The Death of Edgar Allan Poe

On October 3 1849, the famed American horror and mystery author Edgar Allan Poe was found in a complete state of delirium – incoherent, dishevelled and wearing a stranger’s clothes. Four days later, he died in a hospital. His final words were “Lord, help my poor soul”.

The nature of Poe’s untimely demise at the age of 40 remains a mystery today, having baffled scholars for over 170 years. Dozens of possible causes of death have been suggested — from rabies to syphilis. Some suggest Poe was victimised in a form of voter fraud known as a cooping scheme, in which gangs working for corrupt politicians would sometimes beat unwilling bystanders to make them vote repeatedly for a certain candidate.

Others have suggested suicide. Poe’s contemporary, Charles Baudelaire — a French poet who also translated Poe’s works — suggested that the incident was “almost a suicide, a suicide prepared for a long time”.

At first, the suicide hypothesis may seem a touch dramatic. The idea of an author whose works were famously dark and gruesome being so disturbed as to take his own life almost sounds like a bad cliché. However, there may be something to this theory.

Poe’s personal life was a complex blend of factors that are reliably associated with an above-average risk for depression and death by suicide. He was male, often felt overwhelming hopelessness, had a history of alcohol and substance abuse, and repeatedly lost loved ones. Critically, Poe had made previous suicide attempts — having tried to overdose on laudanum a year before his death.

All possible causes of Poe’s death have, to date, been purely speculative. He received no autopsy, and no medical records of the event have survived (if they ever existed). Yet even in the absence of medical data, we are now able to examine Poe’s life and death through an objective lens.

Today, we have tools that can measure a person’s psychology from the words they use in everyday life. My colleagues and I have used text-analytic methods to better understand everything from the emotional underpinnings of political ideology to entrepreneurial personality profiles to the psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse.

Language and depression

The links between language, depression and suicidal behaviour are well established. Researchers consistently find that depressed people use language differently than their non-depressed peers.

People who are depressed tend to use more negative language. They also use language consistent with social withdrawal, including more self-referential words (“me” words) and fewer collective pronouns (“we” words). Depressed people also typically use more “working through” language – also called “cognitive processing” words – which includes “think”, “suppose” and “understand”.

Research has found that people who died by suicide can be identified by such language patterns. For example, they consistently use more “me” words and fewer “we” words. Importantly, these patterns tend to increase drastically as they get closer to suicide. Analyses of the language patterns in Marilyn Monroe’s Fragments and the diaries of explorer Henry Hellyer have been used to support the case for each of their suicides.

Building on this past research, our research team created an index of depression language. We then used it to assess whether Poe’s language showed signs of recurrent depression or feelings of suicide. We analysed over 400 stories, poems and personal letters written by Poe throughout his life. Accounting for his own unique linguistic patterns, we identified any prolonged spikes that signalled likely periods of major depression:

Throughout Poe’s life, nearly 20 texts scored abnormally high on our depression index, half of which were written in 1843, 1845 and 1849 — the year of his death. Poe’s depression scores were most pronounced in his personal letters, which are often the best reflection of one’s “authentic self”. They are largely absent from his professional writings. Notable exceptions include The Light-House, which scored extremely high on our depression index and was still a work in progress at the time of his death.

Looking deeper, we explored the events of Poe’s life during his most depressed periods. Surprisingly, 1843 and 1845 were two of his most successful years. Poe earned overnight fame for The Gold-Bug (1843) and The Raven (1845). Both were reprinted dozens of times to keep up with popular demand. Yet Poe’s relationship with his newfound fame was complicated. He earned practically nothing from his accomplishments. He deeply resented his own poverty, and fame likely betrayed his expectations.

Was it suicide?

From our analyses, we can conclude that Poe’s final months were indeed quite dark. This was primarily evident within his personal life. For example, Poe’s personal letter that scored highest on our depression index was one written to his mother-in-law in July 1849, where he wrote about the poor state of his health, finances and clothes.

Although our analyses reveal that Poe was spiralling into a depression at the end of his life, we can’t say for sure whether his death was a suicide. Considering his rather high suicide risk from a clinical perspective, paired with our objective analysis of his mental states, it remains a real possibility that he did kill himself. Following our analyses, the suicide hypothesis currently stands as the only cause of death that has objective evidence behind it.

We cannot definitively rule out other theories of Poe’s death. Given the less consistent results from his professional writings, and that suicide is often influenced by numerous factors simultaneously, a more complex picture emerges. At the very least, his mounting depression could have played some role in his judgement and decision-making leading up to his death. Ultimately, the nature of Poe’s death remains a mystery quite befitting the master of the macabre.

Depression and language: analysing Edgar Allan Poe’s writings to solve the mystery of his death. By Ryan Boyd. The Conversation ,  February  24, 2020.

It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious, and unable to move, but as Walker approached the him, he discovered something unexpected: the man was Edgar Allan Poe. Worried about the health of the addled poet, Walker stopped and asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore that might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker penned Snodgrass a letter asking for help.

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849

Dear Sir,

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,

JOS. W. WALKER

To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.

On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond, Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs. St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th- century, again—and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for "Reynolds"—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.

Poe's death—shrouded in mystery—seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works. He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas—a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia. But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise. "Maybe it’s fitting that since he invented the detective story," says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, "he left us with a real-life mystery."

1. Beating

In 1867, one of the first theories to deviate from either phrenitis or alcohol was published by biographer E. Oakes Smith in her article "Autobiographic Notes: Edgar Allan Poe." "At the instigation of a woman, " Smith writes, "who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed. . . ." Other accounts also mention "ruffians" who had beaten Poe senseless before his death. As Eugene Didier wrote in his 1872 article, "The Grave of Poe," that while in Baltimore, Poe ran into some friends from West Point, who prevailed upon him to join them for drinks. Poe, unable to handle liquor, became madly drunk after a single glass of champagne, after which he left his friends to wander the streets. In his drunken state, he "was robbed and beaten by ruffians, and left insensible in the street all night."

2. Cooping

Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping, a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities. Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state.

Around the late 1870s, Poe's biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), 'cooped,' stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die."

3. Alcohol

"A lot of the ideas that have come up over the years have centered around the fact that Poe couldn’t handle alcohol," says Semtner. "It has been documented that after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary."

Months before his death, Poe became a vocal member of the temperance movement, eschewing alcohol, which he'd struggled with all his life. Biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss recalls, in her biography "The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe," an event, toward the end of Poe's time in Richmond, that might be relevant to theorists that prefer a "death by drinking" demise for Poe. Poe had fallen ill in Richmond, and after making a somewhat miraculous recovery, was told by his attending physician that "another such attack would prove fatal." According to Weiss, Poe replied that "if people would not tempt him, he would not fall," suggesting that the first illness was brought on by a bout of drinking.

Those around Poe during his finals days seem convinced that the author did, indeed, fall into that temptation, drinking himself to death. As his close friend J. P. Kennedy wrote on October 10, 1849: "On Tuesday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at the hospital from the effects of a debauch. . . . He fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle, which it was said he had renounced some time ago. The consequence was fever, delirium, and madness, and in a few days a termination of his sad career in the hospital. Poor Poe! . . . A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched."

Though the theory that Poe's drinking lead to his death fails to explain his five-day disappearance, or his second-hand clothes on October 3, it was nonetheless a popular theory propagated by Snodgrass after Poe's death. Snodgrass, a member of the temperance movement, gave lectures across the country, blaming Poe's death on binge drinking. Modern science, however, has thrown a wrench into Snodgrasses talking points: samples of Poe's hair from after his death show low levels of lead, explains Semtner, which is an indication that Poe remained faithful to his vow of sobriety up until his demise.

4. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

In 1999, public health researcher Albert Donnay argued that Poe's death was a result of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas that was used for indoor lighting during the 19th century. Donnay took clippings of Poe's hair and tested them for certain heavy metals that would be able to reveal the presence of coal gas. The test was inconclusive, leading biographers and historians to largely discredit Donnay's theory.

5. Heavy Metal Poisoning

While Donnay's test didn't reveal levels of heavy metal consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning, the tests did reveal elevated levels of mercury in Poe's system months before his death. According to Semtner, Poe's mercury levels were most likely elevated as a result of a cholera epidemic he'd been exposed to in July of 1849, while in Philadelphia. Poe's doctor prescribed calomel, or mercury chloride. Mercury poisoning, Semtner says, could help explain some of Poe's hallucinations and delirium before his death. However, the levels of mercury found in Poe's hair, even at their highest, are still 30 times below the level consistent with mercury poisoning.

