Edgar Allan Poe and the Poe Toaster

TRUE: a real grave and a real six-decade mystery

Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849, aged 40, after collapsing delirious in a tavern, and nobody has ever settled why; researchers have blamed fever, late-stage alcoholism and rabies. He was buried in the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, where a stone marks his original grave, shared once with his wife Virginia and his mother-in-law Maria Clemm.

For decades, in the small hours of every 19 January, his birthday, a figure in black slipped into that locked graveyard. Witnesses described a wide-brimmed hat or hood, a white scarf hiding the face and a silver-tipped cane. At the grave he poured a glass of Martell cognac and raised a toast, laid three red roses on the stone in a pattern of his own, thought to stand for Poe, Virginia and Maria Clemm, and left with the unfinished bottle standing beside them. The press called him the Poe Toaster. Witnesses put the start of the visits in the 1930s, though nothing appeared in print until 1950, when the Baltimore Evening Sun mentioned an anonymous citizen who crept in each year to leave a bottle of excellent label.

Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, watched every visit from 1976 and picked up what was left. Mostly the notes were simple: Edgar, I haven't forgotten you. In 1993 one said the torch would be passed, and in 1999 another said the original Toaster had died the year before and handed the rite to a son. The younger visitor's notes took a stranger turn. In 2001, days before the Baltimore Ravens met the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, a note borrowed from The Masque of the Red Death to predict darkness and decay for the Ravens, named for Poe's own poem; Baltimore won 34 to 7. In 2004 the note grumbled that the grave was no place for French cognac, left anyway out of respect for family tradition. In 2006 spectators climbed the walls trying to find out how he got in, and Jerome chased them out.

A Westminster church historian, Sam Porpora, claimed at 92 to have invented the Toaster in the 1960s as a publicity stunt, but the 1950 report is a decade older than his supposed invention, and his story kept changing. The Toaster came for the last time in 2009, the bicentennial of Poe's birth. In 2010 nobody came, and in 2011 four impostors walked in openly, none giving the secret signal only Jerome knew. In 2016 the Maryland Historical Society chose a new Toaster to carry the tribute on.