you would, you know,
if somebody said, well, I don't know where my luggage is,
he would go looking for it. And he wrote in
a letter at the time he arrived in this city,

(24:59):
where he spent the time he was here or under
what circumstances I have been unable to ascertain. It appears
that on Wednesday he was seen and recognized at one
of the places of election in Old Town, and that
his condition was such as to render it necessary to
send him to the college, where he was tenderly nursed
until the time of his death. Mr. Harring and myself

(25:19):
have sought in vain for the trunk of the end
clothes of Edgar. There is reason to believe that he
was robbed of them well, in such a condition as
to render him insensible of his loss. But it turns
out it was always in Richmond. He just didn't take
it with him. He just didn't take it with him,
which is random, Yeah, a great sign or by accidents,

(25:40):
who knows. And again then there's literally nothing known about
that week in between between when he left Richmond and
the third when he appeared in Baltimore. So there's there
is stuff out there talking that this trip that he took.
I believe it was his final destination was New York,

(26:02):
Is that right? Because he had a book to edit
for somebody, and then he and the woman who had
written that book, we're going to come back and it
might not be New York. I'm trying to remember what
city it was. Do you know what I'm talking about?
The trip was what you're talking about. I can't. I'm
trying to remember where he was going, Okay, But but
the point is is that he could have been in
any city. So that's an important thing for people to understand.

(26:25):
Is it's not that he went from Richmond to Baltimore.
Baltimore for five days, it's possible, but he also could
have been anywhere else. I'm not sure actually how long
it took to travel from in those days from Richmond
to Baltimore. I mean that I could easily see that
being a couple of days back in those days. Yeah,

(26:47):
I could see that being a train. Yeah, yeah, Because
there's there's talk about people saying, well, maybe he meant
to get on one train and was confused and got
on the other, an accident backtracked, and some of this
is in different theories, but so it's it was. He
was definitely traveling by trade, so I know that for

(27:08):
a fact, but he could have been wherever the stinking
rail routes went. Yeah. I could have stopped off or
got off the train for a couple of days here
there or whatever it could have done all kinds of stuff. Yeah,
and as mentioned, the reliable list reports that his nemesis
released after his death said, well, he was on a

(27:29):
drunken vendor, but no nobody really believed that. Nobody thinks
that that. Well, that's not true. Some people do think that,
but it's likely that that was just made up to
slander his name after his death. I think. So, you
know what the biggest tragedy is for Poe after he died,
is that his rival and what was the guy's name again?
The last name. His last name was Griswald. Okay, what

(27:50):
Griswald did? I don't know if you guys saw this
in the red is. I don't know how he convinced
pose family to do this, if they were in need
of cash or what. But he bought from them all
of his papers and all of his writings and all

(28:11):
these letters, and so he was essentially the executor of
all of this stuff from Poe. So he had an
iron grip on what came out after the fact, which
is just clever and just cruel. But I don't understand how.
I guess the family must not have been aware that

(28:31):
this guy was kind of a and it's not not
a friend and an enemy of that Groland post. I
I have a feeling that they may not have realized
the level of venom that was between them somehow, because
it was pretty public, but he may not have realized
how bad. They may not have known, and so they're like, oh, well,
he's being very nice and very very considerate, and so

(28:55):
we need a couple of bucks. Okay, I mean, I
I don't get it. I don't know. But then again,
a hundred, a hundred, fifty years later, it's very easy
to see the value of those documents. But at the
time they may have had. Yeah. The one I like
to kind of compare it to is Van Gogh, right,
who was a drunk and literally trying to give his

(29:17):
paintings away to have alcohol, and people would say, no, dude,
your paintings are pretty bad. I don't want to, Like,
that's not worth a beer to me. So why would
buy that guy a case of booty at the time?
I'll take that. Yeah, after the time, as his style
was a little out there, though, I mean, we all
recognize it today is brilliant. Yeah, yeah, right, But exactly

(29:40):
that sort of phenomenon that happens pretty frequently it was not. Yeah,
maybe Poe was not well. He was actually pretty highly regarded,
I guess even at the time. But it's not. But
but now he's, like, you know, one of the great
American authors of all time. But does this mean, though,
that because Grizzwold bought all this stuff, does that mean
every time I buy a copy of The Raven than
some descendantive Grizzwold guests the Royalty. I don't know that.

