Buried three times: Edgar Allan Poe - the guru of horror

– 2024-06-28 10:02:00

BURIED THREE TIMES

Edgar Allan Poe - the guru of horror

Text by: Andreas M. Gross

There was a deafening crash and screech when the train derailed in Baltimore, USA. The wagons and locomotive crashed uncontrollably into the yard where cemetery stonemason Mr. Sisson was storing the finished gravestones. The flying wreckage shattered a white marble headstone with the inscription:

"Edgar Allan Poe January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849".

Another bad break for Mr. Poe: the Boston-born storyteller, poet, journalist and sharp-tongued critic, best known as a pioneer of horror poetry, was given a miserable funeral. At least the motif of his story "The Premature Burial" was left out: the "Writer of Shivers" was not buried alive. Otherwise, everything about the eventful life and mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe reads like one of the stories that made him immortal.

Poe's stories "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Gold-Bug", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Masque of the Red Death" and many more are considered the ultimate examples of Black Romantic literature, indeed the "Gothic story" par excellence. Without him, horror great Bram Stroker would probably not have come up with Dracula. Alfred Hitchcock would certainly have captured murder suspense differently on celluloid, Alice Cooper would not have rocked the stage so virtuously with horror and without Poe, the "Prince of Darkness" Ozzy Osborne and his band Black Sabbath would hardly have come up with the dark standards of today's metal scene.

Poe invented the detective novel and the modern crime thriller with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; without him, Sherlock Holmes would be unthinkable. His literary father Arthur Conan Doyle called Allan Poe "the master of us all" for good reason. Baudelaire fervently admired the "Prince of Horror". As his congenial fan and translator, he made Allan Poe a pioneer of Symbolism in France. No wonder that the surrealists later found plenty of inspiration in the American.

Poe is considered to be the first well-known writer in the United States who tried to live entirely from his texts. With moderate success. Although highly talented, he was notorious for his unreliability and suffered from depression; there were rumors of opium consumption and many of his contemporaries considered him arrogant. Allan Poe excelled as a lecturer and his literary criticism was a masterpiece. In particular, his critiques were feared by his fellow writers - not very conducive to Poe's popularity in the exclusive East Coast literary scene, which nevertheless liked to adorn itself with him. Although his poem "The Raven" brought Edgar Allan Poe some success shortly before his death, he remained clammy. The fact that the author repeatedly crashed while drunk did not exactly help his reputation in the higher circles of the conservative southern states. According to Wikipedia, a well-meaning employer once wrote to him: "Edgar, should you wander these streets again, I fear you will drink again, until you are completely out of your mind. ... You can't rely on anyone who drinks before breakfast!"

Edgar "Eddy" Poe came from a poor and difficult background. He lost both parents at an early age and arrived as a small child in Richmond, Virginia, where the wealthy John Allan took him into his family. The young Edgar grew up in a life of luxury and added his new parents' surname to his own. As a teenager, however, Allan Poe fell out with his strict foster father and found himself in constant need of money. After a rollercoaster of personal tragedies and failed careers, widowed for two years, childless and about to marry his childhood sweetheart, Poe was just 40 when he met his mysterious end in Baltimore.

No one knows what the poet Poe was doing in the vibrant port city on the Chesapeake Bay, where he had once lived, in the fall of 1849. It is known that he had previously been in Richmond in order to travel directly from there to New York, where he had been living for several years. We will probably never know why he suddenly changed his plans and what happened to the unusually large amount of money that he was proven to be carrying in cash.

The fact is that Edgar Allan Poe had already been missing for a week when a passer-by found the helplessly slurring and completely neglected writer in front of the disreputable Ryan's Tavern in Baltimore on October 3, 1849.

Only the doctor who was summoned recognized that it was Poe. He was known as a "Southern gentleman" for his elegant clothing and well-groomed appearance, but was unable to describe what had happened to him, who had robbed him of his money and why he was wandering the streets in strange rags. Even in Washington College Hospital, where Poe was taken into the care of Dr. John J. Moran, the hallucinating writer did not regain his senses. According to witnesses, he shouted the name "Reynolds!" several times on the last night before his death. - but what this meant remains a mystery.

After four days in agony, Edgar Allan Poe died in hospital without having uttered a single enlightening sentence. Official cause of death: unknown. All medical reports or the death certificate, if there ever was one, were lost. What he really died of remains the subject of never-ending speculation: Alcoholism, cholera, rabies, murder, suicide, diabetes, meningitis - the list could go on and on.

The funeral took place in the cemetery of Westminster Church in Baltimore on October 9, 1849, on a cold and damp day. As there were fewer than ten people present, the priest was unwilling to make a speech. So Edgar Allan Poe disappeared into the ground within three minutes with a "ceremony-free flash burial". Under a simple sandstone with the number 80. Temporarily.

