Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Poe Toaster

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

For at least sixty years a mysterious person (or persons) showed up at Edgar Allen Poe’s grave to toast the master on his birthday. No one ever found out who this legendary figure was. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just the two of us, just a couple of, couple of honchos,

couple of ombrés, just doing our thing, rattling off facts in a super speedy manner with a limited amount of time. So this is short stuff. So we don't want to waste time with long intros, saying unnecessary things. Right, exactly. So the Poe Toaster, huh?

Is this the beginning of our spooky content? Yes it is, if that's okay with you. Yeah, it's our favorite month. I love October, I love Halloween. I've been sitting on this one since last year, actually. Have you heard of this guy before? No. And obviously, I didn't just ask Chuck everybody

if he's heard of Edgar Allen Poe. We're talking about a corollary to the Poe legend. Everybody knows about Poe, the master author, the creator of the short story, believed to be the first person to ever write a genuine detective story. Edgar Allen Poe, everybody knows about him. We're not talking about just him.

No, but we are talking about his dead body. Yeah, which Poe would love. Oh, he would totally love it. He died, and he probably would even love dying under mysterious circumstances. There's no way he didn't. He was probably like, as they were dragging him out of the street, he was probably like, this is so great.

Well, he was 40 years old. This was in 1849, and he was buried in Westminster Bering Ground in Baltimore, where he made his home. And it was kind of not a big deal at the time, as far as paying tribute. He had an unmarked grave for a while, finally a relative stepped up and said,

can we at least get his name carved into something? He just showed up with a stick and carved it in the dirt. He may have. Yeah, but yeah, he was still fairly obscure enough that he was able to first be buried in that unmarked grave, but some local academics started to recognize the man's genius, and they actually held like an early GoFundMe to create a monument

for Poe's grave, actually. And they were successful, finally, in 1875. That's right. So they had a monument carved. He was actually moved. It was dedicated on a space a little more befitting, one of the great authors of his time. And they exhumed him, moved the body.

And about 10 years after that, his wife and his mother-in-law were buried along with him, which is sort of key in this story. Right. And hopefully he wasn't like a Fred Flintstone type where that would have really bothered him to have his mother-in-law so close by for eternity. Instead, I have the feeling that it was

a very sweet gesture. Sure. So that you would think, well, that's it. That's the most you could possibly say about Poe's remains laying in the ground at a grave. Not true. That was the case from about 1875 to 1849, I should say.

And then allegedly, on that year, the centennial of his death, he was visited by somebody who came to be known as the Poe toaster, a mysterious stranger who showed up at his grave on his birthdate, January 19th, every year, dressed in an all-black suit, a white scarf and a big, black, wide-brimmed hat to cover his face

and created this ritual out of whole cloth that eventually attracted the notice of people in Baltimore. Yeah, so what would happen is this man, presumably, would show up with a bottle of cognac and literally toast Poe and leave three red roses along with that bottle. They are not, and this would happen sometime

between usually midnight and six a.m., so it was even led more to the creepiness of the whole thing. Right, yeah. And no one did anything about it. No one said, hey, grab that guy and let's see who it is. Get him. Let's rip off that hat and expose him.

Right, it's Roy Cohn. But so what happened was, well, first of all, we should address the cognac. No one was exactly sure why he toasted with cognac, even though I read very quickly on the internet that Poe loved cognac. Oh, is that true? It wasn't in his stories.

Yeah, he supposedly loved it, but couldn't afford it unless someone else was buying because he didn't get rich doing this. Right, so yeah, a lot of people are like, well, he should be using a Montiato because obviously the cask of a Montiato is one of his great stories. I don't know why he would be using cognac.

Apparently, now we do know why. You just solved that mystery for me, Chuck, thank you. What about those roses? So he would leave three roses on the grave, like you said, and people have come to believe that that's a gesture to give a rose to each of the people who are buried beneath that monument, Poe, his wife, Virginia, and his mother-in-law, Maria.

So that one's probably the likeliest explanation of that. Should we take a break? I think we should, but first, we'll reveal the identity of the Poe toaster after this. How's that for a cliffhanger? Pretty great. ["The Poe Toaster Song"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So I totally lied on the cliffhanger. No one knows who the potoaster is as far as we can tell. And we certainly don't. So there will be no revealing.

We just wanted to keep you tuned in. Well, I mean, there is one guy who claims he was the potoaster. Yeah, in 2007, a 92-year-old man named Sam Porpora claimed it was him. He was a former ad exec. And he, in 1960, was made historian of Westminster Presbyterian Church, which was apparently in disrepair at the time

and kind of just full of people getting drunk and not treating the graves with respect. So he claims he did it as a promotional thing to sort of raise money and publicity. And it was he and his tour guides. This gentleman, Jeff Jerome, who is the curator of the Poe Museum, I think his quote was, there are holes big enough in his story

you could drive a Mack truck through. Yes. But I couldn't find those holes. I couldn't like, I looked everywhere and I couldn't find him specifically saying why he did not think it was him. Well, so Jeff Jerome has kind of become like the de facto historian of the Poe Toaster

