tribute’s end
After more than six consecutive decades, Baltimore’s mysterious Poe Toaster appears to have hung up his cloak. I first wrote about the annual graveyard visitor back in 2009:
For years now, this day and the occasion of Poe’s birth have found tribute in a fittingly peculiar and elusive tradition. Each year, as the clock tower strikes midnight over the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, a mysterious figure cloaked in black, face hooded, carrying a silver-headed cane approaches the church yard and enters the burial ground.
According to witnesses, the figure wanders the lonesome rows of headstones to Poe’s grave, there opening a bottle of cognac and raising a single toast to the poet himself. At the ritual’s completion, the visitor lays three black roses at the foot of Poe’s stone. Though the significance of the roses remains unknown, they are thought to represent Poe, his young bride, Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm, all interred on the same grounds. After laying the roses, the toaster can be seen quietly vacating the cemetery, vanishing into the night.
The curious homage has become an annual tradition, known to locals and Poe enthusiasts the world over. According to media reports, the visits began in 1949 on the 100thanniversary of Edgar’s death. Though the identity of the toaster remains unknown, he has left occasional missives alongside the cognac and roses, including one in the early eighties which cryptically read, “Edgar, I haven’t forgotten you.”
But the year after that writing, the Toaster failed to appear on the night of Poe’s birthday. So too in 2011, and then again last night. Reports the Baltimore Sun:
Early Thursday morning, a tired Jeff Jerome, curator of the city’s Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, “officially” pronounced the Poe-toasting tradition over. Having spent the night inside Westminster Hall, awaiting the toaster’s arrival, Jerome declared that the furtive stranger’s poignant tribute would be left nevermore.
“I more or less resigned myself that it was over with before tonight,” said Jerome, who has been curator of the Poe House — and de facto keeper of the Poe flame — since 1979. “What I’ll miss most is the excitement of waiting to see if he’s going to show up.”
As he had for the past 15 years or so, Jerome spent the night inside the former church on West Fayette Street, just yards away from Poe’s grave, with a select group of friends and acquaintances. Outside, a few dozen fans — including visitors from Rhode Island, Chicago, California and even Russia — held their own vigil. But the toaster, whose identity has remained a mystery since at least the 1940s, never made an appearance.
