RedHanded - DAY 10: The Death of Edgar Allen Poe (ShortHand’s 13 Days of Halloween)

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

In the last 13 days before Halloween, a different ShortHand will rise from the archives for 24 hours only – before disappearing back into the vault. Get exclusive access to every ShortHand episode ad free only on Amazon Music Unlimited.--The great literary pantheon of horror would be nothing without the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. His life was every bit as dark and melancholy as all his best writing. And as for his death? Fittingly for the inventor of the mystery novel, it’s shrouded in secrets…Found in a Baltimore pub, wearing someone else’s clothes, Poe was rushed to hospital – where he hallucinated and screamed incoherently for days, then died before he could say a word of explanation. We take a look at Poe’s greatest mystery of all.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, Please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600, to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Scams are everywhere, on your phone, in your inbox, even on your television screen. So what is it about scams that has pop culture so obsessed? Maybe it's because it can happen to anyone. Or maybe it's because we're all deeply fascinated by the psyche of some. someone who can lie with ease and cheat with no guilt.

Listen to scam influencers now wherever you get your podcasts. Scams are everywhere. On your phone, in your inbox, even on your television screen. Looking at you, Tinder Swindler. What is it about scams that has pop culture so obsessed? Maybe it's because it could happen to anyone. Or maybe it's because we're all so deeply fascinated by the psyche of someone who can lie with ease, cheat with no guilt, and convince the world that they are who they say they are.

even when they're not. Scambulancers is a weekly podcast that takes you into the world of deception, sharing the stories of today's most notorious scams. Like the recent episode of Natalie Cochran, the pharmacist Femfetal. It seemed like she had it all. A good job, loving husband, and two kids. But behind the scenes, Natalie was scamming friends and family using fake contracts, fake government emails, and she even faked cancer.

But when the wall start closing in, she'll do anything to keep the lie alive until someone ends up dead. Listen to scam influencers now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello there, spooky listener. It's October, our favorite time of the year. And so to celebrate and give you all a well-deserved treat, we're bringing you the 13 days of Halloween. Short-hand edition.

Usually, every single week over on Amazon Music, we release brand-new episodes of our bite-sized sister show, Short-hand. It's like Red Hand's little friend. where we delve into all sorts of fascinating topics from hell in different religions Haitian voodoo the death of Edgar Allan Poe Qatar's syndrome

Japan suicide forest and so much more and this Halloween from the 19th of October to the 31st of October we are going to be pulling out 13 of our most terrifying episodes of shorthand to drop straight into your red-handed feed every single day

but beware Each episode will only be available for 24 hours. So get listening or abandon or hope. Enjoy. Hey, Poindexter, it's Halloween. Put the book away. For your information, I'm a lot. I'm about to read you a classic tale of terror by Edgar Allan Poe.

Hello. Hello. All Hallows Eve is almost upon us. I can feel the veil thinning from here. Hooray. And when you look at the great literary pantheon of horror, it's just not complete without the American short storywriter, poet, critic and former Stoke Newington resident and also editor. The master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. Shivers.

Full-body chills. Do you remember that guy you used to comment that on every single one of our Instagram posts? We were like, it's not the right podcast. Thank you for your support, but it's not the right podcast. I'm saying nothing. And I want that on the record. Edgar Allan Poe, however, very much is on the record. He changed writing.

forever, with a spooky atmosphere's psychological hijinks and sheer preternatural creepiness in stories like the telltale heart, the mask of the red death, the fall of the House of Usher, Usher, and of course, Lisa Simpson's favourite, The Raven. The Raven is just a very satisfying poem to read. Yeah.

It's just so fun. Mm-hmm. I love it. Yeah. The fall of the House of Usher. Yeah. And what Netflix did to it? The Fall of the House of Usher is my favourite Edgar Allan Poe story.

Prison to Netflix. I told you that I fell out with my friend about it. What? My friend tried to tell me that it was better than Hill House. And I was like, I actually need quite a lot of space and time away from you now. How? On what planet is it better than Hillhouse? Don't get me started on what they had to say about Bligh Manor because I actually will expire. I think the fall of the House of Usher is worse than Bligh Manor.

Yeah. I think it goes, fall of the House of Usher, Bligh Manor, and then Hill House. I think I have a particular problem with Bligh Manor because I hate the turning of the screw. I just think. Like, congratulations to the first person who thought of the story, right? But the amount of times it's been refangled, it's not that good of a story to have been done as many times as it has. No. But that's the thing is I also think it's not that interesting a story. So I was like not being that like attached to the source material.