6. Rabies

In 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez was participating in a clinical pathologic conference where doctors are given patients, along with a list of symptoms, and instructed to diagnose and compare with other doctors as well as the written record. The symptoms of the anonymous patient E.P., "a writer from Richmond" were clear: E.P. had succumbed to rabies. According to E.P.'s supervising physician, Dr. J.J. Moran, E.P. had been admitted to a hospital due to "lethargy and confusion." Once admitted, E.P.'s condition began a rapid downward spiral: shortly, the patient was exhibiting delirium, visual hallucinations, wide variations in pulse rate and rapid, shallow breathing. Within four days—the median length of survival after the onset of serious rabies symptoms—E.P. was dead.

E.P., Benitez soon found out, wasn't just any author from Richmond. It was Poe whose death the Maryland cardiologist had diagnosed as a clear case of rabies, a fairly common virus in the 19th century. Running counter to any prevailing theories at the time, Benitez's diagnosis ran in the September 1996 issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. As Benitez pointed out in his article, without DNA evidence, it's impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that Poe succumbed to the rabies virus. There are a few kinks in the theory, including no evidence of hydrophobia (those afflicted with rabies develop a fear of water, Poe was reported to have been drinking water at the hospital until his death) nor any evidence of an animal bite (though some with rabies don't remember being bitten by an animal). Still, at the time of the article's publication, Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House Museum in Baltimore, agreed with Benitez's diagnosis. "This is the first time since Poe died that a medical person looked at Poe's death without any preconceived notions," Jerome told the Chicago Tribune in October of 1996. "If he knew it was Edgar Allan Poe, he'd think, 'Oh yeah, drugs, alcohol,' and that would influence his decision. Dr. Benitez had no agenda."

7. Brain Tumor

One of the most recent theories about Poe's death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard's entrance. Poe's coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe's coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe's body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe's skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe's brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe's brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe's death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn't be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

According to Semtner, Pearl isn't the only person to believe Poe suffered from a brain tumor: a New York physician once told Poe that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his adverse reactions to alcohol.

8. Flu

A far less sinister theory suggests that Poe merely succumbed to the flu—which might have turned into deadly pneumonia—on this deathbed. As Semtner explains, in the days leading up to Poe's departure from Richmond, the author visited a physician, complaining of illness. "His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia," says Semtner. "He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick." According to newspaper reports from the time, it was raining in Baltimore when Poe was there—which Semtner thinks could explain why Poe was found in clothes not his own. "The cold and the rain exasperated the flu he already had," says Semtner, "and maybe that eventually lead to pneumonia. The high fever might account for his hallucinations and his confusion."

9. Murder

In his 2000 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, author John Evangelist Walsh presents yet another theory about Poe's death: that Poe was murdered by the brothers of his wealthy fiancée, Elmira Shelton. Using evidence from newspapers, letters and memoirs, Walsh argues that Poe actually made it to Philadelphia, where he was ambushed by Shelton's three brothers, who warned Poe against marrying their sister. Frightened by the experience, Poe disguised himself in new clothes (accounting for, in Walsh's mind, his second-hand clothing) and hid in Philadelphia for nearly a week, before heading back to Richmond to marry Shelton. Shelton's brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, Walsh postulates, beat him, and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would send Poe into a deathly sickness. Walsh's theory has gained little traction among Poe historians—or book reviewers; Edwin J. Barton, in a review for the journal American Literature, called Walsh's story "only plausible, not wholly persuasive." "Midnight Dreary is interesting and entertaining," he concluded, "but its value to literary scholars is limited and oblique."

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For Semtner, however, none of the theories fully explain Poe's curious end. "I've never been completely convinced of any one theory, and I believe Poe's cause of death resulted from a combination of factors," he says. "His attending physician is our best source of evidence. If he recorded on the mortality schedule that Poe died of phrenitis, Poe was most likely suffering from encephalitis or meningitis, either of which might explain his symptoms."

The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. By Natasha Geiling.  Smithsonian Magazine , October 7, 2014. 

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” to explain why he wrote “The Raven” backwards. The poem tells the story of a man who, “once upon a midnight dreary,” while mourning his dead love, Lenore, answers a tapping at his chamber door, to find “Darkness there and nothing more.” He peers into the darkness, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” and meets a silence broken only by his own whispered word, “Lenore?” He closes the door. The tapping starts again. He flings open his shutter and in, “with many a flirt and flutter,” flies a raven, “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.”The bird speaks just one word: Nevermore. That word is the poem’s last, but it’s where Poe began. He started, he said, “at the end, where all works of art should begin,” and “first put pen to paper” at what became the third to last stanza:

“Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! Prophet still if bird or devil!

By that heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore,

Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

                 Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“The Philosophy of Composition” is a lovely little essay, but, as Poe himself admitted, it’s a bit of jiggery-pokery, too. Poe didn’t actually write “The Raven” backwards. The essay is as much an exercise as the poem itself, a contrivance, a flourish. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that. Nearly everything Poe wrote, including the spooky stories for which he’s most remembered, has this virtuosic, showy, lilting, and slightly wilting quality, like a peony just past bloom. Poe didn’t write “The Raven” to answer the exacting demands of a philosophic Art, or not entirely, anyway. He wrote it for the same reason he wrote tales like “The Gold-bug”: to stave off starvation. For a long while, Poe lived on bread and molasses; weeks before “The Gold-bug” was published, he was begging strangers on the street for fifty cents to buy something to eat. “‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run,’” Poe wrote a friend,“but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug,’ you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” The public that swallowed that bird and bug, Poe quite strenuously resented.You either love Poe or you don’t but, either way, unless you happen to be, say, Coleridge, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers is hard to think of. “The nose of a mob is its imagination,” Poe wrote, “By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

Poe died, under very mysterious circumstances, in October 1849. Drunk and delirious, he seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died three days later. He was forty years old.

“My whole existence has been the merest Romance,” Poe wrote, the year before his death,“in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought his perch. Poe’s biography really is a series of unfortunate events. But two of those events were global financial crises: the Panic of 1819 and the Panic of 1837, the pit and pendulum of the antebellum economy. Poe died at the end of a decade known as “the Hungry Forties,” and he wasn’t the only American to fall face down in the gutter during a seven-yearlong depression brought on by a credit collapse.9 He did not live out of time. He lived in hard times, dark times, up and down times. Indigence cast a shadow over everything Poe attempted. Poverty was his raven, tapping at the door, and it was Poe, not the bird, who uttered, helplessly, another rhyme for “Nevermore.” “I send you an original tale,” Poe once began a letter, and, at its end, added one line more: “P.S. I am poor.”

 Edgar Poe was born in Boston, on January 19, 1809, to a talented actress named Eliza Poe and her hapless husband, David, who deserted her. When Edgar was two, his mother died of consumption. The Poe orphans had little more to depend upon than the charity of strangers. The children were separated and Edgar landed in the home of a wealthy Richmond merchant named John Allan and his sickly, childless wife, Fanny. Allan, who ran a firm called the House of Ellis and Allan, never adopted the boy, and never loved him, either. Poe, for his part, took Allan’s name but never wanted it. (He signed letters, and published, as “Edgar A. Poe.”) In 1815, Allan moved his family to London, to take advantage of the booming British market for Virginia tobacco.11 Poe attended posh boarding schools. Then, during the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, banks failed, factories closed, and Allan’s business imploded. The House of Ellis and Allan fell. Allan, plagued with two hundred thousand dollars of debt, sailed back to Virginia. Poe turned poet. The earliest verses in his hand that survive were written when he was fifteen. “Last night with many cares and toils oppress’d / Weary . . . I laid me on a couch to rest.” Adolescent melancholy, and nothing more. But those lines are scribbled on a sheet of paper on which Allan had calculated, just above Poe’s scrawl, the compound interest on a debt.

