The Graves of Edgar Allan Poe and the Women Who Haunted Him

The spirits of the dead, who stood in life before thee, are again in death around thee,

and their will shall overshadow thee.

Edgar Allan Poe, the name alone conjures up images of ravens, beating hearts,

disturbed graves, undead women, and bereaved lovers.

A key figure of dark Romanticism, Poe was a master of Gothic horror, mystery and the

macabre, remembered for poems like "The Raven," "The Bells," and "Annabel

Lee," and short stories like "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Pit and the Pendulum."

But Poe is also considered the father of the modern detective story, his fictional inspector

C. August Dupin a predecessor of the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Hercules Poirot.

Tales like "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" thrilled Victorian audiences through Poe's

genius use of ratiocination.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, said, "Where was the detective story until

Poe breathed the breath of life into it?"

But perhaps the greatest mystery America's first mystery writer left us, was the mystery

surrounding his own death.

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore outside a tavern,

delirious and in great distress.

His trunk was missing, and he was apparently wearing someone else's clothes.

He had left Richmond a week earlier for New York, but somehow ended up on the streets

of Baltimore, half frozen and out of his mind.

There are no surviving accounts of what happened during that ensuing week, and Poe never regained

enough lucidity to explain his condition.

He was taken to the hospital in a stupor, becoming one day violently delirious, addressing

spectral and imaginary objects in the room, to gravely sedated the next.

He suffered four agonizing days until, according to his doctor, quietly moving his head he

said "Lord help my poor soul," and expired.

It was October 7, 1849.

Edgar Allan Poe was 40.

His death certificate has been lost, and no cause of death has ever been determined, leading

to wide speculation ranging from brain disease, to alcoholism, even murder.

But contemporary poet, Charles Baudelaire remarked, "This death was almost a suicide,

a suicide prepared for a long time."

Despite being one of the most well-known writers of his day, Poe died in poverty.

There was little ceremony at his funeral, attended by only about 8 people, and lasting

just a few minutes.

He was buried in a simple mahogany coffin near this spot in the Westminster Burial Grounds

here in Baltimore, close to his grandfather David Poe, and brother Henry.

Eleven years after burial, a cousin paid for a monument, but in a freak accident that could

have sprung from one of Poe's bizarre tales, a train derailed and crashed into the stone

yard where the stone was made, destroying it before it could even be placed.

And so, Poe's quiet grave remained unmarked.

But this was not the end of Edgar Allan Poe's journey.

Decades later, in the 1870s, a local school teacher and students raised funds to have

a permanent monument to Poe created.

In the fall of 1875, Edgar Allan Poe was exhumed, risen from the grave like so many of his characters.

To properly identify him, the coffin was opened, one witness noting, "The skull was in excellent

condition-the shape of the forehead, one of Poe's striking features, was easily discerned."

Poe was removed from his original burial place behind Westminster Hall to be relocated to

a place of prominence and honor in the graveyard, close to the front gate.

As the coffin was being moved, pieces of it broke off, and were quickly snatched up by

admirers who were present for the event.

Edgar Allan Poe's journey ended here.

And this new tomb, Poe's final resting place, was dedicated on November 17, 1875.

Edgar Allan Poe's legacy of dark tales featuring love and loss was hard-earned.

In this early Victorian era, there was a preoccupation with death; mourning had become fashionable.

But for Poe it was not a fashion he simply wore - it was his reality.

Perhaps his best-known work is "The Raven," the poem that would earn him both critical

and popular acclaim worldwide, though very little money-- just $9.

Like a rock star of today, when Poe would walk down the street, dressed all in black,

people would call him The Raven, shouting out the poem's famous refrain, "Nevermore!"

To hear Poe recite "The Raven" was said to be the experience of one's life.

The audience seemed almost to hear the evil bird ominously croaking his "Nevermore,"

afraid to draw the next breath lest the enchanted spell be broken.

But there was deep personal meaning behind the narrator's lament for the "lost Lenore."

A common thread throughout the writings of Poe is the death of a beautiful woman, whose

presence somehow remains.

In analyzing his own composition process for "The Raven," he explains that "the death

of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world - and equally

is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover."

Poe was, himself, all too often, that bereaved lover.

He was a man who loved too deeply for the tragedies that continually befell him.

Women were to him the greatest sources of beauty, of succor, of love, of caring and

tenderness, of goodness, and inspiration.

They were pure poetry... but they were fragile beings, too fragile.

And every new love for Poe brought with it the terrifying possibility of another loss,

of renewed heartbreak.

And so we have poems and stories, like "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," "The Fall of

the House of Usher," "Morella," "Berenice," "Lenore," "Ligeia," "The Oblong

Box," and "Ulalume," where a beautiful young woman dies, but whose presence remains,

haunting the bereaved with a need to remember, but a wish to forget.

Literary scholars, and even Poe himself, attribute the inspiration of these dead-alive women

to multiple women in Poe's own life, but it's unclear exactly who was the inspiration

for which...

Who are you?

Eddy, my boy.

Eddy.

Mama.

Eddy.

MAMA!!

