I have this theory that the more chaotic the world and world events, the more people lean into holidays and special occasions. And I think that the ones that we culturally trend toward can be traced back to the overwhelming feelings we all share. In years that have seemed especially dark, people lean into merriment more. In years of great uncertainty, there’s a yearning for tradition and things that feel safe.
This October, it seems that being Feral for Fall has become a feature; everyone is climbing over one another to get to the pumpkin patch and light their cozy candles, even though (maybe because) it’s still 80 degrees outside in Oregon. A summer that reminded us things that truly terrify — all of the realities of climate change and the unreasonable power of a handful of wealthy octogenarians — has sent us all looking for the kinds of spooky things we can control in some way. Instead of focusing on our fear of say, SCOTUS rulings about our bodies, we can turn out homes into spaces haunted by kitsch and watch movies that might give us a jump scare but ultimately resolve in a tidy fashion.
Plus, I feel like those of us haunted by some kind of mental illness of whatever sort find a lot of comfort in spooky things outside of ourselves that we can look at and read about and research. Because what is having a mental illness other than living in a haunted house? And how many scary movies are just about presenting the reality of mental illness in more visible ways?
In my own life, I always feel like grounding myself in my own annual traditions (like setting up my ofrenda and going absolutely bonkers on the candles) is a way to calm some of the ghosts in my head. And when more and more people are addressing their own neurodivergences, I suspect I’m not alone in this.
In keeping with this theory — and my Elder Millennial Urge to Become Morticia Addams — I’m going to do a couple of special editions of Crazy/Old. Most will be free, but some will be just for my beloved supporters.
And if you’re thinking about supporting me but are light on cash (I GET IT), I do have a special rate (it’s called the Class Solidarity Special) available here:
So with that out of the way, here we go.
The Strange Final Days of Edgar Allan Poe
Poe: Writer, Poet, Person Destined To Have An Unfortunate Life
Most everyone knows that Edgar Allan Poe was an unusual guy. His most recognizable works are characterized by the presence of ghoulish events, menacing animals, and generalized delusions. Poe has long been suspected of writing what he knew — and most readers assume that he knew life as a non-neurotypical individual. Certainly a normal-brained person couldn’t write the kind of receptive terror presented by a giant bird who answers your questions with a single word over and over and over again. It’s basically a poem about anxiety except if anxiety were a jackdaw.
It wouldn’t be surprising; he was essentially born an orphan. His parents were actors and his mother contracted and died from TB while Poe was in utero, so he certainly began life behind the 8-ball. He did get taken in by a family, the Allans (that’s where the name comes from), though he was never formally adopted and always seemed to have a deep sense of longing for connection. Like, this is a poem of his, entitled Alone:
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—
Woof! The young Poe was studious and smart, but he also had a difficult time with impulse control and seemed to be trying to fill the emotional void in just about any way possible. Often, that took the form of drinking and taking drugs, namely, opium. In a 1992 paper about his substance abuse, a surgeon writing for the Canadian Medical Association stated that “Poe was often a binge drinker, and alcohol cost him dearly in terms of employment, relationships, reputation and health.” He also included the following quote, sourced from a 1945 biography of Poe:
Like so many other young men in the pursuit of meaning, also tried military life, attending West Point for a while, and ultimately settled on the Ultimate Medicine for Aimless Young Fellows: he took a wife. Who was 13. A 13-year-old wife. Who was also his cousin. Because who better to nurse a sad man than a literal child? And maybe her mother, who he liked a lot?
Don’t take my word for it. He was a prolific writer in spite of the drink and was constantly cataloging his thoughts and feeling through stories and poems and essays, so we have a lot of source material. In a poem called “To My Mother,” Poe writes about how his mother-in-law — his wife-cousin Virginia’s mother/also known as his aunt — is so very dear to him in the same way that his wife was and that his actual mother was not.
Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother,"
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you—
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you
In setting my Virginia's spirit free.
My mother—my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.
Virginia died after fewer than 10 years of marriage. She began showing signs of tuberculosis, which Poe knew well because a.) it was pretty common and b.) it’s what killed his mom. Unsurprisingly, this was not great on his mental health and it’s around this time that he goes from drinking a lot to drinking really a lot. After her death, Poe dogged around, hooking up with a handful of different women, which is fairly predictable.
Poe’s early life certainly contained a lot of the building blocks for a future mental collapse, which is what happened. His seemingly unresolved trauma, feelings of loss, and whatever was biologically and neurologically going on as a result of profound lack of connection (and gestational tuberculosis and drug and alcohol use and whatever else might have been interrupting his brain wiring), compounded to create what historians assume to be a case of full-blown substance use disorder.
