![]() “Poe’s death seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works,” wrote Smithsonian’s Natasha Gelling in a 2014 article on the author, “He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas-a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler…” ![]() Then, in 1849, Poe was found delirious and ragged in the streets of Baltimore, dying shortly afterwards in one of literature’s greatest mysteries. He visited her grave constantly, and “Many times was he found at the dead hour of a winter night, sitting beside her tomb almost frozen in the snow,” wrote his friend Charles Chauncey Burr. In spite of it all, he kept writing - didn’t have a choice, really - but “he did not seem to care, after she was gone,” wrote one of his friends, “whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year.” You can feel it in the words of his 1849 memorial poem for her, “Annabel Lee,” in lines like “ I was a child and she was a child/But we loved with a love that was more than love/That the wind came out of the cloud by night/ Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” Virginia’s death sent Poe into a deeper spiral of depression, anxiety and drinking. She lifts off the covers of Virginia’s bed to show us (and yes, we half expected a ghost to fly out). Oh, and you know that saying, “Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite”? Well the former part of the rhyme, says Davis, references the fact that folks literally tightened ropes underneath their mattresses to sleep. To the left are the narrow stairs that her “Eddy”, who wasn’t exactly brawny, carried her up and down in his arms. “This is the bedroom Virginia was moved to when she couldn’t walk,” says Davis, who lets us in to see the first of the three Poe relics: Virginia’s deathbed. Virginia fell more and more ill, and rumours stirred about the city - were both of them dying? Would the literary community really let Poe live on the brink of poverty as he carried the weight of the family, financially and, in Virginia’s case, literally? Sound like the intro to one of his own stories? Good. “The cottage had an air of taste and gentility… So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw,” wrote one visitor to Poe’s house. Today, the house is filled with authentic period furnishings in the same minimalist style, and three items that actually belonged to the Poes themselves: a rickety bed, a rocking chair, and a golden mirror. ![]() “But what is very clear in his writing,” says Davis, “is that Virginia became his world.” (And yes, it was weird even “back then”.) Some historians see their relationship in a more platonic scope, while others think he may have had some kind of professional arrangement with her mother, who also lived in the cottage even after their deaths. It was hell on earth for the already neurotic Poe, who “loved Virginia very deeply, but also had this very mysterious relationship with her family,” says Davis, who explains that he married Virginia when she was only 13 and he, 27, and that she was his cousin.
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