(30:03):
That's an excellent question. We should do some research. Yeah, yeah,
you guys want to talk about theories. Okay. The first
theory is that it was voter fraud. Yeah, a k A. Cooping.
I mentioned he was found outside or maybe in a
polling station, and apparently it was pretty common at the

(30:24):
time for people to find a mark like Poe, for instance,
beat him, kidnap him, dress him in a variety of
different disguises, and force him to vote for the same
candidate multiple times. It would explain why he was wearing
someone else's clothes, explain he was incoherent. It would explain
why he was incoherent. It wouldn't It wouldn't explain you know,

(30:46):
why he kept getting worse after he was hospitalized. Definitely not.
I feel like that's the sort of thing people recover
from and can remember what happened. You don't agree with that.
It's the other thing, of course, says that there and
our records are shoddy, But there's no mention of him
looking like he got beat up. Yeah, I know that's there.

(31:08):
There are other other beating theories out there too, Yeah,
And I don't I haven't heard anything. I haven't read
anything that says that he was described as having even
really any kind of cuts or bruises or anything exactly.
Doctor probably would have mentioned as if he had. Yeah,

(31:29):
but there is there is recordings of the fact that
there are people who when they were victims of these
cooping schemes, and they would be locked away and they
would be drugged, and there are accounts of people who
were overdosed with whatever it was. And of course when
you voted, they gave you a drink, and then you
were hauled to the next place and you voted again,

(31:50):
and you've got another drink. So if you're chucked full
of drugs, whatever it might be, because lord knows what
kind of concoction they're using to make you doscile, that
that can have a negative effect. That it did kill
some people was infrequent. But the other problem with this
theory is the police who monitored the polling stations that

(32:12):
year said it was a very calm and dull day
the cooping's these guys came out and kind of big groups,
and it was pretty obvious when they were showing up
because these people were in a cart. They had them
all chucked in the back of a cart. So well, yeah,
and there's another problem with this particular theory, which is

(32:33):
that was actually fairly well known back in those days.
So the description of him is that he looked so
unlike himself that even his friends had a hard time
recognizing him when they saw him. Somebody knew him recognized
him finally at the bar and said, oh, hey, you're
not just some random drunk yar head Garland Poe. Oh

(32:55):
you don't look great. Let's get you some help. But
it took a while for all we know. You know,
it could have been that he just wasn't recognized as possible.
But well, I don't like this theory. I'm not trying to.
I don't think this theory is really any good. But
because it sounds like it sounds like when they discovered him,

(33:15):
the election took place on a single day. Correct, yes, right,
It sounds like from the state that he was in,
he had been um he had been going downhill sharply
for more than just today, from the condition of his
hair and his skin as closed, everything like that. But
these cooping schemes would start to gather people days prior

(33:35):
to an election and they would hold him in basements
and locked up and all of that. So, I again,
I'm not I'm not in bed with this theory at all,
but it does the the evidence does show that if
he was a victim of it, he could have been
held for days on end. Why didn't they just bribe
him like to do today, I don't know. Next up

(34:01):
is Booze Whoo whoo, whoo whoo, who has previously mentioned.
There were a lot of reports about this. Apparently Poe
was the lightweight. We kind of talked about that and
the validity of that. Who knows. The theory goes that
his illness prior to traveling was brought on by drinking.

