Edgar Allan Poe Fans Left In Dark When 'Poe Toaster' Fails to Show

Did I kill the legend of the Poe Toaster?

To answer that question requires a tale that has taken 27 years to craft. It's perhaps worthy of, well, Edgar Allan Poe.

For years – as far back as 1949 or longer – on the morning of Jan. 19, someone has crept into Westminster Burying Ground, near the Baltimore city center adjacent to the University of Maryland campus, and left three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at the grave of the famed poet and writer of The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart, among others.

The identity of the "Poe Toaster" is unknown, and the ritual has drawn national attention. For the second consecutive year, the mysterious figure has failed to materialize.

My experience with the Poe Toaster dates to 1983. I’d heard about the tradition before arriving in Baltimore to attend University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Being more than just the curious type, I contacted Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, who invited me and three other college students to spend the night in the catacombs beneath Westminster Church.

That year there was a public celebration attended by dozens of people and included readings by Poe impersonator and poet Andre Codrescu. After a toast with champagne and cognac, Jerome ushered everybody out of the cemetery and locked the gates. The five of us, including Jerome, circled the block to the University of Maryland law school library, and from there through a walkway to the Westminster parsonage adjacent to the church.

Locked behind the wrought iron bars that enclose the catacombs, we huddled amid the tombs and mounds of dirt in the frozen darkness.

At around 1 a.m., we were startled by a rattling of the bars. A figure ran alongside the church foundation, shining a flashlight through the catacomb arches. We were being taunted to give chase. Unable to exit directly outside into the cemetery, we ran up through the church and to the second floor of the parsonage, providing a view overlooking Poe’s grave.

There was a tall, dark man to the west of Poe’s grave, near the wall separating the cemetery from the law school courtyard.  He was looking back toward the corner of the church where we would have appeared had we been able to get outside.

Everybody paused for a moment; the five of us lined up at the parsonage windows, the Poe Toaster waiting in anticipation of us at ground level.

He was slender, wearing what appeared to be a cape or long cloak. His head was covered, but I couldn’t make out the style of hat. In one hand he held a walking stick.

The spell was broken by one of the other students, who tapped her fingernail against the window.

The Poe Toaster looked up at us and raised his hand to either salute or shake his fist at us; the gold tip of his walking stick glinted under the streetlights. With a flourish of his cloak, the Poe Toaster slipped into the darkness and was gone.

At the grave, we found the roses and cognac. We passed the bottle around for celebratory sips.

I had a tape recorder with me the whole evening and did a segment about the Poe Toaster’s visit for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

Since then, I've visited the cemetary several times, standing at the worn brick wall near Poe’s grave,  looking for a grip or foothold. I've tried hoisting myself up. How did the Poe Toaster get over – or through – this wall so smoothly and easily?

That is just one of the nagging questions that keeps me intrigued year after year. Befitting the inventor of the mystery genre - the Poe Toaster’s unusual tribute is shrouded in speculation and misdirection, and confounded by inexplicable coincidences.

That NPR segment added to the public awareness of the Poe Toaster. The following year, the crowds around Westminster were larger. The gatherings have continued to swell over the years, at times upward of 100 people or more, many coming to drink and read poetry with like-minded literary enthusiasts.

I wanted to get a pictureof the Poe Toaster – a photo showing him at the grave, without revealing his identity. I made a couple of attempts, once literally sitting hunched down in a snowdrift for most of the night.

Ultimately, I was scooped by a Life magazine photographer, who in 1990 captured the only image of the Poe Toaster in existence. The single grainy image shows the Toaster kneeling at the grave, his walking stick resting against Poe’s grave marker. The picture was acquired with $80,000 worth of equipment, including cemetery trees wired with motion detectors and infrared lights. According to Jerome, out of hundreds of frames of film shot that night, the Poe Toaster appeared in only one.

Try as I might to put the Poe Toaster out of my mind, pieces of the mystery continued to, well, haunt me. One of the biggest puzzles is how the Poe Toaster manages to get in and out of Westminster cemetery without being observed by the increasingly large and rowdy crowds that gather outside of the gates. It’s an illusion worthy of David Copperfield.

I’ve been in and around and all over Westminster countless times over the years, but in 2008 I was taking photos to accompany a story for Where magazine and discovered something that may be a key piece of the puzzle. I had an inkling of how the trick was done.

The next time Poe’s birthday came around, in January of 2009, my then-16-year-old son, Phillip, and I took turns keeping one particular spot under surveillance all night.

At around 2:45 a.m., a telltale shadow projected onto a wall indicated that something was afoot. Phillip went across the street to investigate. He arrived in time to see a man already within the cemetery property. The man turned and, with a finger to his lips, shushed Phil.

By the time I showed up, the man was gone. I looked up and down the sidewalk. Although people had been milling around, nobody else was in the immediate vicinity except Phil, me, and a photographer named Justin Paul Silva.

Within moments, the interloper re-emerged from the cemetery. At first he gestured with his fingers to his lips again, and then announced, “I can report that there is no cognac at the old grave.”

He was tall, with dark hair and a round fleshy face, in his late 20s or early 30s. He wore a long dark coat and gray leather gloves. The material of his trousers seemed to have an iridescent effect like sharkskin, shimmering with colors, although it may have been purplish velvet playing tricks under the sodium vapor streetlight.

As the man exited the cemetery, Silva knelt and took a picture – of me, Phillip and this fellow, whom I thought was an inebriated fence-jumping jerk.

“Dude,” I said to him, “that’s not cool.”

“Yes, that is not cool,” he replied. “I apologize.”

It wasn’t until later, on the way back home, that several things about the encounter didn’t make sense. Jerome had run off other fence-jumpers, but not the man we saw. The way our guy exited the cemetery either demonstrated extraordinary physical dexterity, or had been practiced. These and several other observations led us to suspect that the person we encountered was actually the Poe Toaster.

Months later, Phil and I met with Jerome at the Poe House and Museum. He confirmed that our observation was consistent with the Poe Toaster. Until that moment, Jerome didn’t know how the Toaster gained entrance to the cemetery, since the area he uses isn’t within view from inside Westminster Church.

We didn’t know it was the Poe Toaster, and the photo Silva took can’t be found. Par for the course.

At least my hunch was confirmed, and in 2010 I was ready- determined to top Life magazine and get the first video of the Poe Toaster.

I devised and built a 13-foot-tall digital periscope to peer over the cemetery wall, equipped with a wireless infrared “night vision” camera, that was disguised as a utility conduit attached to a streetlight to blend in with the urban landscape.

Amazingly, everything worked beautifully. Phil and I were able to record the signal from within my van parked at the curb, and captured the whole night on a netbook computer.

For the first time that anybody can remember, the Poe Toaster did not show up.

Was his tribute finished in 2009, the bicentennial of Poe’s birth? Was the Poe Toaster, as Jerome speculated, sidelined with a cold or hobbled with car trouble? Was there something I wasn’t supposed to capture on video? It is anybody's guess.

I set the rig up again this year, and once again captured impressively clear video of a dark, gloomy and empty cemetery.

I have been on the trail of the mysterious Poe Toaster  for 27 years, and now I have the sinking feeling that in one way or another I am responsible for the apparent end of the singularly unique tradition.

Perhaps, as some suggest, the Poe Toaster’s tribute has run its course. Maybe it was a victim of its own success, the crowds creating an ever-greater obstacle for the Poe Toaster to overcome.

Or it may be that legends, like diaphanous soap bubbles, are destroyed by examining them too closely.