In 1823, Poe fell in love with Jane Stannard, the unhinged mother of a school friend. A year later, Stannard died, insane. Poe spent much time at her graveside. “No more” became his favorite phrase. (Poe would later insist that mourning the death of a beautiful woman is, of all sorrows, the most poetical; he loved to play with names.)14 In 1825, Allan inherited a fortune from an uncle. Allan rose; Poe kept falling. At sixteen, Poe went to the University of Virginia where he drank and gambled and, in a matter of months, racked up debts totaling more than two thousand dollars. Allan refused to honor them, even though Poe was at some risk of finding himself in debtor’s prison. Poe ran off. There followed a series of huffy pronouncements and stormy departures; most ended in Poe begging Allan for money. “I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning,” Poe wrote. “I have nowhere to sleep at night, but roam about the Streets.” Allan was unmoved. Poe enlisted in the army and served for two years as Edgar A. Perry. In 1829, Fanny Allan died. Andrew Jackson was inaugurated. Poe, while awaiting a commission to West Point—having sent an application, and Allan’s fifty dollars, to Jackson’s secretary of war, John Eaton—submitted the manuscript for a book of poems to a publisher, who told him that he would publish it only if Poe would guarantee him against the loss. Allan refused to front the money. Poe moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his invalid grandmother; his aunt, Maria Clemm; his nine-yearold cousin, Virginia; and his brother, Henry, an alcoholic who was dying of consumption.

Jackson, meanwhile, refused to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, run by Nicholas Biddle. Biddle insisted on the need for federal regulation of paper currency. Jackson and his supporters, known as “gold-bugs,” wanted no paper money at all.15 (“Gold-bug” was also slang for millionaire.) Between 1830 and 1837, while Biddle and Jackson battled, 347 state-chartered banks opened across the country. They printed their own money. In 1832, the year Jackson vetoed the extension of the national bank’s charter, $59 million of paper bills were in circulation; four years later, that number had reached $140 million. All this paper was backed up by very little coin.16 At the end of Jackson’s two terms, American banks held $57 million in paper money and only $10.5 million in gold.

Poe, who was broke, didn’t need a bank. He could treasure up funds, he came to believe, in his own brain. He read as much as he could, charging books out of the Baltimore Library. “There are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest for ever,” he once wrote. “Knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold.”18 Poe may have thought his mind was a mint, but when his book of poems was finally published, it earned him nothing (exactly what all his collections of poetry earned). He sold one of Maria Clemm’s slaves. “I have tried to get the money for you from Mr. A a dozen times,” Poe wrote to one of his many creditors, “but he always shuffles me off.” And then he added, lying, “Mr. A is not very often sober.”

“I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth,” Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied so compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.) 21 In 1830, Poe finally made it to West Point, where he pulled pranks.“I cannot believe a word he writes,” Allan wrote on the back of yet another letter from his wayward charge. After Poe was court-martialed, Allan, who had since married a woman twenty years his junior, cut Poe off entirely. Poe went to New York but, unable to support himself by writing, he left the city within three months, returning to Baltimore, to live with Mrs. Clemm and little Virginia. He published his first story, “Metzengerstein.” He won a prize of fifty dollars from the Baltimore Weekly Visitor for “MS in a Bottle.” The editor, who met him, later wrote,“I found him a state of starvation.” In these straits, Poe wrote “Berenice,” a story about a man who disinters his dead lover and yanks out all her teeth—“the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice”—although this gets even grosser when, after he’s done it, he realizes she was still alive. It has been plausibly claimed that Poe wrote this story to make a very bad and cruel and long-winded joke about “bad taste.” Also: he was hungry.

John Allan died in 1834, a rich man. He left his vast estate, three plantations and two hundred slaves, to his second wife and their two children. He left Edgar A. Poe not a penny. The next year, Poe was hired as the editor of a new monthly magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, in Richmond. He was paid sixty dollars a month, a modest salary but for him, a fortune. In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm. She was thirteen; he was twenty-seven; he said she was twenty-one. He called her his “darling little wifey.” (“I was a child and she was a child, / In a kingdom by the sea; / But we loved with a love that was more than love— / I and my Annabel Lee.”) Poe held the job at the Messenger for only fifteen months. He boasted that, under his editorship, the magazine’s circulation grew from 700 to 5,500, but, as the Poe scholar Thomas Whalen has discovered, this, too, was a lie. The magazine had thirteen hundred subscribers when Poe started, and eighteen hundred when he left.

Poe lied about the Messenger’s circulation because he was attempting to forge a career in the world of magazine publishing during very troubled economic times. And, plainly, he was a very troubled man. Quarreling with the publisher of the Messenger, Poe left the magazine and, in February 1837, moved to New York. The New-Yorker, a weekly magazine edited by Rufus Griswold, welcomed him, praising Poe’s work at the Messenger. Harper & Brothers was just about to publish Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Unfortunately, Poe arrived in New York just in time for Panic of 1837. With all that paper money, speculators had gone wild; in the West, there had been a land grab and, in the East, a housing bubble; in New York, real estate values had risen 150 percent. When the crash came, in the last weeks of Jackson’s presidency, bankruptcies swept the nation. In New York, riots broke out as the swelling ranks of the city’s poor broke into food shops. “Down with the panic makers,” one newspaper warned, promising, “A bright sun will soon dispel the remaining darkness.” But the skies didn’t clear. In April, one New Yorker wrote in his diary, “Wall Street. The blackness of darkness still hangeth over it. Failure on failure.” By the fall of 1837, nine out of ten eastern factories had closed. Five hundred desperate New Yorkers turned up to answer an ad for twenty day laborers, to be paid at the truly measly wage of four dollars a month.

Then Pym failed. Poe’s publisher had tried to pass the novel off as an authentic travel journal even as its author left a trail of clues to his oh-so clever hoax—“pym” being, for instance, an anagram for “imp.” This didn’t go over especially well. One reviewer called the book “an impudent attempt at humbugging the public.” Poe did not write another novel. He moved to Philadelphia and wrote more stories. During the seven-year depression that followed the Panic, as Whalen has shown, Poe wrote 90 percent fewer poems and twice as many tales. He insisted that this was an aesthetic choice. The tale, he insisted, affords “the best prose opportunity for display of the highest talent.” Any piece of truly worthy writing must be able to be read at a sitting in order to achieve a single dramatic effect, the Nevermore-ish end with which, Poe said,every work of Art must begin. Maybe. But writing a book was exactly the kind of long term investment Poe could not afford to make, especially with so little prospect of return. In the 1820s, books cost, on average, two dollars; during the depression, that price fell to fifty cents.

Poe had already started writing gothic stories before the economy collapsed. But, as a man of no independent means whatsoever, he was especially vulnerable to market forces, and he knew it. (That’s probably why he worked so hard at appearing so otherworldly, so Romantic.) Poe tried to deduce, from careful study, what sold best. “The history of all Magazines,” he concluded, “shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice.” Gothic stories—supernatural tales set, often, in medieval ruins—had been popular for decades.They were also rather interesting to write on a rainy day, as Mary Shelley discovered, and great fun to parody, as Jane Austen found out(both Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey were published in 1818, when Poe was in England). The genre had since gone to seed; most of it, in Poe’s lifetime, was fairly rotten. It did sell well, though. A philosophy of composition? No, what Poe developed was a philosophy of the literary marketplace. He had little choice. “The general market for literary wares,” he reported, during one of the worst years of the depression, “is in a state of stagnation.”

The problem with Poe comes to this. He needed to turn his pen to profit—his mind was a mint!—but he also wanted to signal, as with Pym, that he was lowering himself. Look! See! I’m brilliant! Even at writing dreck! This kind of thing isn’t usually terribly charming. Once in a while, someone attempted to point this out. Early on, a fellow writer explained to Poe why the brothers Harper had declined to publish Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club:

They object that there is a degree of obscurity in their application, which will prevent ordinary readers from comprehending their drift, and consequently from enjoying the fine satire they convey. It requires a degree of familiarity with various kinds of knowledge which they do not possess, to enable them to relish the joke; the dish is too refined for them to banquet on.

Poe found this advice difficult to take. In “How to Write an Article for Blackwood Magazine,” a story he wrote in 1838, he tried telling the joke more broadly. An aspiring writer of gothics visits Blackwood’s editor, seeking instruction. “Your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib,” the editor advises, then offers some examples of recent successes:

Let me see. There was “The Dead Alive,” a capital thing!—the record of a gentleman’s sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body—full of tact, taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the “Confessions of an Opium eater”—fine, very fine!—glorious imagination—deep philosophy—acute speculation—plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote thepaper—but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper.