(34:24):
Somebody had tempted him fall off the wagon, and that's
what you know, the doctor was talking about. Dr Carter
was talking about when he said, if you have another attack,
you'll it'll kill you. There's some speculation that Poe had
something that made it so that his body wouldn't process

(34:44):
alcohol right way, or that it affected him a certain way.
His sister was also a lightweight. As I mentioned, there's
some speculation that that could have been caused by lesion
on the brain. I think there are probably other things.
There are other things that can cause that. Right, Yeah,
I was because I do not like the theory that

(35:06):
po drink himself to death, just because, as Joe pointed
out and you've pointed out, there's not a whole lot
of evidence that he was an alcoholic because people who
love the sauce always drink the sauce. So that doesn't
hold up to me. But you know, just to play
devil's guy, and I started looking into what how does

(35:26):
your body deal with alcohol? And your liver takes and
processes somewhere between nine of all alcohol that you drink
or that you absorb, and then breaks it down from
there and that process how it does it is the

(35:46):
liver first breaks alcohol into acid. Tall to hide, hide
at the hide, that's how you say it. I'm struggling
with that word for a day now um, which turns
out is a pretty bad substance. But once it's once
the body doesn't just leave it there. It then breaks

(36:07):
it down into acetate, which is relatively inert in the body,
and then and it can expel it. And it's so
the whole thing is normally not a problem. But it
got me thinking about what if he has some kind
of condition and there are conditions where people can't handle liquor,
and so it has a greater effect on him. If

(36:28):
his body wasn't processing alcohol like it should have or
breaking down these components and and expelling them the way
that it was supposed to. That might account for some
of it. Because the acetalde hide, it turns out, is
a carcinogen, and it's people. This is something that you

(36:53):
find in a chemical form because we know how to
now make that If people get exposed to the right
parts a million of it, they have delirium, they have hallucinations,
loss of intelligence, all this stuff. It's actually been linked
to for people who don't break it down correctly, they
don't have the proper enzyme, or they don't create enough

(37:15):
of the enzyme. It's linked to Alzheimer's, So there is
a possibility that his body wasn't his liver specifically wasn't
doing its job in the way that it should have
for whatever reason. So he had a build up of
this stuff in his system which may have caused this

(37:36):
this condition that the doctor was saying, if this happens
to you one more time, it's going to kill you.
And I don't know that he necessarily did take a drink,
but if he did and it he had built up
enough of that in his system, that might have been
what he was suffering from, because if you get enough
of this chemical compound, it will kill you. Again. I'm

(37:57):
just looking at this from the science perspective, if I
just wanted to see what happens and how that works,
and it's it's plausible. I don't buy it, but it's
totally possible. And now the thing is, though, is that
you have this. You have this when you drink alcohol
and the stuff builds up and you get all horribly
sick and everything. Then after you recover from that, then

(38:20):
I assume your liver does manage to process it, at
least in your body manages to get rid of it
at least somewhat right, Yes, yeah, that's kind of that's
that's part of what makes a hangover is your body
is breaking down the alcohol into the acetel hyde and
then into acetate and that's a noxious thing in your system.
So that's part of what makes you sick. Yeah, but

(38:41):
you think that if somebody suffered from a condition like that,
then if they would draw, they would notice it every
time they drink, they get horribly sick, they would not drink. Well,
that might be why Poe, though he did drink occasionally,
didn't drink often because it may have been man, I
went out and I had two glasses of wine and

(39:03):
I had a really fun time and I have felt
like crap for three days. That that could explain why
he was such an infrequent drinker and why he got
on board with the temperance movement. That's why other issue
with the booze himself to death. Okay, he had friends
that were in the movement, so he jumped on board

(39:24):
the bandwagon. But you know, they're just the evidence doesn't
support it short of this one jerk who said, oh, yeah,
Post was a total booze hound. Yeah. Well, also I
think that um, even if he had had some alcohol,
I don't think that they were. I don't think the
doctor was feeding him alcohol in the hospital, so he

(39:45):
should have recovered. Well, well, yeah, and correct me if
I'm wrong, Devon. When they picked him up, there are
there's nothing in the writing that says, oh, and by
the way, your buddy smells like a still, No, there's not.
And as they said, Miran, for all his unaccountability, did say, no,
Paul was not drunk. He said he did not smell

(40:05):
of liquor. Yeah, he said he wasn't showing any signs
of that. And I think, you know, the only thing
that this kind of helps to explain is you get
drunk and where someone else's clothes. I mean, you know
that's yeah, we've all done it. No, we haven't theory
poisoning of any kind, carbon monoxide and having metal poisoning meide. Now,