It was later discovered that Poe had been buried in the wrong place, and he was reinterred in 1875 - with an appropriate headstone and dignified ceremony. Frank T. Zumbach describes a gruesome detail in his magnificent biography of Poe (dtv): "A newspaper reporter from St. Louis was present at his exhumation: 'Poe's brain had become so dried up and hard that when the gravedigger picked up the skull, it rattled like a lump of dirt'".

A quarter of a century after his death, Edgar Allan Poe's work was already enjoying worldwide recognition. But the writer's social reputation, which had already been tarnished during his lifetime, was finally ruined in the public perception at the time. Poe's executor and envy, the writer Rufus W. Griswold, was particularly responsible for this. He had known Poe personally and hated him as a competitor. With distorted and false portrayals, Griswold portrayed the "Godfather of Black Romanticism" so permanently and successfully as an immoral drunkard and drug addict that his "posthumous execution of Poe's character" continued to have an effect into the 20th century.

There was not much sign of this on October 9, 2009, when Edgar Allan Poe finally received a dignified - third - funeral in Baltimore 200 years after his birth. On September 18, 2009, DER SPIEGEL (43/2009) wrote: "... Jeff Jerome, curator of the "Poe House and Museum" in Baltimore, initiated a funeral procession on the anniversary of the death of the pioneer of modern crime fiction, including a black carriage, coffin and corpse - made of plastic. Hundreds paid their respects to the master of the macabre." - Eddy would certainly have liked that.

The top 13 stories by Edgar Allan Poe

13. THE OVAL PORTRAIT

This is the gruesome story of a vampiric painter who wants to capture the beauty of his young wife on canvas. But the more beautiful he paints her, the more it sucks the life out of her body.

12. THE SPHINX

This amusing short story shows the effects of isolation on the human mind. A paranoid man takes refuge with relatives in a house on the Hudson River to escape a cholera epidemic raging in New York. There he discovers a huge monster in the distance that resembles an elephant with wings. He interprets this as a sign of death.

11. ELEONORA

The story centers on the passionate love between a young man and his cousin Eleonora, who live together in a secluded mountain valley. But the young woman falls ill and dies. He swears that he will remain faithful to her until his death.

10. THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO

Somewhere in Italy during the carnival. The narrator wants revenge on a hated "friend", lures him under a pretext into the vaults beneath his palazzo and walls him up alive. There's nothing like real friends.

9. THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

Two women are found brutally murdered in a room in Paris. C. Auguste Dupin is faced with a seemingly unsolvable case, as the windows and doors of the room are locked from the inside. All of Poe's methodical detective's ingenuity is required here. Not an easy task.

8. THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE

This story is a study of the perversity of the human mind and our inexplicable desire for self-destruction. The urge to throw ourselves into the depths. Not to kill ourselves, but just to know what it feels like. This is the hobgoblin of the perverse. Edgar Allen Poe has packed it into a thrilling short story.

7. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Probably Poe's most famous tale, dealing with his favorite subject: being buried alive. An eerie atmosphere and creepily bizarre characters. Nothing more needs to be said.

6. THE PREMATURE BURIAL

Once again Poe's favorite theme - catalepsy describes the primal fear of being buried alive. The protagonist suffers from an illness that causes him to fall into a comatose sleep again and again. Out of panic that he might accidentally be declared dead and buried alive, he takes the precaution of equipping his future grave with various escape options and provisions. One day, his nightmare comes true and he wakes up in a grave. Panicked, he realizes that it is not his...

5. THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

Toledo at the time of the Spanish Inquisition: the protagonist, condemned to death, faints after his sentence is pronounced and finds himself in the dark on the damp stone floor of his dungeon cell. A large iron pendulum slowly slides down from the ceiling, threatening to cut him in two.

4. THE BLACK CAT

Under the influence of alcohol, a warm-hearted young husband and cat lover turns into a hate-filled animal abuser. The "spirit of perversity" takes possession of him, which his wife also feels. And so disaster takes its course. A creepy look into the abyss of an alcohol-soaked soul.

3. THE MASK OF THE RED DEATH

Prince Prospero flees from a plague called "The Red Death" and retreats to his specially designed abbey. Isolated from the outside world, he feels safe there and throws a lavish masked ball in the extraordinary building. However, the exuberant atmosphere at the lavish party changes abruptly when a figure in the mask of the Red Death appears.

2. BERENICE

Teeth are the only bones visible during life.
Berenice is a horror short story first published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1935. The story horrified readers with its violence, and some complained about it to the Messenger's editor.

1. THE TELL-TALE HEART

A classic of horror literature. A man feels an irrepressible urge to kill an old man because he has a pale gray covered eye. A deadly hatred overcomes him every time he looks at him with it. And he constantly tells himself that he is completely reasonable.
The story is a prime example of literary suspense. The reader knows from the beginning that this murder will take place. The suspenseful question, however, is when and how. The Tell-Tale Heart is by far Poe's deepest descent into the mind of a psychopath.