Nevermore: The Tale of the Poe Toaster

For sixty years, around 3:00 AM on January 19th, a man in a black frock coat and fedora, with a scarf obscuring his face, would walk into the grounds of the Westminster Hall and Burial Ground, at the corner of Fayette and Greene Streets in West Baltimore. He proceeded briskly to a stone at the back of the cemetery, which marks the site where the body of Edgar Allan Poe rested from April to November 1875. There the man in black toasted Poe with cognac and ceremoniously placed three red roses and a half-bottle of the cognac on the empty grave. Then he would vanish into the darkness, not to be seen for another year.

This man became known, internationally and affectionately, as the Poe Toaster. He carried out his memorial ritual every January 19th, no matter what the weather, from 1949 to 2009.

The great American horror writer, Edgar Allan Poe, was born in Boston on January 19th, 1809, and died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, at the age of forty. He was buried in a family plot, but the stone that marked this original grave was accidentally destroyed almost immediately after it was placed. The grave remained unmarked until 1875, when local schoolchildren took up a collection to buy a grave marker for it. That marker, which now marks Poe’s permanent grave at the front of the cemetery, was too large to fit in a tight space; it overlapped the grave of Poe’s grandfather. Poe was moved temporarily to an empty space in the Poe plot, where he remained until November 17, 1875, when he was reinterred for the third (and hopefully final) time, and his new grave marked with the overlarge stone. The former site was left unmarked until the 1930s, when it was decided to mark the original again; unfortunately, a misreading of the church records led to the marker, a fine one with a carved raven at the top, being placed on Poe’s second grave instead of the original one.

The Poe Toaster went to the second marker, so he may have mistaken the second for the original grave. It is not known what the three red roses symbolize, although they may be placed in memory of Poe, his child bride Virginia Clemm (whom he married when she was thirteen), and his beloved mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. As for the cognac, the Toaster (who left notes at the site on several occasions; see below) once wrote (it is) with great respect for the family tradition that the cognac is placed. Whether this was in keeping, somehow, with Poe tradition or the Toaster’s family tradition is up for grabs.

Once, many years ago, the Toaster left a note that read, simply and elegiacally, Edgar, I haven’t forgotten you. In 1993, one was left that read The torch will be passed. In 1999, a note was found after his visit that indicated the original Poe Toaster had died in 1998, and the tradition would be carried on by his son.

A Baltimore Sun article published on August 15, 2007, proclaimed 92-year-old Sam Porpora of Baltimore, a onetime caretaker at the cemetery, had begun the tradition. Unfortunately, much of the material Porpora gave the interviewer was lifted almost verbatim from a 1976 article in the Sun about the Toaster. His claim was dismissed by Jeff Jerome, for thirty-odd years the curator of Baltimore’s Poe House and Museum (allegedly haunted by Poe and possibly his grandmother, Elizabeth Poe), who noted that Porpora’s account had “holes so big you could drive a Mack truck through them.”

So we still don’t know the identity of the Poe Toaster, except to say that the original carried out his ritual for nearly fifty years before passing it on, putatively, to his son, for another eleven years. Only once, in all this time, was he photographed; in 1990, in a one-time-only event, Jeff Jerome (who attended to watch the Toaster faithfully beginning in the 1970s) allowed a photographer to take one picture. It depicted a heavyset man in black.

The Poe Toaster last made an appearance on the two hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth in 2009.

Dang, I wish somebody had kept the tradition up!

Thanks to certain details in the story, I wonder if the Toaster was not originally inspired to undertake his obligation by the legendary Lady in Black who for many years has placed flowers by the crypt of the silent film actor Rudolph Valentino. But that’s a whole other story–

Advertisement