Today in History: Edgar Allen Poe

On this day (October 3) in 1849, Edgar Allen Poe was found incoherently wandering the streets of Baltimore. He was obviously in great distress and was taken to Washington Medical College where he would die four days later. The clothes he was wearing were not his own. He never became coherent enough to explain what happened to him, but he called out several times to a man named “Reynolds” on the night before he died. The newspaper reported he had died of “congestion of the brain” which was a euphemism for alcoholism.