Still not so endearing.

Poe calibrated and recalibrated. Just how many ways can a writer insult his readers and get away with it? If you take Poe’s best horror stories at face value, they are terrifying, wonderfully, flawlessly, terrifying; they are masterpieces. They’re also dripping with contempt. “Half banter, half-satire,” is how Poe once described them.40 “The Tell-Tale Heart” reads more like three-quarters burlesque, especially when you think about the literary output of Juniper the baboon. A madman with super-acuity murders an old man and entombs the corpse beneath the floor. When the police arrive, the madman begins to hear the beating of his victim’s heart.

I felt that I must scream or die!—and now—again—hark!

louder! louder! louder! louder!—

      “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the

deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of

his hideous heart!”

Most of Poe’s stories have this campy, floozy Boo! business at the end Poe knew these were cheap tricks. No one plays them better than he does. It wasn’t to everyone’s taste.The first editor to read “The Tell-Tale Heart” rejected it, writing back,“If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles, he would be a most desirable correspondent.”

“The Humbug,” first published in The New Yorker, April 20, 2009, and collected in The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore. Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. 

The Humbug. By Jill Lepore. Pen America,  October 23, 2013

What Happened to Barbara Newhall Follett?

Thanksgiving Day  1948. Harold Huckins is deer-hunting at twilight.

He is on Pulsifer Hill in Holderness, New Hampshire, following the Durgin Brook where it skirts the Mount Prospect trail, when he comes to a shallow depression beside the water. Birches grow along its edge, and there is a pine tree down in the hollow.

The bones are lying in the open. Unburied, awash in pine needles and thatched with tree-roots. An animal, Huckins thinks. Then he sees the shoes.

Elsie Whittemore was 25 in the summer of 1936, mother to a 16-month-old daughter and pregnant with another child. Her husband Edward was employed as an ironworker and construction foreman. His work frequently took him away from home, and the young family had moved in with Edward’s parents in Plymouth to save money.

Little is known of Elsie or of her life in Plymouth. Newspaper reports describe her as “highly esteemed” in her community but also “of high character and proud […] quiet, never divulging her feelings or giving expression if in trouble.”

And she was in trouble, of a kind. In late 1935 or early 1936 she became pregnant again. In the summer of 1936, Edward was in Fairlee, Vermont, working on a bridge project, leaving Elsie at home to take care of their daughter. During this time she was said to be “slightly depressed” on account of her pregnancy and had taken to walking alone in the evening.

On June 29, 1936, just after supper, Elsie complained of indigestion and informed her in-laws Carl and Pearl Whittemore that she was going for a walk to settle her stomach. This was not unusual. It was a windy night and Elsie wore a brown overcoat and brown beret over a light summer dress. She took nothing with her — and she never came back.

Her in-laws grew concerned. Edward came down from Fairlee and the family spent the night of the 29th and the 30th retracing Elsie’s usual routes through town. In the morning, they reported Elsie’s absence to the Plymouth police, who initiated a massive search under the direction of Chief Felix McCarthy. Authorities scoured the woods outside of town while volunteers sounded the Pemigewasset River to its bottom.

Sniffer dogs from Northampton, Massachusetts, followed Elsie’s scent as far as the corner of Avery and Highland Streets where they lost the trail, leading some to speculate that she had accepted a ride. The police, however, treated this possibility “lightly.” Apparently, they did not suspect foul play, though Elsie’s stepmother was adamant in her belief that Elsie had been abducted.

Missing flyers were distributed across northern New England. Elsie was described as “slight” and with a protruding tooth on her upper right jaw. A truck driver learned of her disappearance, probably from the posters, and contacted the Plymouth Police Department.

This truck driver was passing through Hill, New Hampshire, on the morning of June 30 when he stopped to pick up a hitchhiker roughly matching Elsie’s description. The young woman was carrying a loaf of bread under her arm. She told him she was en route to New York and had walked through the night. At her request, he dropped her off in Franklin, near the New Hampshire Orphans Home.

Investigators traveled to Franklin, where they learned that the young hitchhiker had spent the entirety of June 30 at Webster Rock, a local landmark. She was just sitting there, they were told, doing nothing. A detective showed Elsie’s photo to boys from the orphanage, but they were unable to identify her, and authorities would later announce that they had determined the young hitchhiker was not, in fact, Elsie. On what basis isn’t known.

After that, there is nothing. Elsie’s daughter was raised in Plymouth by her paternal grandparents while Edward waited 12 years to divorce his wife. The decree, issued June 30, 1948, cites her “absence of three years together” — and, really, after June 29, 1936, absence is all we know of her.

Absence — and silence. No sound in that lonesome hollow save the rustle of blowing pine needles, the rush of running water.

In subsequent days, the scene is investigated by officers of the New Hampshire State Police and the Grafton County Sheriff’s Office. The woman’s remains have been scattered — either by animals or by the brook — but searchers are able to salvage various bones, including the left tibia and right radius as well as the bones of two feet, still in their shoes.

The shoes in question are moccasin-style “sport” oxfords, fashioned from natural leather, with rubber Du-Flex soles. In addition to the pocketbook, a woman’s purse is recovered and found to contain the upper portions of a cash-purse as well as a metal glasses case with a pair of “pretty, well-preserved” horn-rimmed spectacles inside.

Other items emerge out of the pine needles. An empty medicine bottle. A metal flask with built-in cup. A fragment of wool overcoating. The remnants of a straw belt. The neck of a canvas duffel bag and a distinctive compact enameled with the image of a bird in red, gold, green, and black.

In November 1948, Carl and Pearl Whittemore are still living in Plymouth with Elsie’s daughter, now 14. The distance from Pulsifer Hill to Pleasant Street in Plymouth is around 4.5 miles. Sgt. Currier of the New Hampshire State Police calls on the Whittemores at home. He brings with him the glasses case, compact, pocketbook, and purse, but the Whittemores are unable to identify any of them as belonging to Elsie. In fact, they are certain that they are not Elsie’s because she did not wear glasses and did not take her pocketbook with her the night she disappeared.

Before leaving the Whittemore house, Sgt. Currier requests a fabric sample for comparison with the overcoating material recovered from the hollow. Pearl Whittemore produces a square of brown herringbone tweed said to be “similar or identical” to that of Elsie’s brown overcoat, which Sgt. Currier takes with him.

Meanwhile the investigation continues. In 1948, forensic science is in its infancy and the state of New Hampshire does not employ a medical examiner. Drs. Alan R. Moritz and Michael Luongo of the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine are contacted to oversee the removal of the bones from the scene. They are then taken to Harvard for examination.

Moritz’s approach is remarkably thorough. From a soils expert he learns that the process of soil formation from pine needles is believed to take around three years. The roots recovered from the fabric are sectioned and found to exhibit five years’ growth. Based on this evidence, Dr. Moritz concludes that the bones have lain beside the brook for a period of at least eight years — i.e., since 1940 or before, consistent with the timeframe of Elsie Whittemore’s disappearance.

He measures the woman’s left tibia at 36.8 centimeters in length and the right radius at 23.5 centimeters. Using “Krogman’s Table,” Moritz is able to estimate the height of the individual in question at around 62–63 inches, matching Elsie’s height.

Hairs recovered from the hollow range in length from two to eight inches, suggesting a long bob like that worn by Elsie. In color, these hairs are described as “light brown” like Elsie’s but with a distinctive “reddish sheen” under strong light.

A lone incisor tooth shows signs of unusual wear, possibly related to dental malocclusion, and is confirmed to belong to an individual of age 25 or older.

Moritz also compares the two fabric samples under infrared light. The Pulsifer Hill sample is badly degraded but reveals a pattern of dark and light threads similar to the chevron pattern of the Whittemore sample. They do not appear to be identical, however, and the Whittemore sample likewise contains an admixture of viscose rayon whereas the Pulsifer Hill sample does not. Moritz attributes this possible discrepancy to the acidifying action of decomposing pine needles.

Another discrepancy proves more difficult to reconcile. Elsie Whittemore was a petite woman with a shoe size of 5 or 5 ½ shoe while the moccasin recovered from the scene is measured by Moritz at size 7, roughly 23.5 centimeters. Moritz documents this discrepancy but offers no explanation. A January 1949 article in The New Hampshire Sunday News, published in collaboration with the Grafton County Prosecutor’s Office, speculates that a combination of root-action and weathering may have stretched the rubber Du-Flex sole.

