In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe, the tortured literary maestro was reportedly laid to rest at Westminster Church and Cemetery in West Baltimore where he remains for eternity.
Or maybe not.
Sam Porpora, the colorful 93-year-old Catonsville resident and one-time curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House, says the famous writer’s body was snatched from the grave and sold to the University of Maryland School of Medicine for research purposes.
The medical school sits within the shadow of the cemetery at N. Greene and W. Fayette Streets.
“This is a helluva story,” Porpora said, “if it’s handled properly…. Body-snatching was big business and paid well. And the medical school was just a few feet away. The upper windows look down on the cemetery. Twenty dollars for a body? That was a lot of money in those days.”
Not so fast, countered Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House, who Porpora met decades ago while a teenaged Jerome worked as a tour guide at the Poe House.
“This story about Poe’s grave being robbed by body-snatchers has been around for a long time. It’s an interesting story. It’s got goose bumps written all over it, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that body-snatchers robbed the grave of Edgar Allan Poe.”
Jerome said it was legal for doctors and students to dissect cadavers, “without fear of being arrested or burned out of the medical hall.” When Poe’s body was moved in 1975, Jerome added, “there was a skeleton in the coffin. Of course, people say they moved the wrong body. There’s no evidence of that either.”
Robert J. Brugger, a senior editor at The Johns Hopkins University Press and noted authority on Maryland history, said the story “is probably impossible to confirm or deny. There was such a practice as body-snatching, he said, “but I’m not sure anybody would have dug up an identified grave for the medical school, the easiest source being those of paupers, unknowns.”
But the irascible Porpora is sticking to his version. “A caretaker named George W. Spence witnessed activity at Poe’s grave the evening of his burial,” Porpora said with childlike wonder. “A few men had exhumed Poe and told Spence they were taking him to France. Hello! What else would you expect a body-snatcher to say?” Poe’s poems and stories, he observed, drew a wider audience in France than in the United States.
Another Poe player who exhibited an open mind was Larry Pitrof, director of the Medical Alumni Association of the University of Maryland, Inc., who says, “we would never dismiss the possibility that it happened. His death occurred during the height of body snatching for our school, as organized medicine was just beginning to gain public acceptance, yet people weren’t donating their bodies to science upon death.”
Maryland’s laws regarding body snatching, he emphasized, were more liberal than in other states. “For some states, penalties ranged from whippings and imprisonment to even death by hanging; yet in Maryland, those caught simply paid a fine,” Pitrof says. “So, as a result, we were shipping bodies in barrels to schools as far north as Maine. Most of the bodies were retrieved from the potter’s field.”
Dustin Meeker, a school resources coordinator for the Maryland Historical Society says Poe’s body was indeed snatched.
“But not by unscrupulous 19th-century medical students as Sam Porpora presumes,” but by a band of “unemployed literary critics, bohemian types and tour guides sporting ye olde Colonial garb,” he says.
“Philadelphia’s notoriously inaccurate tour guides now explain that Poe was buried in Christ Church burial ground next to Ben Franklin because Poe was Franklin’s illegitimate son,” he said