You can only like make me like it more if you do a good job. Whereas the fall of the House of Usher, if you really like it, they can only destroy it by making it worse. And that is what they did. I agree. It was so bad. I know. How bad it was. Beating of the hideous heart of the Netflix executive that's ruined my life.

Oh, my God. It was so, all of the, oh my God, the desperate clotching attempts to be relevant to young people. Kill me. Anyway, we're not going to be talking about Netflix. We're going to be talking about the real deal, Edgar Allan Poe himself and his life, because it was every bit as dark as prophetic, as melancholy, as incesty, which everyone forgets, as all of his best writing. And as for his death, well, fittingly for the inverse.

The inventor of the mystery novel, it is shrouded in secrets. Found in a pub wearing someone else's clothes, Poe was rushed to hospital, where he hallucinated and screamed incoherently for days, then died before he could say a word of explanation. It's a mystery that has stumped generations of writers, with more than 26 published theories and counting. So what happened to Edgar Allan Poe? Here's the shorthand. So, first off, it's not actually just Poe's death that's shrouded in mystery.

There's a lot about his life that's up for debate, including the very beginning when and where he was born. He never had a birth certificate. Poe mostly said that he was born in Boston in 1809, but a lot of his biographers, from the same time say that he was actually born in Baltimore in 1811. And since Poe also sometimes said that he was born in 1813, two years after his own

mother died, we're inclined to go with the biographers on that one. Either way, though, it's a pretty dramatic start. His parents, Elizabeth and David, were both actors, and when he was born, they were both members of a repertory company in Boston.

Even his name, Edgar, may well have come from King Lear, which is what they were practising At the time he showed up, Edgar sucks so much as a character. I hate Edgar. I hate him. Oh, I had to sit through so many monologues. Oh, my God, he's such a fucking drip anyway. Why, bastard, wet, full base, fuck off.

I don't care. Put a shirt on. The pose were one of the oldest and most respected families in Baltimore. Edgar's grandfather was good pals with none other than. the Lancelot of the revolutionary set. Lafayette, as in the Lafayette from Hamilton. But if you think this is the classic nepo baby story, think again. Because before Edgar's third birthday, both his parents would be dead.

His mother died of tuberculosis at age 24, and Edgar's father, who had already abandoned the family, died just weeks later. So Edgar Allan Poe was an orphan at the age of just two. Pretty on-brand start to a horror author's life. By then, Elizabeth had taken her children to Richmond, Virginia, and there a rich merchant called John Allen, had taken a fancy to the infant. That's what the biography say anyway.

Which is an unnecessarily creepy way of saying that John and his wife hadn't had any kids of their own and saw the orphaned high-born boy as a nice opportunity to sub in as an heir. The Allens were another elite upper-class family. And though John Allen never legally adopted Edgar, he gave him every shot at success. In about 1815, Little Edgar was taken to England to attend the Manor House School in Stoke Newington. And the Manor House School is, I'll take a picture of it where I'm going now because it's next to the dentist. And there is a little rock that is like of the original Manor House school with a little plant.

And then there's a, across the road, there's like two plaques that say Poe on it. Apparently there's a bust. I don't think I've ever come across this bust. Anyway, after about five years in Stoke Newington, the family returned stateside to Virginia. And Edgar got engaged to his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster. He wanted to go off to university, and she said that she was fine to wait until he graduated to get married.

So, off he went. and he was at the University of Virginia for exactly 11 months before he was kicked out for not paying the fees and by the time he returned Elmira Royster was engaged to someone else 11 months look

everyone's dying at like 24 of tuberculosis It turns out that even though Po had been writing to Elmira the whole time her dad had been intercepting the letters Oh, sneaky. Like in the notebook. That's very sad. That sneaky Mr. Royster was nudging Elmira towards another suitor,

one who was on track to make a name for himself in the world of business, not some lanky-stringy writer, who was firmly on track to be a penniless artist. He was not considered to be a particularly great prospect then, and he wouldn't be now either. No. Especially since, like we said, Edgar Allan Poe was kicked out of uni for not paying. his fees. And that's because his not actually adopted father, John Allen, had slightly

dropped the ball on Poe's glittering education. Poe had arrived with $110, less than half of the tuition money that he needed. So, naturally, he'd gambled it to try and win the rest. Instead, he lost more than $2,000. Poe and Alan following this had a massive bust up, Violetta, of course, and Alan refused to send any more money. So Poe went to Boston without a penny and published a pamphlet of poems called Tambalane and other poems. It did not make a splash.