because he ran the Poe Historical Society for a while, or the Poe Museum, I'm sorry. And a lot of people put a lot of weight into what he says. He claims that he had worked out a signal with the Poe Toaster so that the Poe Toaster would signal him and let him know that he was the real deal. Because over the years, there were what

are known as Poe Toasters, who people who pretended to be the Poe Toaster after the thing kind of became a big deal starting in the 70s. So that Jeff Jerome, at least, would know it was the real article. But he swears up and down, and most people believe him, that he has no idea the actual identity of the Poe Toaster. The only interaction he'd had with the Poe Toaster

is at Poe's grave on these specific nights over the years. Yeah, and I wonder why Sam Purporo would come forward and claim to be such so late in life. And they even asked him that in this article. And he said, like, why he came forward. And he went, I don't know. Oh, yeah, that's not a very good. That's a big hole in your story right there.

To not have a motivation? Yeah. If you're somebody who starts out, and here's the thing. Like this whole Poe Toaster thing became kind of a cause celeb in Baltimore and places outside of Baltimore. People would show up, and there'd be little groups of onlookers who would watch this thing every year.

And like you said, very coolly, never tried to find out who it was. They just respected it and watched from a distance. So it kind of became like this cool thing. But this guy was doing this for decades before it became a cool thing. So of course, there's some sort of motivation behind all this. And people who do stuff like they have a motivation

behind everything they're doing. There's some larger meaning or something to what they're doing. So yeah, I don't believe the Poe Toaster would have come forward just for, I don't know. Well, I mean, he said why he did it. He didn't say why he came forward and admitted that he was the Poe Toaster.

Yeah, I don't buy that good story. Who knows? I buy it. OK. I think it makes sense as a former ad guy. But at any rate, and he was on the scene as well as the historian of the church. Right.

So anyway, I think there's a lot of credence there. But at any rate, the gentleman, whoever it was, would leave these notes occasionally. And one note in 93 said, the torch will be passed. It's just like that. It said in quotes, to be read in creepy Vincent Price voice when read out loud. And then in 99, there was one that said the toaster had died.

And there was a theory. And I think Jeff Jerome buys the theory that the torch was passed to his sons because they were sort of lackadaisical about how spirited they were with their efforts, let's just say. That was a really diplomatic way to put it. Yeah, sometimes they would show up in street clothes. And from what I've gathered, the minimum criteria

for being the Poe Toaster is that all black suit, white scarf, and a huge hat, there's a certain amount of dapperness that needs to be brought to this. And showing up in jeans and vans and counting crows t-shirt, that doesn't cut it, buddy. Although the crows, counting ravens maybe, Baltimore. I guess maybe, maybe. So one of these notes, though, that supposedly was left

by one of the sons, if you buy that theory, was a prediction of the Super Bowl in 2001. Pretty lame, though. The giants would beat the ravens. So if it was his sons, then I'd totally see how Jeff Jerome would be like, they're not doing a great job. Exactly.

So finally, in 2009, I guess that's 20 years, 10 years? Yes, 10. 10 years after the torch was passed, after the original Poe Toaster died, allegedly, they just stopped showing up all together. And they didn't show up in 2010, 11. And then finally, in 2012, when they didn't show one more time, Jeff Jerome said, well, I guess I have as much cloud

as anybody, being the curator of the Poe Museum. I'm going to officially declare this tradition ended forever. Yeah, but not so. Because he turned on his heels four years later, and in 2016 said, you know what? Let's just throw a big party. We're going to audition Poe Toasters. And this is where the story really gets disappointing to me.

I wish they would have just let it die. It's this mysterious, weird thing. Is it the raffle? Yeah, they have a raffle. They have a Poe-themed cake that you can win. Hundreds of people, they toast apple cider. And I don't mind them honoring Poe, but I think they could have just divided it

and not made it part of the Poe Toasting thing that came and went. Yeah, I have to agree. I like that it's a, I like the idea of what they're doing. I like the toast with apple cider. But I think, yeah, maybe hold it at the local library or something, because it really smacks of the kind of event you would hold at a local library.

Yeah, and it's during the daytime, I don't think we mentioned, which, I mean, if it's not between midnight and 6 a.m., then just get out of here with that. True, but it does give the Poe Toaster an excuse to do some day drinking of cognac once a year, at least. Or apple cider. Yeah, supposedly the Poe Toaster does drink cognac

still in that tradition, yeah. So I don't, did you say that they held auditions for the new Poe Toaster? I did. And the new Poe Toaster placed the vial in though, added a little extra flair? Yeah, maybe, you know, what's gonna happen is they're gonna hear about this

and then make us honorary Poe Toasters and we're gonna be way into it. Yeah, right, exactly. I'm gonna wear a Count and Crow's T-shirt. And I'll learn to play the violin. All right, so that's it, everybody, the Poe Toaster. This is one of those legends where I hope we never ever find out who it was

because I think that's wildly appropriate in this case. Okay. Add executive. Well, since Chuck said add executive, that's the secret word for short stuff to be out. The stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

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