Finally, Moritz turns his attention to the flask and medicine bottle. The flask holds only water, but upon analysis, the empty medicine bottle is found to contain traces of an unidentified barbiturate, leading Moritz to conclude that the Holderness female most likely ended her own life in the hollow via an overdose. In a table summarizing his findings, Moritz suggests that the dead woman is far more likely to be Elsie Whittemore than any other missing woman in New Hampshire, citing height and clothing similarities, among other factors.

He reports his findings to the Grafton County Prosecutor Robert Jones, who shares these conclusions with the press on December 1, 1948. At this point, Jones announces that he is discontinuing the investigation. He contends that Elsie Whittemore left her in-laws’ house on Pleasant Street on June 29, 1936, and crossed over the Pemigewasset River into Holderness, where she died in the woods on Pulsifer Hill, a likely suicide.

The case is closed.

But Elsie’s story hasn’t ended, has no ending.

In the years that followed the 1948 discovery, the Whittemore family continued to contest the county’s findings, citing discrepancies such as shoe size as well as their own failure to identify items recovered from the scene.

Perhaps they were trying to protect Elsie’s daughter. Or, perhaps, they were right.

Moritz’s identification of Elsie Whittemore was strongly informed by his height estimate of 62–63 inches from Krogman’s Table using standard regression formulae. These formulae, however, were derived from 19th-century cadaver samples and, for this reason, are not appropriate to use when calculating stature for 20th-century individuals as they tend to underestimate height, especially in females.

The landmark 1952 stature estimation study by Mildred Trotter and Goldine C. Gleser, which appeared within five years of Moritz’s examination, provides a more accurate series of regression formulae. If we assume that Dr. Moritz’s bone-length measurements are correct, then we can derive an estimated height range for the Holderness female of between 64.799 and 67.681 inches, with the most likely range falling between 65.1 and 66.0 inches. These estimates are consistent with a taller individual than Elsie Whittemore (62 inches) and likewise in accordance with the larger shoe size observed.

Prior to Moritz’s examination, the New Hampshire State Police provided him with a list of missing women from Vermont and New Hampshire along with relevant identifying information such as age and descriptions of clothing. Moritz then reviewed and discounted every one of these individuals apart from Elsie Whittemore, whom he was unable to rule out.

But there were other missing women whom Moritz did not consider, including one with a lifelong connection to Holderness and the Squam Lake region who was reported missing in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1939.

Barbara Newhall Follett was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, in March 1914. Her parents were Helen and Wilson Follett, both writers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbara proved remarkably precocious. As a young girl, she studied birds and butterflies, invented a language, and taught herself to use a typewriter at the age of five. When she was just 12 years old, her first novel was published by Knopf to critical acclaim.

The House Without Windows (1927) details the adventures of a young girl named Eepersip who craves the freedom of the natural world. She runs away from home to explore the woods, the sea, and, finally, the mountains, until at the last she leaves behind even the constraints of her body to become “a spirit of nature.”

House is a strange and compelling work, as beguiling and poignant as a fairy tale by George MacDonald or Walter de la Mare, but possessed of a child’s raw imagination.

The book’s success coincided with the collapse of Barbara’s family life. In 1928, Wilson Follett abandoned his family and remarried. Barbara was devastated. In subsequent years, she accompanied her mother on an extended trip to the West Indies and the South Pacific and afterward to Los Angeles, where she was placed in the custody of a well-meaning family friend who sought to provide her with a stable home life following years of travel and turmoil.

It didn’t last. Probably it couldn’t.

Barbara ran away and was apprehended in San Francisco. The House Without Windows had made her into a minor celebrity and the newspapers were full of the scandal. Her parents, naturally, were horrified. Helen moved with Barbara to Washington, DC, and eventually to New York, where they worked together on an account of their experiences in the West Indies, published in 1932 under the title Magic Portholes.

Around this time Barbara wrote her final novel, which was never published. Lost Island is a distinctly melancholy adventure story inspired, principally, by her relationship with the sailor Edward Anderson, to whom the manuscript is dedicated. The novel follows the course of a love affair between a young woman and a sailor, from their first meeting aboard a schooner to their final parting in New York.

Much of Lost Island takes place on a lush Pacific island, where the couple find themselves marooned after a storm. They quickly become lovers, and the island becomes for them a kind of Eden. In time, they are rescued and return to New York, where their Edenic relationship collapses. In a climactic scene, the novel’s protagonist flees to the Maine woods and clings to a pine tree, holding fast to it as the world spins around her:

She held on and watched, and drifted more and more into the swinging illusion of the thing. She and the pine tree were falling through space together. It was a long fall, and an oddly companionable one. She laughed a little at that. Life was relentless, but there was nothing more it could take away from her.

If only that were true.

Barbara met Nickerson “Nick” Rogers in 1931. The two became friends, then lovers. In 1932, they hiked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Vermont as far as the Massachusetts border and not long afterward embarked together on an extended backpacking tour of Europe.

They were married in 1934. Barbara took her husband’s name, becoming Barbara Rogers, and settled down with Nick in the Boston area.

The sailor Edward Anderson was forgotten, left behind. His last surviving letter to Barbara is dated March 1935, not long after her marriage to Nick, but it isn’t known if she responded. Two years later, in 1937, Anderson was living in Seattle, recently married to a young woman named Willma Crayne. His mental state, however, was deteriorating, and in October of that year, while traveling by taxi through Yakima, he directed the cab driver to stop before taking off running into the woods. A search effort was launched and then abandoned after Willma received a telegram from Anderson originating in Chicago.

From Chicago, Anderson made his way to Boston, arriving in town on the Columbus Day Holiday, October 12. He booked a hotel room for a week in advance but only stayed a single night. His movements in Boston are not known. On October 16, he boarded the night boat for New York. At 8:30 that evening he accepted a final drink from the steward, then leapt unseen to his death in the waters of Buzzard Bay. A month later, his body washed up on Chapoquoit Island in Falmouth. His watch had stopped at 8:33 p.m.

Barbara, it seems, never learned of his death. Certainly she never wrote of it. In the fall of 1937 — perhaps even when Anderson was in Boston — Barbara was in New Hampshire with Nick in the region around Squam Lake encompassing Holderness, Plymouth, and surrounding towns. The area was one of great personal significance to Barbara. She had camped in Holderness on multiple occasions early in her relationship with Nick, including two weeks in 1932 prior to embarking on the Appalachian Trail, and another extended stay in 1934.

As Barbara writes:

Way back in October we were prowling around the region near Squam Lake in New Hampshire when our eyes lit covetously upon an old farmhouse on a hill — a farmhouse that was in quite reputable condition compared with most of the abandoned houses thereabouts. […] We were quick to cart up some old furniture from Nick’s family attic, and place same upon the floor of the farmhouse. Follett, over in Bradford Vermont, crashed through with the very important item of one kitchen range he was not using. So we set up house-keeping — week-ends. And, as easily as that, we had our much-longed-for, often-discussed Place in the Country. […] Of course the main idea in the back of our minds is a skiing headquarters. We haven’t yet been able to try it out as such, so far; but we shall be doing that soon now.

In the mid-1930s, Plymouth was among New England’s preeminent skiing destinations. Every weekend “ski trains” carried passengers from Boston and New York to the ski areas around Plymouth. These included Frontenac, Mount Pero, and Wendy’s Slope (all in Plymouth) as well as Huckins Hill in Holderness and the Mount Prospect trail.

Barbara never mentions the precise location of their “skiing headquarters,” but we know they continued to rent the property for at least one year, and perhaps longer, as surviving correspondence indicates they visited the house in the fall of 1938 to assess the damage from the Great New England Hurricane.

The next year, 1939, proved to be one of crisis. Barbara spent much of that summer in California, where she attended a dance workshop at Mills College. Nick did not accompany her. Later, he wrote to request a divorce. He had met another woman. Barbara was gutted — reminded, perhaps, of her parents’ own failed marriage. She cut short her trip and traveled home to Boston in an attempt to save her marriage.