Poe was out on his ass in pretty much everywhere going. So, he joined the army. He did a bit better there. He rose to regimental sergeant major in just two years. So he'd naturally place Edgar Allan Poe. I didn't know that about him. and apparently getting that high up in just two years even back then is quite impressive

and john allen liked where all of this was going so he organised for poe to get into a military school instead but by this time poe was itching to get back to the poet life and since john allen wouldn't sign off on poe's resignation poe basically skived and acted up until he was kicked out of the army he was court-martialed for extreme dereliction of duty and then he went off to new york where he started to pick up some steam. He published a collection of poems called Poems, several of which are now considered

masterpieces, to be fair. So after some success on the poem front, he moved on to short stories, and he got some of those published as well. Metzengistine was published in the Southern Literary Messenger and is today considered to be the first modern horror story. That's very cool. And the follow-up,

Benice was so graphic and so terrifying that the paper that published it got complaints. The Southern Literary Messenger's editors, sensing, posed genius and possibly courting the controversy at the same time, hired him as a literary critic, and he became a respected voice in the arts. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps, the ones that make you really question what's real? Well, what if I told you? that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead, in hospital rooms and doctor's offices. Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries. And each week on my podcast,

you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling, they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. How hard is it to kill a planet? Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. When you see what's left,

It starts to look like a crime scene. Are we really safe? Is our water safe? You destroyed our time. And crimes like that, they don't just happen. We call things accidents. There is no accident. This was 100% preventable. They're the result of choices by people. Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime. These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet. Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about.

about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. All of which sounds pretty great, but there still wasn't enough to live on. What's more, Poe had properly fallen out with John Allen About Alan's new wife And when Alan died

He ended up leaving Po nothing So Poe moved in with his aunt Maria Clem And his 12-year-old cousin, Virginia Here we go He was pretty close to Maria And Virginia Calling Virginia Sissy for sister

And Maria Muddy for mother And if you think that was That's gross. Then, well, you're not going to like the next bit. Because the following year, 1836, Edgar Allan Poe married Virginia. His then 13-year-old cousin when he was 26. And it was a bit more common back then.

But it wasn't that... I've read extensively on him marrying his cousin, right? And how acceptable it actually would have been not very... Like, it's, yes, more common than it is now. But it wouldn't have been like... Normal. Fine. People would have been talking about it.

Exactly. And they weren't. Some biographers do try and clean this up, saying that they didn't really have that much of a physical relationship, but more of an emotional connection. More like they were brother and sister. But that's not great, is it, Edgar? Especially when quite a lot of your stories...

involve brothers and sisters fucking each other. Anyway. Edgar Allan Poe most certainly contained multitudes. He was skittish and spontaneous, and he loved having affairs, especially with two women in particular, Francis Sergeant Osgood and Elizabeth F. Ellet. His affair with Ellet was so established and well known

that when Virginia was on her deathbed years later, she would claim that Ellet had murdered her. But despite the many women he was involved with out of wedlock, he's maybe not the smooth Lothario that you possibly are imagining if you've never seen a fucking picture of him. And we do know, thanks to this sick burn from W.H. Orden, who calls Po, an unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps.

Loth. Barbaric. Poe. Also, other than crying into lapse, loved his boozing. He was eventually fired from the Southern Literary Messenger for drinking and would lose a ton of opportunities the same way throughout his life. He was unable to speak in public without a little drinky, which would inevitably set him off on a mad bender. In his personal and professional affairs, Poe was erratic to say the least.

And we have another big literary name to back us up on that, George Orwell himself said that Poe was not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense But then again Poe had an amazing creative and intellectual mind

The New York Tribune said this His conversation was at times Supromortal in its eloquence His voice was modulated with an astonishing skill And his large and expressive eyes Shot fiery tumult and to theirs who listened. In his writing, he obviously kept things quite gloomy.