(40:33):
there is something and I don't remember what the compound
is in the medication that he would have been taking
for cholera. There is a compound in it that if
you get enough of it, it is really lethal. But
he would have had to have been taking so much
of that compound that it's obscene he would have been

(40:55):
having to take. I don't remember what it was. Five
to ten times the prescription for that to have made
him go into the state that he was founded right
back back in those days. That's a pretty questionable stuff.
And some of the like mercury, Yeah, I think that
might be what was it? It was mercury, Yeah, I
think yeah. Yeah. And so I maybe he did chug

(41:17):
alog his bottle of loudon um. I don't know. But well,
the other thing is that so pose hair became collector's
item directly after his death, which is actually kind of fortunate. Yeah,
it turns out it's fortunately because doctors have been able
to since then take and test his hair and they've
come up with nothing. There's nothing, there's nothing they can find.

(41:38):
So no and no rabies. I'm actually kind of liking rabies,
like brabies, thinking rabies makes a lot of sense. I've
never liked rabies as a disease. I don't really care
for it either. That's why you know what people go
about to say, we're raising money for cancer. I say,
good at hell, I'm not a favor of cancer. Apparently

(41:59):
his symptoms match. I don't buy it. How he would
have gotten it is unclear. There was no evidence to
suggest that he gotten bit by anything. One of the biggest,
most prevalent, almost every single time somebody has rabies fears
things symptoms is the fear of water, and he did
not have that. So yeah, that's the only that's the

(42:21):
only problem with that is, I mean, they're probably other
ways to get rabies besides just being bitten by a
dog or a bat or a rat, but rabies isn't
an immediate onset. Rabies has an incubation period of something
on the order of, if I remember correctly, four to

(42:41):
six weeks before you're really in the symptoms. Yeah, so
you could have gotten a rat by it, for example,
and that it had enough time to heal exactly. Yeah.
So while I again not on board with it, I'm
not going to discount it because there was no bite wound. Yeah,
I give it's the water thing for me. But you know,
say I was good. I was gonna check into the

(43:03):
the actual symptoms of hydrophobia because I know that hydrophobia
you're afraid of water, and I know it was drank
water while he was in the hospital, But I don't
know if hydrophobia means that you're afraid of the water
because you still have to drink water to stay alive, right,
But that's part of the problem with brabies is that
you're afraid of water and so you don't drink, and

(43:24):
so you start to get dehydrated. So I mean, people
won't drink. That's why they get all their fluids intervenously
when they're being treated for brabies, is you know, when
they're in the throes of it, because you can't say,
would you like a glass of water, because they freak
out and knock it out of your hand and it
scares the holy living crap out of them. Okay, but

(43:46):
again I don't I don't buy that one. I don't
like any Next is an illness of some kind. It's
not a tumor edition. It's speculated he could have had
the flu or had another bout of collar um. There
there's nothing to suggest the symptoms. He could have been hypoglycemic,

(44:10):
which I don't get because I assumed they were feeding him.
So if he had low blood sugar, you would think
he could have had some unknown illness like the vapors,
Like I don't know what he could have the vapors,
and the vapors is just a term for for you know,
like like when Victorian women would like be all offended

(44:32):
and they act all faints and go oh my, oh
my lords, you know when they go sit on the
fainting couch, because you know that's the vapors. I think, Okay, yeah, sorry, Javin,
I didn't mean to interrupt. I just didn't get that
could have had syphilis. I mean he could could um well,
I know that there. I mean, syphilis does lead to

(44:53):
insanity at the at the end, so it's entirely possible.
It seems like it came on really quickly. It seems
like he you would have been showing symptoms, although if
he had been sick and not looking well, it does
seem like it came on really quickly. Though. I if
we're going to say that it's syphilis, because we've gone

(45:14):
down this road, I would point have either of you
ever done any research into al capone. But oh yeah
he was a symphiletic idiot. Yeah he But but that
lasted a long time time. It wasn't as if yeah,
I've got syphilis. Oh I'm not treating. Yeah I got syphi. Listen,

(45:35):
whoo screwy three days later. Yeah it doesn't work. No,
you drag on for a long, long time brain. So exactly,
it's it's not an immediate killer. Yeah, I'm not liking syphilis,
don't like I don't like cephialis period. Yeah, really, why
would you? Nobody should? He could have, I guess been

(45:57):
epileptic as well. Explain that to me. I can't explain it.
It's just something I saw on the internet. And I
was going to scratch my head over that one. Yeah,
I don't know. I mean, we're kind of doing a
list of things that aren't viable right now, aren't we
Just to just to say it, that's what. Yeah, that's what.

