This story has been updated since its Tuesday web publication.
This is Baltimore's morbid spring.
The city where Edgar Allan Poe gave up the ghost has always had a soft spot for the historic macabre. But in the next month, more cultural activities starring the Specter of Death will be competing for your entertainment dollar than at any time of the year outside of Halloween.
This week alone, the Maryland Historical Society opens a new exhibit featuring 17th-century coffins and 330-year-old human remains from St. Mary's City. "The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe," an immersive theater presentation held in a spooky 1844 house, sold out its entire run several weeks before Friday's opening. (Update: On Wednesday, the show's run was extended to May 17).
Mid-April will feature a presentation in Fells Point of "Our American Cousin," a 19th-century comedy best known as the play that President Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot.
A few days later, the B&O Railroad Museum will sponsor a re-creation of Lincoln's funeral cortege.
"It can be a very positive thing to brood over the macabre," said Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at North Carolina's Wake Forest University and the author of the 2012 book "Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away."
"Looking at life unblinkingly in all its horror can make our own lives seem brighter and happier by contrast. It can be a weird form of therapy."
As it happens, there will be plenty of opportunities for travelers abroad to partake of the graveside cure, both nationally and abroad:
On Thursday, the 530-year-old remains of Great Britain's King Richard III will be reinterred in England's Leicester Cathedral. Future visitors will be able to visit the final resting place of Britain's most reviled monarch.
Earlier this month, a team of forensic scientists in Spain announced that they had discovered the 400-year-old casket of the novelist Miguel de Cervantes. The site is expected to become a tourist attraction next year.
Last fall, a 120-year-old British coffin factory was turned into a museum of Victorian death practices.
Exhibits celebrating the formerly living also are on display at a slew of other museums nationwide, from the Walters Art Museum, which has a Roman marble sarcophagus dating from the second century A.D. and an even older Egyptian mummy, to the California-based Museum of Death, which boasts a serial killer's skull, and which just opened a branch in New Orleans.
Partly, the focus on the past is event-driven. Barely had the nation wrapped up its celebration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 — and its 1814 Battle of Baltimore — when it began preparing to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865. "Silent Witness," an exhibit of artifacts from the assassination, opened Monday in Washington across the street from the historic Ford's Theatre.
"You can't study the past or commemorate important anniversaries without talking about death and dying," said Burt Kummerow, the Historical Society's outgoing president. (It was his group that deemed the coming weeks Maryland's "morbid spring.")
He was at St. Mary's City in 1990, when historical archaeologists discovered three lead-lined coffins under the site of a former Jesuit chapel. The coffins are believed to contain the remains of former Maryland Gov. Philip Calvert, who died in 1682; his first wife, Anne Wolseley Calvert, and a six-month-old baby who is thought to be the daughter of the governor and his second wife.
When the coffins were opened, most of Philip Calvert's skeleton had dissolved into crystals, Kummerow said, but he still had a full head of shoulder-length red hair.
All three coffins, as well as some bones from Anne Calvert and from the baby, are on display in the exhibit.
"It's one thing to read that life in Maryland in the 17th century was extremely difficult," said Alexandra Deutsch, the museum's chief curator.
"It's another thing when you see the baby's skull, which is literally like lace in some places, or Anne Calvert's broken femur, which never healed and which must have been extremely painful.
"Anne Calvert was a member of the 1 percent. She led a privileged life. If someone like her could suffer like this, what must life have been like for the average person?"
Wilson said Deutsch's question demonstrates how museum exhibits and theatrical performances can elevate the human impulse to rubberneck at the scene of a car accident into a response that's ultimately uplifting: They put horrific events into context, he said. They encourage visitors to use their imaginations to empathize with the real or fictitious people who experienced the tragedy.
"Imagination is a very important part in turning morbid curiosity into something other than a sick thrill," he said.
"If we ask what it means to suffer, it makes the horrible event meaningful and helps us think about our existence in a different way. That's where the poets and the painters come in. Death is an especially intense invitation to find the meaning in life."
Deutsch thinks that American society cycles between periods of private and public mourning. The Victorian era was an example of the latter, with its rigidly prescribed etiquette in which the bereaved wore black as an outward expression of inward grief, and a passerby could scan details of a stranger's attire and tell at a glance how recently her beloved had died.
American society may be turning away from a more individual tradition of grieving to one that's more communal. Social media sites such as Facebook, Deutsch said, may provide the same function of communicating grief publicly today as wearing jet jewelry or crape-trimmed dresses did for the Victorians.
"A lot of people post pictures of their deceased loved ones on social media," she said.
"In the past few years, I've been struck by the number of people who use Facebook as a vehicle to announce memorials and anniversaries of deaths. I find it to all to be a bit Victorian."
The trend to a more public display of grief may have begun with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Deutsch said. Some traumatic events, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, can result in a nationwide expression of grief that can have the unplanned result of uniting a country.
One of the earliest of those moments was Lincoln's murder, which marked the first assassination of an American president.
Courtney B. Wilson, executive director of the railroad museum, said that 20,000 people turned out when the funeral train carrying Lincoln's body stopped in Baltimore during the 13-day, 1,600 mile funeral procession.
"It really was a seminal moment in American history," he said. "There was a multi-cultural, multi-racial outpouring of public grief."
The Wake Forest professor, Eric Wilson, said that some events arouse such strong and universal emotions that they generate a nationwide community of mourners.
"Some moments get lifted out of the flow of history," he said. "They create a sense of fellowship, because we're all feeling the same way at the same time.
"Maybe we all have to suffer. But we don't have to suffer alone."
A sampling of local events
"A Tale of Three Coffins: Living and Dying in 17th Century St. Mary's City": Today through the fall. Maryland Historical Society, 201 W. Monument St. mdhs.org.
"The Mesmeric Revelations! Of Edgar Allan Poe": Thursday-May 1, Maryland Historical Society, 201 W. Monument St. (Show is sold out but may be extended.) myedgarallanpoe.com.
Update: The Maryland Historical Society on Wednesday announced an extension of "The Mesermic Revelations!" The show will now run through May 17.
"Abraham Lincoln — The Final Journey to Baltimore & Lincoln's Funeral Train" plus other events: April 18-21, B&O Railroad Museum, 901 W. Pratt St. borail.org.
"Our American Cousin": April 15-19. Robert Long House, 812 S. Ann St. newoldtheater.org.