He had a knack for romanticising all things dark, occult and satanic. He drew from his own terrifying dreams and pulled them into surreal, impressionistic visions of terror and sadness featuring powerful imagery of death, decay and loss. He'd write supernatural horror narratives that started domestic and then spun out into wild dreamlike fantasies only to reveal the true monster is the human capacity for evil itself. He moved around a lot in his life between various towns on the northeast coast, most of which

we've not been keeping you up with. But his time in Philadelphia, from about 1838 onwards, was his real golden age. It was there that he bashed out the telltale heart, the mask of the red death, the black cat, the pit, and the pendulum, the imp of the perverse, which I'm going to reserve as my rapper name and then also my favourite, the fall of the House of Usher, and then the murders in the Rue Morg. The last one in that list

is a short detective fiction story and is considered to be the originator of the entire murder mystery genre. It features an eccentric detective who solves bizarre puzzling crimes and it also inspired fairy-loving Arthur Conan Doyle to invent Sherlock Holmes.

It was while he was working as sub-editor at the New York Mirror that Poe first published his poem, The Raven. In it, a narrator sits in a strange room and asks a raven about the possibility of seeing his love again in the afterlife, and the raven gives the constant reply, never more. This was Poe's absolute smash hit. Charles Baudelaire said in his introduction to the French edition of the raven, It lacks nothing. Neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colours, nor sickly reasoning, nor driveling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering, which makes it more terrible.

I'm always very impressed. I think this just because language is just not something that I am good at. But when something like a poem is translated into another language and it's still good is like mind-boggling to me. My favourite one though is that in order to make Tom Riddle makes sense in the French version of Harry Potter Voldemort's middle name has to be Elvis

Brilliant So yes Despite it being an absolute banger Poe earned just $15 from the Ravens publication It did however open all sorts of doors For him in the literary world He took on literary clients

and was invited all over the world to give lectures and recite poems. He was the first American writer to live completely off his earnings from writing alone. But all that success and admiration's not very Halloween, is it? Well, never fear, never more. The tragedy is just around the corner. Not long after the publication of The Raven, Poe's wife and cousin and Sissy and Child died of tuberculosis at the the age of just 24. Poe was massively reliant on Virginia for his emotional and mental well-being, and when she died, he spiraled. He had a string of affairs and short-lived engagements and then turned in a

big way to the booze. In 1848, he published Eureka, which he calls an explanation of the universe. Some people consider it a masterpiece, but quite a lot of other people think that It's incoherent gibberish. Still, just before the end, there was a spell of calm happiness for Poe. He finally got re-engaged to his school sweetheart, Elmira Royster, who'd been widowed for a few years. He also joined a temperance society, which is basically alcoholic's anonymous, but way more morally intense and religiously motivated. Lizzie Borden was in a temperance society?

Mm-hmm. So finally it looked like things were smoothing out. Then, in 1849, Poe planned a trip. He had bought a ferry from Richmond to Baltimore, then head on from there to New York. And he arrived, as planned, in Baltimore on the 28th of September. But he wouldn't leave alive. He saw a few acquaintances when he got there, but then disappeared for days. Then almost a week later on October.

He was seen sitting in a pub called Ryan's Tavern, and he was in a bad way. A Baltimore printer called Joseph Walker found Poe, attempted to rouse him, but Poe was totally unresponsive. He could manage a few grunts and lurching movements, but not much more. He was also dressed quite strangely. Poe was known to always wear a tailored black woolen suit, but here he was in a very cheap, ill-fitting suit that was way too big for him. Walker sent a note to a doctor called J.E. Snodgrass. Snodgrass happened to know Egrel and Poe and he arrived quickly.

He immediately said that Poe must have been incredibly bladded and sent him to a hospital. In hospital, Poe drifted in and out of consciousness for days. He woke up, hallucinated and rambled in strange nonsense before passing out again. And before he could become lucid enough to explain what was going on, Poe died on the 7th of October, 1849. The newspapers reported the cause of death as congestion of the brain. I think I've got a bit of that. And the doctors noted it down as parenthesis,

which means inflammation of the brain. But both terms are pretty nondescript, vague terms that doctors wrote, when they had actually no idea what it had. happened. And the cause of death of Edgar Allan Poe quickly slipped into mystery. Like we said, there are more than 26 published theories as to what happened, from the mundane to those more fitting of our mystery writer. Firstly, let's knock out the obvious, that he just got absolutely rat-assed and then passed

out and then he died of alcohol poisoning, which feels quite neat. He was, after all, a lifelong boozy-souzy. And Dr. Jee Snodgrass, the doctor who examined him first at the pub, was convinced that he was blackout drunk. But then again, Poe had recently joined a quite strict temperance society and had mostly stayed away from the bottle for quite a while. And it's not inconceivable that someone who swears to abstinence would relapse and then kill themselves a drinking because they'd have a break and their tolerance had gone out the window. So how about this? John Morin was the attending physician at the hospital for Poe's final few days, and he did spend days examining Edgar Allan Poe much longer than Snodgrass

