Death becomes him

Edgar Allan Poe is finally getting the send-off he always deserved -- from a city that has spent decades claiming him as one of its own.

True, he's spent more than a century-and-a-half buried in the hallowed grounds surrounding Baltimore's Westminster Hall. It's also true that Baltimore isn't the only city celebrating Poe, in this bicentennial of his birth on Jan. 19, 1809. At least four other East Coast cities -- Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston -- have legitimate claims to Poe's legacy. The five cities have been squabbling for years, and have spent the past year exploiting their connections to the pioneering writer and early master of the horror and mystery genres.

But Baltimore has something that none of the rest of them have. And over the coming week, his fans here are going to flaunt it for all it's worth -- in ways the macabre Mr. Poe would doubtless appreciate.

"We have the body!" says Poe fan Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No one else can say that."

Which explains why Baltimore will be holding a second wake, funeral procession and funeral for the long-dead Poe, 160 years after the first. On an early October day in 1849, Poe was found walking the streets of the city, bedraggled, incoherent, possibly beaten up, dressed in clothes that didn't belong to him. He died four days later at Washington College Hospital (later Church Home & Hospital, closed in 2000) and was buried at Westminster the next day, after a sparsely attended three-minute service. His death warranted a paltry four-sentence obituary in The Sun. "This is Baltimore's chance," says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, where a Wednesday-afternoon-and-evening viewing of the famed poet and author's body will begin a five-day commemoration of both his mysterious death on Oct. 7, 1849, and the quiet, almost secretive funeral services that followed. "This is what I've been working for, to honor Poe and to say, 'Thanks.' It's the least I could do."

But there's more to the Poe-Baltimore connection than his death. His family was firmly rooted in Baltimore, where his grandfather fought in the Revolution and his grandmother made trousers for Lafayette's troops. He met his cousin (and future wife), Virginia, in Baltimore. He became a paid writer for the first time here, winning a literary prize for one of his early short stories.

In later years, he would often return to the city when times got tough and money scarce, seeking help from his aunt and former mother-in-law, Maria Clemm.

"Whenever he wanted to seem as if he was a person of good breeding and good background, he would point to his Baltimore roots," says David Keltz, an actor who has made a career of performing as Poe.

If Poe was, indeed, proud of his connection to Baltimore, this week, the city will be returning the favor. Immediately after Wednesday's viewing, an all-night vigil is set for Poe's grave, at the entrance to Westminster Burial Grounds. Saturday, a re-created funeral procession will take Poe's "body" from his house on Amity Street to Westminster Hall.

There, actor John Astin will serve as host for a memorial service featuring eulogies from a host of Poe fans. Jerome and his fellow organizers want to make the occasion seem as authentic as possible, promising to adopt an appropriately somber mood and try to make things appear much as they might have in 1849.

Still, Poe's fame has grown so much over the years, it wouldn't do to simply hire actors to portray the same few people who showed up at Poe's actual funeral. So, in a bizarre time-shift befitting both the subject and the occasion, eulogies will be delivered by actors portraying not only people who were there, including Poe's friends and family, but also by Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, film director Alfred Hitchcock and horror author H.P. Lovecraft. None were alive in Poe's time, but all are his spiritual descendants.

"This is a chance for people to come out and listen to the eulogies, listen to people who knew Poe, people who were influenced by Poe," Jerome says. "We just didn't want to have someone standing up and saying, 'I knew Poe, he was a great guy.' We wanted something substantial."

Poe, who never had any doubt of his own talents, would certainly approve. And he'd appreciate that his stories endure, as staples of American literature and as the inspiration for generations of horror and mystery writers. There's "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which a murderer is undone by the amplified beating of his victim's heart; "The Cask of Amontillado," in which a crazed murderer entombs his victim alive, and relishes the thought; "The Black Cat," the tale of a feline spirit our for revenge; "The Murders In the Rue Morgue," an early detective story that helped define a genre that's as strong today as ever.

"His stories, they go right to your heart and right to your mind," says Jeff Kortman, Poe fan and manager of the Maryland Department at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. "I don't know how demented one would have to be, to dream up some of those twists in those stories that he wrote. And that kind of stuff really lives on."

There's also the continuing fascination with Poe's life, which seems to have been as mysterious and macabre, not to mention tragic, as anything Poe himself ever wrote. Poe was orphaned at age 3. At age 27, he married his 13-year-old cousin, who would die less than seven years later -- perhaps one reason why the specter of early death shows up in so much of his work (including "The Raven"). He struggled to earn a living throughout his life, and never achieved the mind of success he thought he deserved. And he died young, only 40, under circumstances never explained.

"Some of the circumstances of his life were so classically tragic," says the BMA's Bolger. "He's an orphan, he marries his 13-year-old cousin and she dies of tuberculosis. It almost becomes overwhelming."

"There's been a lot of speculation about his life, and people love that sort of thing," says Steve Parke, a Baltimore artist and photographer who illustrated the 2002 graphic novel, "In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe." "It's sort of like gossip that's still around 160 years after the guy died."

Plus, as everyone from Byron to James Dean could attest, dying young is always a good career move.

"It's like all those rock stars who died young," Parke says. "If those people had lived to a ripe old age, they might not be the continuing stars they are."

Whatever the reason for Poe's continuing popularity, Baltimore is glad to have him. And his fans here have little trouble defending their claim.

"There was a lot of the Poe family in Baltimore, the connection is much deeper than people realize," says Astin, who teaches theater at Johns Hopkins University and will forever be remembered as the effervescently ghoulish Gomez Addams on TV's "The Addams Family." A fixture at local Poe celebrations throughout the years, Astin notes that Poe became a paid writer in Baltimore, when he won a literary contest. This is where he met and courted his beloved wife, Virginia. This is where, Astin contends, the seeds of his literary career were planted, where his imagination really began to flourish.

"There really is a truly important formative time of his life that was in Baltimore," Astin says, "even if, to some, it's not readily apparent."

The viewing of Poe's body is set for noon-11 p.m. Wednesday at the Poe House and Museum, 203 N. Amity St. Tickets are $5. The all-night vigil at the Poe monument in the Westminster Burial Ground, at the southeast corner of Fayette and Green streets, will run from midnight to 11 a.m. Thursday; admission is free. Poe's funeral procession, from the Amity Street home to Westminster Hall, adjacent to the burial ground, will begin around 11:30 a.m Wednesday. Two funeral services are scheduled, for 12:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $35 in advance, $40 at the door. Information: 410-396-7932 or poebicentennial.com.