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DEPARTMENTS – OCTOBER 2009

Maddry—POE KNOWS SCARY

Celebrate Halloween by revisiting the works and life of famous and frightening author Edgar Allan Poe.

By Larry Maddry

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Halloween is coming at us faster than a rabid bat, and there's no better way to celebrate the horror than with a visit to the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond.

Yep, a Halloween trip to see artifacts and manuscripts belonging to the writer and poet who was the master of fright. And if you can't get there personally, now's the time to stock up on some scary Poe souvenirs like T-shirts, matchboxes and coffee mugs with the writer's likeness or that of a raven. Or both.

You can visit the online store at www.poemuseum.org. You might even want to buy the Poe U.S. postage stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of his birth, issued on Jan. 19 of this year. In releasing the stamp, the U.S. Postal Service declared: "For more than a century and a half, Poe and his works have been praised by admirers around the world, including English poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, who dubbed Poe "the literary glory of America."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, called Poe "the supreme short story writer of all time."

I think of Poe more simply. To me he is someone who can scare the beegebus out of you ... and then scare the beegebus. I get a little queasy just looking at his photograph. A forehead like a tombstone slab of white marble and beneath it a penetrating stare—the eyes of a hypnotist—and a nearly Hitlersque moustache.

One can almost imagine that visage in thought: "I was never kinder to the old man than in the week I killed him." Hoo-boy! The last quotation is from one of Poe's masterpieces that kept me up all night or plunged me into hellish nightmares. Poe readers will recall it from "The Telltale Heart."

"A Cask of Amantillado" has also channeled its way into my brain like a poisonous worm. It's about a man who seals his neighbor into the wall of his basement while the neighbor is alive and pleading for mercy. If I read that short story again I'd have nightmares the way I did the first time around. So, as the raven said in Poe's famous poem, ... nevermore.

Poe, who is considered the father of the detective fiction and science fiction genres, wasn't a Virginian by birth. He was born in Boston but grew up and worked in Richmond and spent most of his life in Virginia. Several of his cousins lived in Norfolk, a city he visited shortly before his death in 1849.

No childhood home of Poe survives. Richmond's oldest standing home—the Old Stone House—is used as the Edgar Allan Poe Museum.

The dorm room Poe is believed to have used while studying at the University of Virginia in 1826 is preserved, and its care overseen by members of the Raven Society.

Baltimore has preserved the earliest surviving home in which Poe lived as a museum. That structure is the headquarters of the Edgar Allan Poe Society.

Poe is believed to have taken his last alcoholic beverage at a bar in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore. That bar is now known as The Horse You Came In On. The bar's patrons insist that a ghost named Edgar haunts the rooms above.

For more information on Richmond's Edgar Allan Poe Museum, visit www.poemuseum.org.

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