A Toast to Poe
Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine
October 1998
By Lawrence Wells

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

— The Raven

It is snowing as I park my car near the entrance to Westminster Church Cemetery in downtown Baltimore. The church, dating to before the Revolution, and its small cemetery surrounded by a wrought-iron fence are owned and maintained by the University of Maryland at Baltimore. This historic site is where author Edgar Allan Poe is buried and where, every January since 1949 on the anniversary of his birth, a mysterious visitor has paid homage, leaving roses and a bottle of cognac on Poe's grave.

Approaching the somber little cemetery with its weathered old tombstones framed incongruously by high-rise buildings is like stepping back in time. Edgar Allan Poe is waiting for me, standing under a gray umbrella, holding a gold-tipped walking stick, tapping his foot.

Actor David Keltz, dressed in the costume he uses for his one-man stage act, has agreed to meet me; yet for a split second I feel as though it is Poe himself who waits impatiently - I am a quarter-hour late for our appointment - to show me around Westminster graveyard.

With his rumpled dark wig and dark eyes, Keltz could be a reincarnation of the author of "The Raven." Since the moment when he first read Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" in junior high, Keltz has felt an inexplicable affinity and attraction for the master of gothic horror.

As we stand talking beside Poe's monument, a wandering drunk stops and peers at Keltz's costume, then shouts in extreme annoyance, "What are you bothering with him for? He's been dead 150 years." After being denied entrance to the church, the man lurches away, more spirit than human; a Gothic character worthy of Poe, down to the alcoholic bouquet swirling in his wake. When Poe first came to Baltimore, down on his luck, he, too, was in desperate financial straits and had to borrow money to buy a coat before he could accept an invitation to dinner. For most of his life he was tortured by financial worries and lived from one writing assignment to the next.

Keltz points out that Poe originally was buried behind the church. In 1875, the body was moved to its current location next to the main entrance after a Baltimore teacher named Sara Sigourney Rice asked local students to give "pennies for Poe" to raise the necessary funds for a monument. The original grave site has a modern tombstone engraved with the image of a raven. "Poe was buried next to a minister," says Keltz, "and people joked that Poe, having led a dissolute life, would now receive counseling, whether he liked it or not, for the rest of eternity."

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died October 7, 1849. This year, in anticipation of next year's 150th anniversary of his death, there was a special celebration in January, along with the annual "watch" for the mysterious visitor, whose first visit, in 1949, was in the year that would mark the 100th anniversary of his death.

Keltz lowers his umbrella and indicates the church windows from which a group of special guests is allowed to watch the laying of the roses. The church was built on stilts over the graveyard to prevent medical students from stealing corpses for scientific purposes - a practice worthy of Poe-tical horror - and its first-story windows overlook the cemetery.

"In 1993, the first year I participated in the watch, the visitor came in at a gate near the window where I was watching," Keltz recalls, his face lighting up, eyes darting. "The wind was cold, it was icy, and the windows were fogged up. They were constantly clouding up, and we were wiping them off with paper towels. Just as I was wiping the pane, I thought, "There's someone coming in the gate!" I wiped it again, looked closely, and whispered, 'Someone's coming.' Everybody ran over to my window, and we watched him come in; then as he proceeded into the cemetery we all ran to another window where there was a better view."

The visitor, dressed all in black and wearing a hat pulled down over his face, was obviously aware of the people watching from inside the church. He quickly finished his business, leaving his tribute behind, and departed.

"The first night I was there," Keltz continues his tale, "everything was covered with ice. It was beautiful; all these graves covered with snow. He happened to look up at the windows, and I think he knew we were there. He walked away quickly. Everyone was excited and speculating about who it could be. Several people got a glimpse of his face, and we thought it might be a certain person we all know, someone who is very interested in Poe and has studied and researched him. I had just done a performance during the Poe birthday celebration, and a friend observed, 'He looked like the man who was trying to sell you that jewelry box.' The visitor was wearing a long black coat and white scarf, and that was what this other person was wearing. I've seen him another time since then, and I suspect it might be him, but obviously he wants to keep it private."

Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum located nine blocks from Westminster Church, confirms the practice of keeping secret the identity of the visitor, known locally as the Poe Toaster.

"We make no attempt to hinder or interfere with the visitor when he comes," says Jerome. "It would be so easy for us to confront him and unmask his identity. But once you do that the mystery is gone. Of course, I have had ideas about his identity - some favorite 'suspects' - and I would say to myself, 'Hey, I know who he is!' But if I told one person, even my wife, then it wouldn't be a secret any longer. We make no attempt to interfere or identify or otherwise hinder the visitor. We only observe.

"I have a sneaking feeling he has called me up before and asked why don't we identify the person. I told him, as I tell everybody, that we have a policy not to interfere. The people of Baltimore respect his right to keep his identity private. In all these years, there has only been one attempt to imitate him."

On that occasion, the watchers inside the church, having spotted the impostor, sallied forth to confront him, thus clearing the way for the annual visitor to pay his nocturnal call. The cognac bottle is always marked the same way every year, which is how Jerome and his fellow Poe Society members can authenticate continuity of tradition.

Poe House is a small, two-and-a-half-story, brick townhouse with low ceilings. The air is musty and still. The compact rooms tenaciously cling to the past. One feels that very little has changed since Poe lived here. This was the home of Maria Clemm, Poe's aunt, and he lived and worked there from 1833 to 1835. He fell in love with his cousin, Virginia Clemm, whom he married though she was only thirteen. His room was a tiny garret. Going up the curving narrow staircase, slowly, a step at a time, I feel as if I am climbing the ladder of history.

Among the Poe pilgrims visiting the house have been Venezuelan author Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind and had to descend the stairs sitting down. Actor Vincent Price, who appeared in The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, and other film adaptations of Poe stories, bumped his head twice climbing the stairs.

"Price said, 'This place gives me the creeps,'" Jerome remembers, "but he also said that Poe's room at the top of the stairs was lovely, and that he was happy about the house being preserved."

The little garret is simply furnished, with a writing desk, chair, and cot. It was here that Poe wrote "MS Found in a Bottle," which won him $50 in a magazine-writing contest and launched his short-story writing career. The story concerns an encounter with a ghost ship reminiscent of the Flying Dutchman:

We are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool — and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and — going down.

"They didn't want to give him both the poetry and prose prize," says David Keltz, "so they gave it to another poet. Poe followed the winner to the corner of Baltimore and Gay streets, a section now called The Block, where strip clubs are, and all but challenged him to a duel. There's a little pawnshop there now. Poe was enraged that he did not get both prizes." Keltz strikes a martial pose and takes up Poe's lost cause:

"You, sir, are dishonorable. The poetry prize is truly mine, given to me by Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Latrobe."

"Are you saying the judges are dishonorable, sir?"

"The judges are honorable but, sir, you are not, sir."

For years, even after many publications and honors, Poe adamantly claimed to have won that first poetry prize. Perhaps he would be mollified to know that his books fetch premium prices. A two-volume first edition of "The Raven" sold for $17,500 about a year ago. An earlier edition, published in what was called "wraps," paper covers that were frequently used by nineteenth-century publishers, recently listed for $75,000.

If Vincent Price felt a ghostly presence in Poe House, he was not alone. It has the reputation of being haunted.

"Most of the people in the neighborhood refuse to go into the house," Jerome observes. "They are superstitious. Children will enter only if there are five or more of them. There have been things that have happened at the house. I've been there for many years. It's not easy to sense a presence because of the distractions. We have steam heat and rattling pipes, and that makes constant noise in the winter.

"The first time I heard the pipes my first impulse was to get out of the house quickly, but I haven't seen any ghosts. My only knowledge of a presence happened when we were rehearsing a play based on one of his stories. It was Halloween. An actress was changing clothes in the back bedroom. I heard a loud crash. It sounded like the ceiling had caved in. I ran upstairs and [the actress] was leaning against the wall holding her costume to herself with this look on her face. I looked in the middle of the room and one of the windows had crashed on the floor. She said it had come out of its groove and tilted, lifted out of its frame, came toward her, and fell in the middle of the room.

