The Cooping of Edgar Allan Poe

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering dazed around the streets of downtown Baltimore, wearing clothes that didn't belong to him (perhaps a fetching bikini/ sarong combo). Poe was taken to hospital and four days later he was dead. With all medical records lost, and the author incoherent until his death, it was unclear how he went missing in the first place, how he turned up wearing a stranger's clothes, even what caused his death, until a conspiracy theory emerged, maybe a figment of imagination, or maybe a sinister truth of America's shady past.

The theory was that Poe was a victim of cooping, an old-school form of election fraud in which shady government characters would employ heavies (in nineteenth century Baltimore maybe a time-travelling Stringer Bell) to kidnap people from the streets, keep them bunged in cages, and ferry them around to different voting wards to rack up multiple votes for the same candidate. As fitting a fate as this sounds to befall a great eccentric such as Poe, it seems a strange way to get extra votes in a country that at the time was so corrupt that senators could trawl library records and pull the details of dead men for some extra support. And if you were going to coop somebody, you might not choose someone of such a ghoulishly terrifying appearance as Poe. It's not said whether he had his trademark moustache when he was found. In the theory's defence, there's no rational explanation for Poe going missing and turning up in borrowed clothes, other than that he may have been kidnapped and forced to perform nightly strips in Baltimore's gentlemen's clubs alongside a host of other moustachioed beauties, and after a few days, worn out, he was slipped into the nearest outfit and dropped on the streets.

Whether the cooping story is true or not, whenever I think of Poe I have the image of a scary wide-eyed horror writer locked in a cage and wearing a giant fake beak, fluffy downage glued all over his body. It makes The Tell-Tale Heart less scary if you imagine it being written by a giant man-chicken.