It was no good. This, too, would be taken from her. The couple’s home life deteriorated, and Barbara began taking sleeping pills (or “dope,” as she calls it), which she obtained from a family friend. In a letter dated November 4, 1939, Barbara hints at suicidal thoughts.

On the surface things are terribly, terribly calm, and wrong — just as wrong as they can be. I am trying — we are both trying. I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one; but I would have to think that anyway, in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!

Barbara was in a tailspin. Matters came to a climax on Thursday, December 7, 1939. Early that evening after work, Barbara quarreled with Nick, then walked out of their Brookline apartment with $30 (around $500 in today’s money) and some shorthand notes from her work as a secretary.

Nick waited two weeks to report her as missing. Likely he was thinking of the 1929 incident in San Francisco because he specifically requested that there be no publicity — and there wasn’t. Five months later, in April 1940, Nick returned to the Brookline Police Department and asked them to publicize her case, but by then it was too late. No newspapers carried the story and Barbara Newhall Follett’s 1939 disappearance would not become widely known until the 1960s.

On April 22, 1940, Brookline PD dispatched the following teletype to eight states:

Brookline. 139 4-22-40 3:38PM McCracken

Missing from Brookline since Dec. 7, 1939, Barbara

Rogers, married, Age 26, 5-7, 125, fair complexion

black eyebrows, brown eyes, dark auburn hair worn in

a long bob, left shoulder slightly higher than right.

Occasionally wears horn rimmed glasses.

Like Elsie, Barbara was 25 when she vanished. She was around 67 inches in height — corresponding to revised stature estimates for the Holderness female — and wore horn-rimmed glasses like those that were recovered. In December 1939, she was depressed, perhaps contemplating suicide, and known to be using sleeping pills.

She was intimately familiar with the Squam Lake area and might have had access to a rented farmhouse nearby, assuming Nick and Barbara had continued to pay the rent after 1938. Regrettably, the precise location of the Rogers family’s “skiing headquarters” isn’t known, but Barbara’s letters suffice to create a vivid portrait of an abandoned hilltop farmhouse “sitting idle” on the land of “a prosperous farmer” who lived nearby.

In a 1937 letter, she details how they “rounded him up [the landowner] and persuaded him to rent it to us [Barbara and Nick] on the incredible and absurd basis of $2.50 a month.” Later, she adds, “Don’t mention this around — it’s a secret (the amount, I mean).”

The White House, still standing today, is a small farmhouse on the northern side of Pulsifer Hill around half a mile from the Mount Prospect Trail. It was formerly owned by the White family but passed into the possession of the Pulsifer family in 1916.

The Pulsifers were an old and prosperous farming family who owned several farms and farmhouses on Pulsifer Hill. They had no need of the White House and rented it out to various families and individuals during the period of roughly 1920 to 1968.

In 1930, the White House was rented by one Milford Morgan at the rate of $5 per month, according to the 1930 federal census. The 1940 census does not include the White House, suggesting that it was vacant at that time. In 1940, Milford Morgan is given as the owner of a different farm in Holderness where he had been resident since at least 1935. Presumably, then, he gave up the lease of the White House at some point between 1930 and 1935, potentially leaving the house abandoned but in “reputable condition” and, indeed, “sitting idle” on the Pulsifers’ property.

In 1937, the patriarch of the family lived nearby, much as Barbara describes, and might have been persuaded to rent out the house at the lower rate of $2.50 per month — i.e., half the rate paid by Milford Morgan. As Morgan still lived locally, it is easy to understand why Nick and Barbara might have been discouraged from telling anyone about their “incredible and absurd” rent.

And the rent would remain low long after 1939. We know this because — bizarrely — Elsie Whittemore’s in-laws began renting the White House as a second home and weekend getaway either shortly before or shortly after the discovery of human remains on Pulsifer Hill.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Carl and Pearl Whittemore arranged for rental of the house at the rate of $25 per year (or $2.08 per month). They continued to rent the property for another 20 years until 1968, when the house was sold.

Elsie Whittemore’s sister-in-law Eunice K. Halfmann writes fondly of the White House in her 1985 memoir Clothespins and Calendars, recalling: “There was no plumbing or electricity. The sagging floors creaked and the windows were crooked and drafty, but it had a nice fireplace in the living room and an old cookstove in the kitchen near the table. […] The place had charm!”

Elsie is mentioned only briefly in Halfmann’s account:

During the days of the Great Depression my brother Edward was married to Elsie Lufkin. […] [M]oney was scarce and jobs were few, so PJW [Pearl Johnson Whittemore] and my father took them into their home while my brother worked for a construction company around the area. The poem “Patchwork,” which my mother [Pearl] wrote, tells the story of Elsie’s disappearance more gently than I can …

Our son’s wife went to walk

One windy night.

We cannot find her anywhere.

She left her little daughter in our care.

I made the baby’s ‘jamas longer yesterday.

We’ll warm her with our love as well.

It is unclear what connection, if any, Elsie Whittemore might have had to Pulsifer Hill, or what might have caused her to walk the four to five miles hard uphill from Plymouth to end her life beside the Durgin Brook. Nonetheless, investigators in 1948 were firm in their belief that this is what happened.

And their case is not without merit. While evidence such as shoe size and bone length would seem to argue against Elsie Whittemore as the Holderness female, there is a correspondence between the clothes in which Elsie disappeared and the evidence recovered from the hollow.

The night she vanished, Elsie was said to be wearing low oxford shoes, a dress, a brown overcoat, and a brown beret. The following items of fabric were found beside the brook: a scrap of wool top-coating, fragments of coarse cotton possibly from a dress, and the remnants of a machine-knit garment believed to be from a sweater, gloves, or a hat.

Elsie did not take her pocketbook with her when she left the Whittemore residence, but she might easily have secreted some of her belongings outside the house — perhaps in the duffle bag that was recovered at the scene. The Whittemores could not identify the purse or compact, but these could have been older items or new: Elsie’s in-laws need not have seen them before. Likewise, Elsie might even have “once wor[n] glasses,” as the 1949 New Hampshire Sunday News article attests, though without attribution.

Like Barbara, Elsie was known to be depressed at the time of her disappearance, and in the 1930s, barbiturates were prescribed for all manner of ailments, including depression.

Numerous newspaper reports inform us that Elsie was “soon to become a mother for the second time” or “soon again to become a mother.” From this we might infer she was in the latter stages of pregnancy, though no evidence of a fetus or infant was recovered from Pulsifer Hill.

But, of course, this doesn’t mean the evidence was never there since the body was slowly taken to pieces, carried off by scavengers or swept away by the Durgin Brook. Ultimately, we can only guess at what was lost. Eighty-two years since her vanishing and Elsie remains as un-divulging as in life, as inexpressive as the absence she left.

With Barbara, it is different: we have her writing, not only her novels but also her letters, which were preserved by her mother and donated to Columbia University. In one letter, dated June 16, 1930, Barbara reflects on her time aboard sailing ships in the Pacific:

I suppose it will be years before I go to sea again, and I may never even see that schooner. I suppose that I spent about the happiest month of my life during that sea-trip in her. […] Life was beautiful then. This doesn’t seem like the same era. Here the beauty consists of great stone towers against the sunset — sublime, symbolic, but away above the plane of us poor ants that hustle along the swarming streets at their feet, so engrossed in ourselves that we never even see a fellow-mortal, but bump into him with a bang, and then hurry and hurry on.

Oh, my God, my God! It makes one’s heart and soul suffer — it stabs them to the quick.

Oh, for wings, for wings! Wings!

Her anguish is palpable. So too her yearning for freedom — wings! — an escape like Eepersip’s.

Picture it this way.

On December 7, 1939, Barbara leaves her apartment in Brookline and makes her way by streetcar to Boston’s North Station, where she boards a B&M train. She reaches Plymouth around midnight, then crosses over the Pemigewasset River into Holderness. It is over four miles uphill to the crest of Pulsifer Hill, but Barbara is an avid outdoorswoman: the climb would pose no difficulty.

Perhaps she stops at their rented farmhouse. Or, again, perhaps not. She is making for the woods, the mountains. In the dead of night, with light snowfall in the air and no one about, Barbara passes into the trees off the Mount Prospect trail. She follows the brook until she finds a shallow depression, a place of vanishing. She swallows the overdose she has prepared and clings to the pine tree as the world drops away.

