Edgar Allan Poe is the father of both detective stories and weird fiction.  He also dabbled in cryptography.  In the real world, he died in 1849 in Baltimore. He died strangely: delirious, not wearing his own clothes, and muttering about someone named “Reynolds.”  His end has never been satisfactorily explained, and theories include sickness, madness, intoxication, and even a rough kind of electoral fraud called “cooping,” in which unwilling voters were forced multiple times through the booths, and beaten, or even killed, if they failed to cooperate.

Eliza R. Snow was almost certainly not to blame.

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