had. And John Moran was resolute that Poe wasn't drunk, that he hadn't been drinking in the days leading up to his death. John Moran said there was no trace of alcohol in his system, and he added that the duration of Poe's illness and the fact that he seemed to recover slightly before he died very suddenly were inconsistent with alcohol withdrawal. Dr Moran said that he thought it was much more likely that Edgar Allan Poe had been beaten by thugs.

Plot twist. So why would Snodgrass lie? Presumably because he's some sort of made-up fairy-tale creature. What was it? The imp of the... The imp of the perversion. Yeah. Well, Dr. Snodgrass, as well as being a physician, was a made-up magical creature.

No, he was also a radical follower and proponent of the temperance movement. He saw alcohol as a deep moral evil and preached that its total eradication was necessary for the good of society. So it's very likely that he could have seen Poe's death as an opportunity to spread the work. We even know that he changed Walker's note before he put. passed it onto the hospital, changing the words, rather the worse for where, to deep intoxication. And then to beastly intoxication. Been there a few times. So the plot thickens.

Another fairly popular theory goes that Poe in fact died of rabies. I've heard this one. Rabies patients are known to appear to get better just before their deaths. If you want to know more about it, we have done an entire shorthand on rabies. It's somewhere in there, dig it out. There are also hospital reports showing that Poe had had a lot of difficulty drinking water in the last few days.

And fear of water is a classic rabies symptom. And yet another explanation, which is in the running for the favourite one, is that Eger Allen Poe was a victim of cooping. Never heard of it, I will explain. Back in those days, the olden times, the olden dazels, it was quite common to use drinking establishments as polling places, which is pretty Victorian era, to me, that's where they got half the Navy as well.

And the tavern that Poe was found in before he went to hospital and died was at the time being used as a polling station. And there was a very naughty practice going around at the time called cooping, in which corrupt politicians would hire gangs of criminals to intimidate random people and force them to vote repeatedly for their candidate. They were even given a series of disguises to pass by multiple times without arousing suspicion. Amazing. Often these poor people were beaten by these voting gangs

or they were forced to drink alcohol to force them into passing their vote. So this theory could explain quite a lot, why Poe was so disorientated, why he disappeared for several days, and his doctor saying that he had been beaten by thugs, and also his weird ill-fitting suit that did. didn't belong to him. So yes, there are plenty of other explanations, which include, but are not limited to, diabetes, heart disease, epilepsy, tuberculosis, suicide, murder, cholera, hyperglycemia,

syphilis, influenza, and maybe even a brain tumour. And it is certainly possible that Poe got cooped. Really, we'll never know what went down or how he really died, leaving us with Poe's greatest and most vexing mystery of all I think he got cooped and one of the thugs bit him and gave him rabies Love it Still, at the rate Poe was going at the time His death was going to happen sooner or later

As the Buffalo commercial put it in their report on his death We hope he has found rest But he needed it That's good I like that Because he looked like shit And he also gave us a hell of a lot in his 40 years on earth.

He's considered the architect of the modern short story, who was an enormous influence on French symbolists like Baudelaire and Verlian, as well as Russian greats like Dostoevsky, who all went on to change modern literature in their own way. In works like the unparalleled adventure of Hans Fall and von Kemperlin and his discovery, Poe built on early science fiction writing to create a blueprint for modern sci-fi.

And like we said, he practically invented both mystery novels and modern horror itself. So what we're saying is that he's the Beatles of books. So whatever flavour of spooky entertainment that you are lining up for the next few days, take a second to thank the real master of the macabre, the man behind it all, the man behind every single curtain. He's behind you right now. Edgar Allan Poe. I'm here for it.

And happy Halloween. Yeah, you deserve it. I think do. Goodbye. Bye. It's all a lighthearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid. We're your hosts. I'm Alina Urquhart. And I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy. The stories we cover are well researched. Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group. With a touch of humor. Shout out to her. Shout out to all my therapists out of years. There's been like eight of them. A dash of sarcasm.

and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing. That mother f***er is not real! And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tail of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the way back machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes. You should tune in to our podcast. Morbid. Follow Morbid on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad free by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.