From Lost Island: “She looked straight up at the sky through surges of silver-green […] and then felt the swift sensation that she, her pine tree, and all the woods, all the world, were falling slantingly.”

She sinks into pine needles, into the black earth. Years pass, and animals scavenge her body. Tree roots pierce her clothes and shoes. She is scattered down the hillside and joined with it: a spirit of nature, a part of the hills. If this is her ending, then it is beautiful and terrible, but we may never know if this is, in fact, what happened.

Because the Holderness female vanished not once but twice. First in 1936 (or in 1939) and then again in 1948 after her remains were discovered.

Prosecutor Jones concluded his investigation on December 1, 1948. The case file was lost or discarded. For unknown reasons, a New Hampshire death record was never issued, either in Elsie’s name or in association with an unidentified person. The bones presumably were returned to the State Police Crime Laboratory, but it is unclear what happened next or if they were ever released for burial.

In the absence of a definitive identification, the bones might have remained in the custody of the State Police or the Grafton County Sheriff’s Office and/or Medical Referee. New Hampshire did not have a medical examiner’s office at the time, but files or records associated with the Crime Laboratory and/or the Medical Referee would likely have been turned over to the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) at its inception. However, as of 2018, New Hampshire’s OCME has no record of these remains in their storage files.

It is also possible that the bones were released for burial. A New Hampshire statute in effect in 1948 stipulates that unidentified or unclaimed remains should be returned for burial to the County Commissioner, the town’s Overseer of the Poor, or to Dartmouth College for research purposes. Unfortunately it would seem that this protocol was not followed, as inquiries in Holderness, Plymouth, Concord, and Hanover — as well as Grafton County — have failed to turn up any record of death or burial associated with these remains.

The bones, simply, are gone — and a woman’s name along with them. Whether she was Elsie or Barbara, she is likely lost to us forever, “invisible to all mortals,” as Barbara writes of Eepersip, “save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see.”

And, really, there is little enough to see. After 70 years, we have only photographs.

A woman’s bones, arranged upon a table. Tibia, fibula, radius. Ribs and phalanges. Two fragments of wool overcoating with similar patterns. A woman’s oxford shoe, size 7. A plain brown medicine bottle.

A photograph from the Manchester Union Leader dated November 29, 1948, shows a woman’s purse and pocketbook, glasses case and spectacles. The enamel compact is pictured as well, but its design cannot be made out.

Elsie Whittemore, aged 10 or 11. She smiles broadly, revealing a jutting canine tooth at upper right. A portrait of her in adulthood shows a petite woman with bobbed hair. Her lips are closed, perhaps to hide her teeth, and she is wearing light-colored shoes and a long dress, a straw belt.

Barbara Newhall Follett, aged 12. Hiking in the White Mountains or hunched over a typewriter. Aged 16 in low oxfords, her red-brown hair newly bobbed. Or 22 and smiling, wearing a blouse and straw belt. In her last known photograph, Barbara is 25 years old, her hair worn in a long bob. Her expression is imperious, even defiant. She does not look at the camera but rather beyond it, as though to a place we cannot see, and where we cannot follow.

A Place of Vanishing: Barbara Newhall Follett and the Woman in the Woods. By Daniel Mills.

Los Angeles Review of Books , April 5 , 2019. 

“A small back door opened into the lovely woods at the back of the house. Quickly Eepersip made her way out into the open; and everything looked twice as lovely as before. How light it was, with all the world a window, instead of those silly little peep-holes fringed about! How much more glowing everything was! Oh, nothing in a house could compare with the world of light that Eepersip lived in!”

At the age of four, Barbara Newhall Follett pestered her father Wilson to “tell her a story” about his typewriter. By five, Barbara was typing letters and poetry on the Corona without assistance. By six, she completed her first 4,500-word short story. By eight, she had started writing her first full-length novel. At 12, The House Without Windows, and Eepersip’s Life There, would be published to widespread critical acclaim.

At age 25, Follett—once famed as a child genius poised to become the next great American novelist—walked out of her apartment with a notebook in hand and $30 in her pocket. She was never heard from again.

Follett was born March 4, 1914 in Hanover, New Hampshire, to parents Helen—a writer—and father Wilson, a scholar who taught at Dartmouth College and Brown University before taking an editorial position with the Yale University Press.

In a household where typewriters took the place of crucifixes and books the place of formal curriculum, Follett thrived in being schooled at home and socialized amongst adults. Her literary talents blossomed bright and early—according to her mother’s written accounts, Follett’s “love for books” began when she was a year old and became a “passion” by three and a half. Typewritten correspondence became part of her curriculum by age five and, today, letters she wrote to friends and family—mostly adults many years her senior—offer insight into Follett’s deep love of the natural world, talent for diction, and disinterest in same-aged playmates. Follett’s letters and early poetry evolved to include long swarths of prose and, at just six years old, Follett completed the short story The Life of the Spinning-Wheel, the Rocking Horse, and the Rabbit.

Follett's main inspiration was the natural world around her. A turning point in her young career came with her first visit to Lake Sunapee when she was eight—the same year, Barbara began writing the story of Eepersip, a young girl who runs away from her family to live in the wild. She gave the manuscript to her mother as a gift on her ninth birthday. Later that year, Barbara’s completed manuscript—along with the rest of the family’s possessions—were lost in a house fire. Lucky to have survived the blaze and yet unable to shake Eepersip, Barbara returned to the story in 1924. The House Without Windows, and Eepersip’s Life There was published by Alfred A. Knopf—at that time, her father’s employer—as Follett’s debut novel on January 21, 1927. In her own words:

“It is about a little girl named Eepersip who lived on top of a mountain, Mount Varcrobis, and was so lonely that she went away to live wild. She talked to the animals, and led a sweet lovely life with them—just the kind of life that I should like to lead.”

The book received widespread acclaim, with a critic in the The Saturday Review calling her writing “unbearably beautiful” and another in the New York Times calling it a “remarkable little book.” Barbara paid little attention to the praise, but did respond to a review in which a book reviewer pondered what price Barbara might pay later for her “big days” at the typewriter. Barbara’s written response read:

“You write positively as if all children were alike, as if all children desired the same surroundings, as if they all liked the same things. Children are as different from each other as grown-up people; they are even more insistent in their variety of tastes; and a great deal more hurt when things do not go as they like. [...] The book is an expression of joy—no more—and to a careful person it should be an expression of my home-life as well.”

Later that year, Barbara—supervised by a family friend named George Bryan—would embark on a 10-day excursion aboard the Frederick H. schooner to Nova Scotia; The Voyage of the Norman D., published upon her return in 1928, is a partial memoir inspired by the trip to sea. With two critical darlings under her belt by the age of 14, Barbara was considered a child prodigy and poised to be one of the next great American writers—but rough waters were ahead, as Barbara soon learned that her father was leaving the family for his employer’s young secretary, Margaret Whipple. Heartbroken, Barbara wrote to her her father:

   

“Such things do not reconcile themselves. For instance, if you now finally and determinedly drop all that, leave it behind, kick it out of the way, then how am I to believe that they actually and truly meant all to you that they seemed to at the time?”

Betrayed by the father she’d once idolized, Follett returned to the sea—this time, convincing her mother to sail with her to West Indies. The pair left in September 1928 and sailed for six months, but it would prove to be a trying time—both mother and daughter struggled to sell work and weren’t receiving money from Wilson, who was fired from his editing position after his affair came to light. Additionally, there was tension between mother and daughter; Helen wrote to friends that Barbara had become “difficult” and had “gone to some kind of pieces, emotional, and physical” in the wake of losing the father she “worshipped.” According to letters, the conflict came to a head in Tahiti, when Barbara had what Helen called a “moral break down” and “turned against” her mother; perhaps related to an unchaperoned trip taken with Captain Andrew Burt, during which Barbara wrote she “picked up a new and glorious acquaintance—the devil.”

In 1929, mother and daughter returned to the mainland; agreeing time apart was necessary. The younger Follett stayed with friends in Altadena, where she was placed in psychiatric care and enrolled in junior college. But she subsequently fled to San Francisco—eventually making news after she was captured by police and refused to return to a guardian. She was quoted in a newspaper:

“I came away because I felt I had to have my freedom. I felt utterly suppressed, almost frantic, under the plans that had been made for me. I did not want to enter college nor live the standardized existence. I have never been to school in my life. Perhaps I might like it—I do not know. But this I know: I do not want to like it.”