"People might say the wind blew it or it fell by itself, but the shutters were closed. It would have taken a hurricane-force gale to blow the window out, which was not the case that day. Even if it fell by itself, it would have fallen at the base of the window, not all the way across the room. She was so frightened by that, we never did the show. She left and never came back. I called a psychic, who said she would think about it. She called me the next day, saying, 'Don't worry about it. It was somebody - Edgar or Maria - teasing the actress, trying to scare her.'"

Over the years, other psychics have examined the house. According to Jerome, they agreed, independently, that of all the rooms in the house, only two were "active," where they picked up any sensations or vibrations. One is where the actress was dressing; the other is the garret where Poe slept and wrote. Although Jerome won't say if he believes Poe's house is haunted, he observes, "These psychics did not get together and compare notes. They arrived at the same conclusion independently."

In the Poe House collection is a letter left in the church gate two years ago by the mysterious visitor. It reads:

"My dear Mr. Jerome, It seems we have both become Baltimore traditions. I am content that some traditions must end and others take their place. The torch will be passed."

When Jerome read the note, he didn't know how to interpret it. "On one hand," he says, "it sounded like it was over with, that he was content to retire after we began giving a public toast to Poe. So we had to wait a year to see if he would come back. That was the year with the ice and snow on the ground. A younger person appeared that year. So he meant he was passing his toast to someone else to do for him. He was telling us the tradition would survive him; that he was retiring but it would continue. The gentleman who had been doing it until that point appeared to be elderly. I supposed there was a health factor, a safety factor. He decided it was time to move on."

That year, the visitor's successor left white roses instead of red.

The Poe Room at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library houses an impressive collection of books by and about Edgar Allan Poe. Here is the writer's essence in the familiar, dusty smell of books, ink, and paper. A life-size portrait of Poe looks down from the mantel, and in the corner sits a brooding black marble bust in the fashion of his idol, Lord Byron.

Poe was not only a poet and short-story writer but a literary critic and journalist for Graham's and other magazines. He was truly a man of his time, writing about literature, criticizing or praising his rivals, defining the best and the brightest of pre-Civil War Philadelphia and New York. I spend a quiet hour perusing the collection, surrounded by hundreds of shelved volumes and etchings of illustrations.

"Poe lived in different places - Richmond, Philadelphia, New York," says John Sondheim, the library's manager of special collections, "and he was born in Boston. Philadelphia claims him, with good cause, and so does Richmond, which probably has the strongest claim as his boyhood hometown where he grew up, but," he adds with a wink, "Baltimore's got him."

Poe died in Baltimore after collapsing in an alcoholic stupor that led to heart failure. He was taken to Church Hospital, which has functioned continuously at the same location: Fayette Street and Broadway. Near the end, Poe reportedly cried out the name of a character from one of his seafaring stories — "Reynolds, Reynolds!" — as if seeking a companion for a final voyage to the limits of the imagination. A plaque hangs in Poe's memory in the Rotunda of the East Building of Church Home & Hospital.

The anniversary of Poe's birth will be celebrated in January at Westminster Church with a special program, including a popular puppet presentation by a troupe from North Caroline called Nevermore: The Last Days of Poe. This is the Black Theatre-style of puppetry, in which puppeteers dressed in black handle rods for life-size marionettes. Poe's poems set to music by a Colorado composer will be presented by a pianist and a tenor. David Keltz will perform a forty-five-minute dramatization of Poe's life and works. At the end of the program, bagpipers will lead everyone out of the church to Poe's grave, where an apple-cider toast will be given by Jeff Jerome.

"Last year's toast," Jerome recalls, "ended something like this: 'It is this affection for you that brings us here to celebrate your life, your work, and your spirit. Edgar, we your friends raise our glasses to salute you and to thank you for coming into our lives."

The watchers will settle down after midnight to wait, as always, for the mysterious visitor to carry on a tradition begun in 1949. The original visitor, on his last trip to Poe's grave before passing on the torch, looked up at the shadowy watchers in the church and tipped his hat. At that moment, gusts of wind stirred up miniature dust devils in the snow as if the inhabitants of Westminster cemetery were dancing in honor of their most famous resident.

Happy birthday, Mr. Poe.