Yesterday was Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday.
As you may know, beginning in 1949, someone has marked the occasion every year by leaving three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe’s grave by Baltimore’s Westminster Hall.
The midnight visit was a Baltimore tradition-except, last night, it didn’t happen. For the first time, no one came.
Some speculate that the visitor was David Franks, a Baltimore poet known as a prankster who died this year.
But he couldn’t have been the only one: he would only have been 11 months old at the time of the first visit.
The mystery abides. Poe would have loved it.
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