The Stranger at the Grave

A Poetry Tale about Edgar Allan Poe, told by Hello Doggo.

Every year, in the small hours of the nineteenth of January — Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday — someone slipped into a Baltimore churchyard.

Dressed in black. Hat pulled low, face hidden by a scarf or hood. He knelt at Poe’s original grave, raised a glass of cognac to him, and left behind three roses and what remained of the bottle. Then he was gone.

The roses are usually read as three people buried there: Poe, his young wife Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm. The cognac? Nobody knows.

For years the curator, Jeff Jerome, kept vigil with a few watchers, and they let the visitor be. Sometimes he left notes. In nineteen ninety-three: The torch will be passed. In two thousand and one, by most accounts, a note backed the New York Giants against the Baltimore Ravens — a team named after Poe’s own poem. In Baltimore. That takes nerve.

Then, in two thousand and seven, a ninety-two-year-old local historian called Sam Porpora announced he’d invented the whole thing in the nineteen sixties, as a stunt to rescue a struggling church. It was just a lark, he said. Awkward, then, that a Baltimore paper had mentioned a bottle left at the grave back in nineteen fifty. Jerome said there were holes in Sam’s story you could drive a Mack truck through.

The visits stopped after Poe’s two-hundredth birthday, in two thousand and nine. For three more Januaries the watchers came back and waited. The real visitor never showed. His name was never revealed.

Quoth the Raven: Nevermore.