Barbara would return to the East Coast in 1930, taking work as a typist, penning book synopses for Fox, and beginning a third novel, Lost Island, while living in New York. But she would find her way back to the lush landscapes of the Northeast and, while in Vermont over the summer of 1931, met an outdoorsman named Nickerson Rogers, who she would eventually marry. In the following years, the couple sailed to Europe, married in Boston, and began taking interpretive dance classes.

But come 1939, things would take a turn for the worse—during a trip to the west coast, Follett received a letter from her husband in which he expressed unhappiness in the marriage and a desire to separate. In a letter from this time, Barbara noted that things were more dire than she had initially thought, as she’d discovered that there was another woman. As with all things Follett loved in her life, she was determined not to lose Rogers and committed herself to what she expected to be “long, patient process” of reconciliation. From her letters, it appears that the couple attempted to make it work—but soon, things would appear irreconcilable. According to the last surviving letter written by Barbara:

“In my last letter I told you things were going well, and I thought they were. They continued to go well for a time—at least I thought so, and I was happy, and decided that the worst part of the ordeal was over. But that was too easy. No such luck! I don’t know what to say now. On the surface things are terribly, terribly calm, and wrong—just as wrong as they can be. I am trying—we are both trying. I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one; but I would have to think that anyway, in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!”

  

Barbara left her apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts with $30 in her pocket and a notebook in hand on the evening of December 7, 1939.

She was never heard from again.

Suspicions surrounded her husband, who waited two weeks to report her disappearance to police and four months to request a missing persons bulletin, claiming he was waiting for her to return. When the bulletin was released, Follett was listed under her married name—thus, the connection to the former child prodigy was not made until many years later. In fact, Follett's own mother did not discover her daughter was missing until the mid-1940s; letters she subsequently sent to former acquaintances, including Captain Andrew Burt, yielded no leads. The case of the missing writer went cold—and with no evidence of foul play the mystery endures: was Barbara murdered? Did she escape to another location, reinvent herself, and live another life without ever telling her family or friends? Or, perhaps, was the draw of Eepersip’s House Without Windows—the natural world, free from cheating husbands and fathers—more than she could resist?

I spoke to Barbara Newhall Follett’s half-nephew Stefan Cooke via email. He revealed that his mother—Barbara’s half-sister Jane—thought she might have made her way from Brookline to the White Mountains, and frozen to death by choice. He has another theory: “I think Barbara chucked everything to start a new life under a new identity,” he wrote. “She'd run away before from untenable circumstances,” he continued, I just don't think Barbara could have been depressed enough at 25 to commit suicide.”

Barbara’s 104th birthday would have been (or maybe is) this week. Her physical letters and papers are archived in a collection at Columbia University, while Cooke—the closest family member to Barbara still alive—has made her work publicly available on Farksolia.org and in anthology published in 2015, Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters.

Though we may never know what became of her, through her work, Barbara Newhall Follett lives on.

The Child Genius Poised to Become a Great Novelist—But Then She Disappeared.  By Nile Cappello. Vice , March 12 , 2018.

Flowers have faded,

Butterfly wings are weary,

And far off is the chanting of the eternal sea.

—Barbara Newhall Follett, The House Without Windows (1927)

Meet Barbara. Not exactly your average American kid. Barbara is extremely gifted. She is intelligent and ambitious. A prodigy. Very much in awe of nature, and in love with writing.

In 1927, at the incredibly young age of twelve, Barbara published her first novel to great critical acclaim. Two years later, her second novel followed. Then things changed. In spite of her literary success, she suffered several personal blows and reportedly became depressed.

In December 1939, at the age of twenty-five, Barbara walked out of her Brookline apartment, never to be seen again.

Like so many of us, I enjoy a great mystery tremendously, and although Barbara’s life story reads as if Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier brainstormed to dream up a fantastic new character and write a compelling tale of success, lost ideals and broken dreams, Barbara was real.

I write “was,” but to this day nobody is certain of what happened to the author and if she perhaps fled to start a brand new life, is still alive and over a hundred years old. The idea of ‘escape’ is a powerful one. I think all of us have at one time or another, even for the briefest of moments, considered running off and starting our lives over. A clean slate. Doing it all again, but better. If only we could…

The element of escape is what makes disappearances not only tragic but also exciting, even if we don’t want to admit it. There are famous cases of authors who, in their own particular way, disappeared: Agatha Christie “staged” her own escape, only to be found by her husband in a health spa two weeks later. Virginia Woolf escaped in the most tragic and definitive way by walking into the river and taking her own life.

But back to Barbara Newhall Follett: the daughter of critic and editor Wilson Follett and children’s writer Helen Thomas Follett, she was home-schooled and probably encouraged by her parents to write from an early age on. Especially Wilson, her father, had a particular influence on her ambitions as an author.

One thing is certain: Barbara had a vivid imagination and those who lived with were required to take her fantasies very seriously. “Don’t go sit there, daddy,” Barbara would say when her father took a seat at the dinner table. “That’s where Beethoven sits!”

Barbara invented her own language: Farksoo. She was in awe of words and books, but perhaps even more so of nature. Her debut novel The House Without Windows, the title being a metaphor to nature itself, is an incredibly sensitive ode to the beauty and inspiration of the meadows, the sea, and the mountains. Barbara lived in a village and loved to play in the woods and on the river and to run off to hide between the trees where she’d act out her stories.

Encouraged and guided by her father, she wrote most of her debut novel when she was nine. Unfortunately, the manuscript was destroyed in a domestic fire. Barbara rewrote it and three years the novel was published with Knopf. The debut received much critical acclaim but Barbara especially reveled in the pride her father took in her accomplishments.

Later that year, Barbara left on a ten-day-excursion aboard a schooner to Nova Scotia and when she returned she had finished her second novel: part fiction, part travel memoir of her time at sea. The Voyage of the Norman D. was published immediately and, again, received critical praise.

However, that same year life took a turn for the worse. Barbara’s father left her mother for another woman. Barbara was shattered and heartbroken. In long letters she begged her ‘dear daddy-dog’ to come back. He didn’t.

At the age of sixteen, Barbara moved to a small New York apartment with her mother. They didn’t receive any money from Barbara’s father and the Great Depression made circumstances even more difficult. Barbara found a job as a secretary. She had little to no contact with her father, and though she kept on writing, she wasn’t able to get her subsequent manuscripts published. This rejection caused her to ponder the painful question: “Can I do it without him?”

In the summer of 1931, Barbara fell in love with Nickerson Rogers, an outdoorsman who shared her deep love for nature and eventually married him. After a few happy years in which they backpacked through Europe, Barbara started to suspect that “her” Nick might be cheating on her. She became depressed, stopped writing, withdrew from contact with family and friends. Then, on a cold December day, reportedly after a fight with her husband, she left their apartment and vanished without a trace.

Today, Barbara’s mysterious disappearance is still surrounded by questions. Why would a promising writer suddenly walk out on her life and never return? If she willingly ran away, why did she take nothing but thirty dollars and a notebook with her? And why did her husband Nick wait for two weeks until he called the police?

Here’s another: when Nick requested a missing persons bulletin four months after her disappearance, why did he list it under Barbara’s married name ‘Rogers’ causing the author’s disappearance to go by unnoticed by the media? It wasn’t until two decades later, in 1966, the press picked up on the story of the lost American prodigy.

Fascinated by Barbara, I’ve tried to bring some of her back to life in my debut novel. To this day, I’m continuing my research into her mysterious case, looking into files on her disappearance and assembling all the documents that still exist, in an effort to get to the bottom of this captivating mystery.

Did the betrayal by the two most important men in her life bring Barbara Newhall Follett down? Did a violent act or accident occur in the apartment on that tragic evening? Or was it her own doing and did Barbara finally act on a dream she had all along, which she described in her debut novel through the eyes of Eepersip: “a young girl who runs away from her family to live in the wild”?

If she’s alive, Barbara would be 104. She could have built that beautiful house deep in the woods she dreamed of. However, I believe she isn’t and she didn’t. For her sake, I’ll keep digging. And I do hope one day I’ll be able to tell you what truly happened to Barbara on that mysterious December night.

What Happened to Barbara Newhall Follett?  By Sarah Meuleman. Crimereads,  November 1, 2018.