(46:21):
My mother had had epilepsy, and and she also had
brain cancer. And eventually, after the surgery and all the
radiation and everything and that they gave her, she had
a massive seizure and she was out of her mind
for several days. I mean literally, I mean it was
it was crazy. She was I was, but she wasn't
completely incoherent. I could still talk to her, but she
wasn't perceiving reality quite correctly. I mean, like, for example,

(46:45):
I talked I was talking to and and and she
said that the people around here are acting so strangely
because like the phone rings and I tell them that
to the phone, and they said, the phone's not ringing.
And I'm going too, you know, they're lying to me.
And I was visiting the next time, I was visiting her.
We're sitting there talking and and suddenly she says, there,
do you hear it? And she's pointing at the phone
and the phone was not ringing. Yeah. Yeah, and stuff

(47:09):
like that. I mean, I can list a whole bunch
of stuff. But she eventually recovered, though she didn't just
like go down and down and down and then die
because because at the see the athletics. Yeah, I mean yeah,
she was kind of sort of out of her mind
for a few days, and then it started getting better,
and within three or four days she was she was
okay again, you know. So yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah,

(47:31):
so now it's illness of some kind. It's a tumor. Oh,
this is the tumor edition. This is actually, uh not
a bad one. This is the one that I'll get behind.
These next two are my two favorite, saved the best
for last. Apparently, a doctor once told Poe in his
younger years, I think in his it was a doctor

(47:52):
in New York, and it was in his he was
in his twenties or something like that, said that he
had a legion on his brain and that was the
root of his booze problem. How did they figure that out?
I don't know, Okay, than an X ray. Maybe I
don't know what you can see and what you can't
see anywhere. Yeah, if you have like scar tissue, that's

(48:13):
differ I don't know. Yeah, I just don't know how
they figure out you have a legion on the brain
in eighteen thirty. So I'm just I'm just have no idea. Yeah,
because here's the thing, I'm kind of pulling a Devon
on Devon is I'm googling as we're talking, and I
knew I had heard something about this recently, which is
X rays weren't used clinically until about eighteen nine, so

(48:39):
it's eight it's still not something that they're doing. So
I just okay, So I don't know why how that
doctor knew. But let's just like take on faith with
the doctor knew or said, hey, there's something wrong with
your brain. It was the brain savant of something. Maybe
there were there there are ways to deduce disorders and

(49:00):
stuff like that from the behaviors. Sometimes you can tell
but of course, back in those days, a lot of
us still was like basically they were kind of witch doctors.
I mean, I don't know if they were. They were
still bleeding people in this at that time, were they.
Some of it happened, but not nearly as much as
it had. It wasn't that much that earlier. Like George Washington,
for example, supposedly died of a cold turn in pneumonia,

(49:22):
but he probably actually died from because they kept bleeding him,
you know, otherwise he would have lived a lot longer.
And that was not that long before. Yeah, that was
still around, but I don't think it was quite as
popular as it had once been. Can we start talking
about my favorite theory again? Oh? Yeah, sorry, we wouldn't
way out in the weeds, didn't we Yeah, we haven't.

