After Halloween...

Edgar Allan Poe
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THERE ARE MANY THEORIES AS TO THE CAUSE OF POE'S DEATH on October 7, 1849. Some say it was alcohol poisoning, some other illness or heart disease. Found near death in a public house on Oct. 3, he was taken to Washington College Hospital, in Baltimore, where he was kept a virtual prisoner and allowed no visitors. His last words, after days of delirium, were "Lord, help my poor soul".
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His funeral, the next day, was a three minute ceremony on a damply chilly day. The minister declined to give a sermon, because hardly anyone attended. He had no headstone, because it was accidentally destroyed in a train accident. But in 1875, he was exhumed and reburied, and the gravesight was given a monument. Several leading poets were invited, but only Walt Whitman attended.
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The words of Poe never disappeared. Nevermore...160 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe has finally been given a proper funeral. There was a re-enactment, a "viewing", of his body in a casket. A wry touch that Poe himself might have smiled at. There was a funeral procession with bagpipes, a memorial service with eulogies thought up to cover the buried years. More than 700 mourners and admirers attended and listened to the words delivered by actors, about the great "master of the macabre". And maybe floating and hovering in an ethereal dimension, Poe's ghost...and an admirer by the name of Whitman.
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