BALTIMORE — No one was suppose to grieve the death of Edgar Allan Poe. The man who penned the writer’s obituary tried his best to make sure no one would remember Poe favourably.

“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.” The obituary which appeared after Poe’s death on Oct. 7, 1849, was written by an author identified as “Ludwig”.

Ludwig turned out to be Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an editor who became Poe’s literary executor in a strange twist of irony that I think would have given the author grist for one of his horror stories.

Griswold hated Poe and throughout the rest of his life attempted to portray Poe as a drunkard and a drug addict. Over the years, biographers have attempted to dissect exactly why Griswold so despised Poe, a fellow poet. The most credible reason was that both vied for the attention of a fellow poet Frances Sargent Osgoode.

The reality was that Poe, the first American to make his living as a writer, was not as commonly believed, found delirious on a Baltimore street on Oct. 3. He was taken to Washington College Hospital but never regained consciousness. Four days after first admitted, Poe was dead.

A few decades after Poe’s death, his reputation was revived. Griswold’s hatchet job on his enemy didn’t stick.

What caused his death? It’s a mystery that has remained for 162 years.

The Baltimore home where Poe lived with his mother-in-law Maria and his young wife Virginia remains where it has stood for nearly 200 years on Amity Street.

The two-and-a-half storey duplex with its five rooms and narrow staircases has been under renovation. Even in daylight, the house is dark inside.

Executive director Jeff Jerome has in the front room of the Amity Street house a chair that Poe once sat in.

The power of Poe remains. Earlier this year, Jerome tells me that he had a young visitor from China, a teenage poet who considered Poe her hero. When she visited the Baltimore home and was invited to sit in the chair, she was completely overwhelmed.

“She was crying and couldn’t believe that she could just sit in the chair Poe had sat in,” said Jerome.

A few blocks away, Poe is buried at gothic-style Westminster Presbyterian Church, part of the University of Maryland’s Law School. The cemetery, located at the intersection of Fayette and Greene Streets, was completed in 1852. But the burial grounds had been there for 60 years prior to that and to avoid disturbing the existing graves, the original church building was constructed on brick piers above some of the tombs creating catacombs.