The Absent Poe Toaster

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 19, 2010, 2:58 pm
‘Poe Toaster’ Is a No-Show
By RANDY KENNEDY

“There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his 1845 short story “The Man of the Crowd.”

And since 1949 one such secret has attended Poe’s final resting place in Baltimore at the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, where a black-clad figure has shown up annually early on the morning of Jan. 19, the author’s birthday, to raise a Cognac toast to his grave and deposit three red roses, along with the remnants of the Cognac bottle.

But the visitor — whose identity, or identities, has never been revealed, despite some claims to the contrary over the years — failed to show up this year for the first time, ending a strange crepuscular tradition and disappointing a crowd of more than 30 people who forfeited a good night’s sleep to witness the visitation.

“I was very annoyed,” Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House, told The Baltimore Sun. “I’ve been doing this since 1977, and there was no indication he wasn’t going to show up.”

Some conjectured that the Poe Toaster, as the visitor has come to be known, might have just had the flu or car trouble. But Mr. Jerome spoke with Poe-ian air of finality. Last year was the bicentennial of Poe’s birthday, he said. “And if it was going to end,” he said, “that would be the perfect time to end it.”