(49:45):
We haven't discussed yet that pose body was fairly unceremoniously
dumped into a cheap coffin into an unmarked grave when
he first died, Well wasn't. It wasn't quite dumped. They
placed it in there. And yeah, he actually had a
very brief funeral. I think it lasted three menace with
seven people in attendance. Yeah, yeah, at least there's so

(50:05):
many millions of people who love love him now well,
and that's exactly a twenty six years later, his body
was exhumed and moved to a more permanent location with
this like huge statue or not statue, but monument. It's
a beautiful monument. Yeah, that's really pretty. You should look
up pictures if you'd like. It's the second one, you know,

(50:25):
the first one that they were going to put down
got destroyed by a train, right, which was crazy. Well everything, Yeah,
he didn't have a curse, and they did. Anyways, when
the crew was exhuming his body, the coffin was in
such disresp disrepair that when they went they had it

(50:47):
connected to some mechanism to carry it, and the coffin
just like fell apart. So Shelton obviously it was not
the soil will do that. Yeah, it wasn't in a
great shape. And one of the workers remarked, unsolicitedly remarked
that there was an odd feature of the skull, and
that was that it sounded like there was a ball

(51:08):
rolling around in there. And the given that this was
about the late eighteen hundreds, they said, oh, yeah, that's
just his brain. It troveled up in there. We now know,
of course, that brains don't last that long real quick.
But apparently a brain tumor can calcify after death and

(51:29):
would account for the sound of a ball rolling around
inside of a skull because it would be calcified, it
would be harder, it would have lasted, it would have
been in there, it would be in the skull without
a fracture or anything like that. So that could account
for that sound. It could account for a lot of
his behavior, could account for his swift decline, his inability

(51:49):
to be treated. I get I personally put a lot
of stock into the idea that Poe had a brain
cancer of some kind. I know Joe has briefly talked about,
you know, having family that had brain cancer, and I've
seen it too, and it's amazing how someone can operate
and operate and operate and seem completely okay, and then

(52:14):
just one day it you know that whatever the cancer
maybe shorts the circuit, to put it kind of in
a general phrase, and it just shuts everything down and
send somebody downhill quite rapidly. Damn it. Actually, though, a
tumor probably depending on what part of the brain it's in,

(52:36):
I mean you'll feel the effects of it for a
long time. I mean, and they'll continually build. But he
may have been suffering, for it's possible that he had
been suffering from years. You know, he he was having attacks,
He wasn't a very well man. He had bouts of
time where it was better and bouts of time that
it was worse, which I think is typical of kind

(52:56):
of a long term illness like that you kind of
get better and you get worse, and you get better
get worse. So I don't know, it's it's not as
though we have any evidence to suggest that he wasn't
suffering migraines and headaches and delusions and whatever else. The
things that that I I really find horrifying in the
whole story is of course, the lack of records of

(53:20):
oh when he was in the hospital, because if there
had been any kind of written accounting of his actions
and his behaviors other than this kind of I'm going
to use the word anecdotal recollections of the of Miran,
then that might lead us to know a little more,

(53:41):
have have better better ideas. I mean, there's there's things
that people in that condition do. I don't know if
you guys have ever heard of things like terminal agitation,
which is it turns out kind of a related or
a common thing with with can't of the brain, where
somebody's just constantly moving and doing stuff. And so it's

(54:04):
it's like, if we had that kind of record, we
might be able to say, oh, yeah, we've seen that
over the last hundred and fifty years and categorized it.
But unfortunately I just don't have it. And the ball
rolling around in his in his skull, can I just say,
is not indicative to me of brain cancer. That sounds

(54:29):
more like a clod of dirt. I'm I'm just gonna
say it still is not going to roll around and rattle.
It's going to disintegrate. But I don't care what it is.
A chunk of earth of some sort is in the
skull where I But I still I get behind the
cancer theory because that's the one that explains to me

(54:51):
why he switched so quick and went downhill. That's one
of my favorite theories. The next to my favorite theories
is murder. As we previously alluded to, it turns out Sarah,
his at that point fiance, was quite wealthy, which we

(55:13):
started talk about she also had three brothers. Yeah, I don't.
I think they were younger than her, because I think
that she had all the money, she was in charge
of all the money, and that they were in risk
of using a lot of the money if she married

(55:33):
Poe or something of that natural nature. The theory goes
that Poe was threatened by the three brothers in Philadelphia,
and he was so frightened that he disguised himself for
a week and hidden Baltimore to throw them off the trail.
It didn't work, of course, he was intercepted by the brothers.
He was beaten or else wise incapacitated, forced to drink

(55:58):
which they knew would kill him, and left for dead.
Why didn't he use the sword cane? Well, that I mean,
I think that's one of the other things. Is this
is one of This is literally the only theory that
addresses the fact that he seemingly purposefully took a weapon
with him the night before he left on the train.
So I think it's at least fun to think about.

