Edgar Allan Poe and the Poe Toaster

Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore in October 1849 under circumstances no one has ever explained, found delirious in a stranger’s clothes outside a tavern, and was buried at Westminster. For sixty years a figure in black known only as the Poe Toaster slipped into the locked graveyard every January 19th, his birthday, and left three roses and a half-bottle of cognac on the stone, then vanished. The visits stopped in 2009, and no one ever learned who he was.