Add Some Mystery to Your Summer Vacation: The Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Part II

At the Edgar Awards on May 1, I was by pure chance seated at the same table with two charming representatives of the mystery world: Jaime Fawcett & Chris Semtner — respectively Executive Director and Curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. I could hardly believe my luck. The Edgars — The Oscars of mystery writing, named after the writer who invented the detective story — and I get to sit with two of the people who know the most about him. I asked them if they would guest blog, and they enthusiastically accepted.

Chris guest-blogged with us last month (May 29).

Today, it's Jamie's turn. 

Elmira Royster Shelton's Albumen Print Carte de Visite. Elmira was one of Poe's early loves.

The Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, tells the story of Poe’s life and legacy.  For over 90 years, hundreds of thousands of visitors have visited the museum, seeking inspiration and motivation from the largest collection of Poe memorabilia and manuscripts in the world.  The museum is a popular place for mystery writers, poets, and academics, including such notables of the past as Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller and H.P. Lovecraft.

A first edition manuscript of The Purloined Letter from the museum's collection.

Poe is easily one of the most recognizable authors in the literary world.  As an iconic image, admirers feel they “know Poe”.  

What we find, in fact, is that most visitors are originally attracted by Poe’s dark caricature.  Popular culture has portrayed Poe in hues of black, purple, and gray, while images of sinister black cats and dilapidated mansions usually fill the mind’s eye.

Certainly Poe’s real-life circumstances lend themselves to gloomy interpretation.  To say Poe led a difficult life is an understatement.  He was orphaned at three years old.  He lost his mother, foster mother, brother and wife to tuberculosis.  He was in constant financial distress.  He even died in tragic and mysterious circumstances, adding an ironic end for the Master of Macabre.

But as visitors to the Poe Museum soon discover, Poe’s historical figure is far more intricate than Poe’s caricature.  To really understand Poe’s genius, one has to appreciate the balance between “historical Poe” and “Poe the legend”. 

Poe’s real genius is that he was a brave writer.  Poe explored every human experience and emotion, and he expressed his observations with such resonance that his readers are left emotionally immersed in the story. 

He tried to live entirely by his craft, though he was largely unsuccessful due to the lack of international copyright laws.

Of Poe’s 70 short stories, only 15 actually fit into the gothic horror genre upon which his caricature is based.  Often drawing on current events and scientific achievements of the time, Poe pushed the boundaries of 19th century literature into the arenas of detective fiction, natural science, satire, and science fiction.

The Poe Museum’s Memorial Building is dedicated to Poe’s writing legacy.  Copies of first editions and manuscripts are on display, and visitors can explore the variety of Poe’s influence in American literature in depth.   

One exhibit explores Poe’s influence as the Father of the Detective Story. Through his character, the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, Poe introduced new methods of analysis and deduction.  Calling it “ratiocination,” Dupin creatively solves crimes by putting himself in the mind of the criminal in a series short stories, “The Mystery of  Marie Roget,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the “The Purloined Letter.” 

This innovative technique laid the groundwork for the detective fiction genre we know today.  Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, credited Poe as a writing inspiration – and Poe even earns a mention in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.

To round out Poe as a historical figure, Poe’s clothing, trunk, and walking stick are also on display, providing guests with a sense of who Poe truly was.  

The Poe Museum is the perfect place for the aspiring mystery writer.  Find your own literary inspiration at the Poe Museum this summer.  Check out our website at http://www.poemuseum.org.  








Virginia’s first literary museum, the Poe Shrine (the original name of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum) opened in 1922 with a weekend of events held in what was then its newly planted Enchanted Garden. Two years later, the Poe Shrine commissioned the London firm Raphael Tuck and Sons, Publishers to the King and Queen, to immortalize the garden in a series of postcards. The artist S. Shelton produced the series pictured here.

The Garden Club of Virginia has begun a restoration of the Enchanted Garden based on these cards.

Jaime at the Edgars with Dan Stashower, who won an Edgar Award that night for Best Fact Crime for The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War

Sheila York

Copyright 2014

Add Some Mystery to Your Summer Vacation: The Edgar Allan Poe Museum

At the Edgar Awards on May 1, I was by pure chance seated at the same table with two charming representatives of the mystery world: Jamie Fawcett & Chris Semtner — respectively Executive Director and Curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. I could hardly believe my luck. The Edgars — The Oscars of mystery writing, named after the writer who invented the detective story — and I get to sit with two of the people who know the most about him. I asked them if they would guest blog, and they enthusiastically accepted. 

Chris is going first. I'll hand this over to him now. Jamie will be writing a blog of her own for us in June.