"To the humane heart, on this night, Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded

by her children, asks your assistance, and asks it perhaps for the last time."

So read the plea for help that went out to theatergoers in November, 1811, on behalf

of Eliza Poe.

Her husband had abandoned her and their three children, and she lay on her deathbed.

The Mrs. Poe here was Edgar's mother, known and beloved not only to theatergoers in Richmond,

but throughout the country.

She was one of the nation's most popular actresses, admired for not just her acting,

but the sweetness of her singing voice, and grace of her dancing.

"Mrs. Poe is a brilliant gem in the theatric crown," said one reviewer.

She toured city to city playing hundreds of roles, from comedic ingénues, to Shakespearean

roles.

But this was an age when acting was seen as just one step above prostitution.

Still, she was so beloved by the society ladies of Richmond, that the call to the humane heart

was answered, and she and her children were looked after until her death from tuberculosis

at the age of 24.

"By the death of this lady," news articles read, "the stage has been deprived of one

of its chief ornaments."

As a child, Poe saw his mother die on stage night after night, as Ophelia or Juliet, but

she always came back to life.

Until that bleak December, when little Eddie was not yet 3 years old, and she didn't

come back.

For a child that age, this would have been difficult to comprehend, to reconcile, and

for the rest of his life, his writings would reflect this inner turmoil as to whether or

not death was real, or permanent.

The young women who die in his stories, in one form or another, often come back to life...

"These are the full and the black and the wild eyes of my lost love, of the Lady Ligeia"

Rising from the dead, just as Eliza had done so often on stage.

Edgar was proud to be Eliza's son.

He was proud of her work as an actress, and attributed his creative gifts to her.

And however dim his recollections may have been of her, Eliza was an ever-present force

in his life and work.

Edgar described her to be "as pure, as angelic and altogether lovely, as any woman could

be on earth."

And in a way she was by his side for the rest of his life, in the form of a small oval portrait

she left him.

Eliza's grave here at St John's Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia remained unmarked

until 1927, when this marker was placed by various Edgar Allan Poe foundations -- a monument

to Eliza Poe, the mother of The Raven.

Eliza?

Is that who you are?

Helen, thy beauty is to me, like those Nicean barks of yore...

This must be Shockoe Hill Cemetery in Richmond.

One of Poe's favorite haunting grounds, he was known to take frequent Sunday evening

strolls here with his wife, Virginia.

But as a teenage boy, it was another love that drew him here.

And this is her grave.

Jane Stanard, whom he called Helen, after Helen of Troy, considered in Greek mythology

as the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

Poe began writing as a teenager, the beginning of a career that biographer Kenneth Silverman

would describe as sort of prolonged mourning.

That mourning began as a child with his mother, but continued when a teenager of about 14.

Jane Stanard was the mother of one of his schoolmates, a woman he knew for about a year,

but grew to love deeply, with all the affections of a devoted son.

One of his early poems titled, "To Helen," was written for Jane Stanard.

Poe said that he wrote this poem in his passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of

my soul."

She was an angel to Poe's forlorn and darkened nature.

It was not a romantic love young Eddy had for Jane, but an ideal, the love of a woman

as a giver of care and affection.

In 1824 Jane began suffering from a death-like illness, and died insane at the age of 31.

Poe mourned her like she was his own mother, nightly visiting her grave here at Shockoe

Hill Cemetery, unable to "endure to think of her lying there forsaken and forgotten."

Edgar?

Wait!

Are you Jane Stanard?

Perhaps... but there was a real mother figure in young Edgar Poe's life.

And here she is, so close to Jane - Frances Allan, known as Fanny.

One of the society ladies who had come to the aid of Eliza Poe after she was struck

ill was Frances Allan, wife of wealthy merchant, John Allan.

After Eliza's death, her children each went to different foster homes.

Little Edgar Poe was taken in and fostered by the Allan family, and though never formally

adopted, was baptized as Edgar Allan Poe.

In this comfortable upbringing, Edgar was afforded the liberal education that would

prime his love of literature and reciting poetry.

Fanny loved Edgar like her own son, and is said to have resembled Eliza in many ways.

Poe's affections were reciprocated, calling her Ma.

But Fanny was often sick.

When Poe went off to the Army, letters home to John Allan always asked after the health

of Fanny, asking to send "my dearest love to Ma."

In 1829, when Edgar was around 20, Fanny's illness took a serious turn.

In her final hours she greatly desired to see Edgar.

Frances Allan died on February 28th at the age of 45.

Edgar managed a military leave, but was unable to arrive until the day after her burial here

at Shockoe Hill Cemetery.

The grief of losing his foster mother was magnified by the guilt of having left her

in that condition, and not being able to make it back to see her before her death and burial.

Grief, it seems, would be Edgar's stock and store for the rest of his life.

With the death of his foster mother, and having never been formally adopted, Edgar once again

felt like a man without a familial foundation.

John Allan was usually kind to Edgar in his upbringing, but he never really saw him as

a son, and their relationship, ever tumultuous in later years, would eventually dissolve

entirely without the unifying force of Fanny Allan.

John assisted adult Edgar on occasion, but Edgar would receive no inheritance, leaving