So when he died days after being found incoherent and sloppy in a tavern, it would have been easy to assume it was Edgar being drunk yet again. But! There were unusual circumstances that went along with his death which made is seem like there was maybe more to it.
In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed—
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.
The first thing you need to know about Poe’s death is that historians can’t find basically any of the records. Death certificate? Missing. Hospital notations? Nope. And if that’s not spooky enough, let me tell you about the whole thing with his clothes.
Poe’s later life remained chaotic, although less so. He was working somewhat steadily and continuing to have consistent relationships with the people in his life.
It stopped on October 3, 1849, when he was found laying in the gutter outside of a pub in Baltimore. Joseph W. Walker worked for the Baltimore Sun and had gone to the pub to check out the hoopla — it was Election Day and the pub had polls because the middle-1800s were a veritable assembly line of good ideas — when he found Poe, dressed like a common laborer and looking extremely unwell.
Walker did the Good Samaritan thing and wrote to a connection of Poe’s. The letter read:
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, he is in need of immediate assistance.
Poe’s sudden appearance in Baltimore was surprising, since he hadn’t really been heard from in about a week — and the last time anyone saw him, he was in Virginia and was supposed to be heading back to his home in New York.
Four days passed before Poe succumbed to his injuries and during that time, he was never able to give a clear answer as to how he got there or what he was dressed like a common worker (which was out of character for him, because he liked to look very sharp).
Here’s what’s weird, though: It didn’t seem like he was just too deep into his cups. Though he had been known to get White Girl Wasted often, Poe had been working to drop the drink in the recent weeks. He’d even joined the Temperance Movement just before he died and had “made a number of verbal pledges to abstain from the use of intoxicating drink,” though evidently it was “equally well known that he violated these pledged [sic].” So many he was just back on the wagon and got robbed. Stranger things have happened.
But there’s another interesting theory that I think is worth exploring. In ~these modern times~ we know that people mental health issues or people who are neurodivergent are more likely to be victimized by both violence and crime. So was he robbed? Or maybe worse?
The Smithsonian has a great article on theories about Poe’s death and lays this one out:
Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping, a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities. Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.
Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state.
Around the late 1870s, Poe's biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), 'cooped,' stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die."
It’s very interesting to note that some reports have stated that both Poe and his sister shared a hereditary affliction wherein they had an unusually low tolerance for alcohol — remember the quote above about drinking just one shot and being completely hammered — which is a strange little quirk. It’s possible that they had a shared allergy, or an autoimmune disorder, which could have lead to other side-effects. So it’s possible that is he was cooped, the guys gave him way more alcohol than he needed and just like, poisoned him.
Poe’s death — and whoever caused it — remain a mystery. So does his mental state and whatever demons he may have struggled with. But I think one of the reasons that Poe was able to create such riveting, intense, and scary works is because his own brain was probably a pretty unsettling place.
Poe: Victim of Circumstance, Probable Fuckboy
Edgar Allan Poe’s young life did not set him up to succeed. He certainly had insecure/anxious attachments, which is a recipe for later substance abuse, poor relationships later in life, and “being highly emotional, impulsive, unpredictable, and moody.” He also had so much tragedy and trauma in his early life (so did basically everyone back then, but his was extra) that his brain was likely rewired to make it harder to like, live a regular life. And then there’s also just the garden variety mental illness which may have run in his family.
Describing The Tell-Tale Heart, authors from Augustana University noted that “throughout the narrative, the narrator struggles to reassure that there is nothing wrong with him and that he is completely normal.” This, to me, feels like such an accurate description of living with a mental illness or some kind of neurodivergence, especially in the period before diagnosis when the fear — the terror, really — that something is wrong with you is the only thing more frightening than the fear that there isn’t and that you’re, you know, being haunted by a disembodied organ.
But Edgar Allan Poe also had some definite fuckboy energy, too, which I think we can’t leave out, too. Marrying his teenage cousin was weird, even then. And at a time when a lot of people had childhood trauma, not all of them gambled their foster dad’s money away at college. I could see him meeting a lady on the street or at a salon and talking about his incredible works of poetry, dressed in his tight little waistcoat, painting her romantic pictures while knowing full well he would not return her telegram, mostly because he couldn’t afford it.
I’ll leave us with a section from his obituary:
EDGAR ALLAN POE died in Baltimore on Sunday last. His was one of the very few original minds that this country has produced. In the history of literature, he will hold a certain position and a high place. By the public of the day he is regarded rather with curiosity than with admiration. Many will be startled, but few will be grieved by the news. He had very few friends, and he was the friend of very few—if any. But his character and adventures were too remarkable, and his literary merits too indubitable, to pass from the stage with the simple announcement already given.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll be back with more ~Spooky Season~ content soon. xo