-- Sheila York

Late one October night, a phone call awoke the director of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The anonymous caller said he would reveal the whereabouts of the missing bust of Edgar Allan Poe if the director would read to him Poe’s poem “Spirits of the Dead.” 

The missing bust had sat on a brick pedestal in the Poe Museum’s garden pergola for nearly 60 years. Then one morning, it was gone.

The director recited the poem. The caller said, “It’s at the Raven Inn,” and hung up. That’s where the police would find it, resting on the bar in the Raven Inn, a rather seedy biker joint on Richmond’s Southside. 

Next to the bust were a mug of beer and a scrap of brown paper with some lines from “Spirits of the Dead” written on it. When asked how the 80-pound bust came to be there, the bartender told police a man in a cowboy hat had carried it into the bar, saying, “I met my friend in the alley, and he’d like a drink.”

Twenty-seven years later, the bust is still on display, though safely in the Poe Museum’s highly secure exhibit gallery. The abductor was never found.

This is just one of the enigmas lurking around every corner of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. It is only fitting that the inventor of the detective story should have lived a life haunted by unsolved mysteries, and his museum invites the sleuths of the world to try their hand at solving them. 

[Sheila's note: The picture at right is the original bust, now in its secure location. Below, a replica that sits on the pedestal in the museum's pergola. Chris told me that they have to regularly wipe visitors' lipstick off replica Edgar's cheek.] 

One of the first conundrums is the death of Poe’s father. 

The museum’s Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building houses dozens of scripts and reviews of the plays in which Poe’s father, David Poe, Jr., performed. These documents help trace his whereabouts in the months leading to his disappearance. Poe’s contemporaries and today’s scholars still debate when David Poe left his wife, where he went, and when he died. But the best evidence leads us frustratingly to the conclusion that he simply vanished from history somewhere between New York and Norfolk sometime between 1809 and 1811. Even Edgar Poe wasn’t quite certain.

Another whodunit involves a murder Poe tried to solve. 

In the museum’s library is the first printing of Poe’s serialized detective story “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Poe based his tale on newspaper accounts of the unsolved murder of New York cigar girl Mary Rogers, and he boasted that his story provided all the clues the police would need to identify the murderer. Regrettably, they apparently did not follow up on his theory, and the case is still open.

Then there is the question of whether someone was trying to kill Poe. 

The museum owns a letter from his friend John Sartain in which the latter describes a troubling visit from the author, who was convinced that people in Philadelphia were conspiring to kill him. In this note, Sartain expresses his certainty that Poe was not the least bit intoxicated at the time. Sartain found Poe “measured and deliberate” in everything he said, although he later recanted his story. Scholars are uncertain who might have wanted to murder Poe or if he had just imagined the whole thing. Considering he would die under suspicious circumstances a few months later while on his way to Philadelphia, some authors suspect he might have had good reason to fear for his life.

Museum guests can see the walking stick Poe left at his doctor’s house the night before the author left Richmond for the last time. Poe took the doctor’s sword cane along in its place. Why Poe exchanged walking sticks is still unknown, but we do know that Poe was planning a return visit to Philadelphia where, a few months earlier, he had feared someone wanted him dead.

Of course, Poe never reached the City of Brotherly Love. He died in Baltimore nine days after leaving Richmond. The cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery. He disappeared for five days before a Dr. Snodgrass found him semi-conscious and wearing someone else’s clothes, and took him to Washington College Hospital. Over the course of four days in the hospital, Poe was unable to tell anyone either where he had been for the past week or what had become of his luggage.  

That luggage, Poe’s trunk, is now in the Poe Museum along with its key, which was found in his pocket after his death. 

Neither the trunk, the walking stick, nor the museum’s lock of Poe’s hair Snodgrass clipped from Poe's head after he died, provide any answers to the mysteries about Poe’s final days, but there have been a dozens of published theories about what could have happened to him.

These are just a few of the puzzles guests are invited to explore at the Poe Museum, the perfect vacation destination for mystery lovers.

If you are interested in learning more about the inspirations for Poe’s detective stories, the Poe Museum is the perfect place to uncover the truth behind “The Gold-Bug” or “The Purloined Letter.” Visitors learn how Poe, as a writer for Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger, used his own amateur sleuthing skills to expose a fake chess-playing automaton five years before he wrote his first detective story.

This summer, try solving a mystery at the Poe Museum. The museum’s four-building complex boasts the world’s largest collection of Poe personal items and memorabilia.

Finding us won’t take much detective work. Just visit our website at http://www.poemuseum.org.

Chris Semtner

Curator

Edgar Allan Poe Museum

With Chris at the Edgars

Copyright 2014 Sheila York & Chris Semtner