(56:19):
Maybe their brothers had threatened him just verbally before, so
he thought, oh I need to protect myself. I'm going
to take this cane with a sword in it wasn't.
One of the only things that he still had on
his person that was his was the cane. He still
had the cane when they found him, so he ditched

(56:41):
his fancy clothes. I was wearing the palm hat I
think they called it in raggedy coat, like a straw
hat and raggy coat. But he still had the sword cane. Ye, yeah,
but why didn't you buy a gun? He was broke,
he was super broke. I don't know. I think that's

(57:02):
a fun theory. I don't know if it's the one
that I necessarily to believe the most, but I definitely
think it's fun. It's also possible that, you know, he
was kept in communicado in the hospital, so there's another
couple of ways to look at it. And maybe the
brothers paid off paid off the doctor, and there, you know,
then I've already even paid the doctor to poison him,
overdose him, something like that on lauding him. It's always possible.

(57:24):
And then uh, you know, and then just the doctor
made up this whole story about even though he was
completely loose, it doctor made up this huge story about
how he was just out of his mind and raving
the entire time when actually he wasn't right, It's possible,
It's always possible. I I also wonder if, well, let's
just not say necessarily that it was the Brothers that
beat the holy crap out. I mean, but he he
got clubbed by somebody or something. You could well, he

(57:48):
could have been mugged, but I'm not. I'm not gonna
infer what caused the beating. But if it is possible
to get whacked in the head hard enough to cause bleeding,
that doesn't leave a giant crater in the skull. And yeah,

(58:09):
and it may have been that, you know, the the
Miran just didn't do a very thorough exam, or maybe
it had been a day or two and so the
swelling on the outside of his skull had gone down,
So we just didn't know. I will lend credence to
the beating of some sort I I don't think it
was this the brothers that just it seems too convenient.

(58:35):
Can we talk about how convenient pose life was, though,
I mean, it was so tragic and it's like you
can't make it up. It's so good anyways, that that
would be the perfect end to an otherwise very tragic
life of a man who's just obsessed with tragedy, so
very at the very least it's nice and romantic and

(58:57):
poetic ending to his life. Well, that he was beaten,
senseless murdered over the woman. Yeah, or you know, but
but that leads me to my just another theory I'm
gonna throw out there, which is that perhaps Poe was
feeling that he kind of the words on, he kind

(59:18):
of shot his wad. Perhaps he was having writer's writer's block,
Perhaps he felt his best days were behind him, and
so after this episode and it sounds like he had
these episodes. He winds up in the hospital where he
spent several days with the doctor. He tells the doctor
that he doesn't want visitors, and at the end of
it all, he tells he asked the doctor to help

(59:39):
him fake his desk, so they find an average substitute
for his and he goes off and runs away and
joins the circus and changes his name because he likes
to change his name. So and that would explain, that
would explain a lot of stuff. He just you know,
he just left Grolan. Poe could have gone just gone
out to somewhere. Maybe he went out west and he
became a cowboy. Possible suicide is also possible, So I'm

(01:00:03):
actually really liking Joe's theory. Edgar Allan, Edgar Allan, Poe
rides off into the sunset. That's pretty awesome to me.
All Right, I'm going to get behind that one. We
can end on that note. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, and
then it eventually meets up with John Wayne and they
shoot a lot of people and uh and they russell
cattle or no excuse me, they shoot rustlers and they

(01:00:24):
heard cattle. Okay, yeah, yeah, all right, girl on. Poe
rides off into the sunset. All right, good, well, uh,
you want to talk about aliens? No, okay, all right.
You can find some links about this episode on our website.
That website is thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You might

(01:00:47):
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(01:01:07):
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(01:01:30):
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(01:01:52):
at gmail dot com. With that having been said, as
Steve says, I think we're gonna get out of here.
Sounds good to me. Never more, never more, never more,