Edgar Allan Poe vanished for nearly a week before he turned up outside a Baltimore, Maryland tavern being used as a polling place, incoherent and wearing clothes that were not his own. He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he drifted in and out of consciousness for four days.
Witnesses said he repeatedly called out the name Reynolds in his final hours, a man no one has ever identified. Poe died on 3 October 1849 at age 40, and no doctor ever agreed on what killed him, leaving one of American literature’s most famous authors with one of its strangest unsolved endings.
