Everybody likes a good story, and this Fells Point institution has a number of them.

The oldest continually operating saloon in the United States (since 1775), the bar has changed names many times, but is now a live music venue known as The Horse You Came In On Saloon.

Local legend says that Edgar Allan Poe used to enjoy imbibing at this location, and that he was potentially knocking them down here the day he was found incoherent on the street before he died- October 3, 1849.

Although this story is completely unverified, so are equally fun ghost stories from the bar's employees. Apparently, a ghost nicknamed "Edgar" continually swings the chandelier, opens cash register doors, pulls out stools, and knocks over beer bottles. Maybe the ghost is drunk too...

view full location details...

From 1949 to 2009, a mysterious figure nicknamed "The Poe Toaster" would visit Poe's grave annually on January 19 (E.A. Poe's birthday).

The figure would slink into the graveyard under the cover of dark, dressed in black with a wide-brimmed hat and white scarf. He would pour himself a glass of cognac and raise a toast to Poe's memory, then vanish, leaving three roses in a distinctive arrangement and the unfinished bottle of cognac.

The tradition lasted for sixty years. Nobody knows who the Toaster was, but there is evidence that it was a father who passed the bizarre ritual to his son. The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of Poe's birth, and since then there has not been an appearance of The Poe Toaster (or the signature opened bottle of booze with roses).

view full location details...

In 1875, Poe was disinterred from the original burial location and moved to his present location. A larger, more ornate monument had been erected for the popular writer through donations, gifts, and fund-raising.

Among the dignitaries to attend the dedication of the monument on November 17, 1875 was Walt Whitman.

The monument is still within the Westminster Burying Grounds; the move placed Poe next to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Maria Clemm (on his right), and his wife, Virginia Poe (who had been originally buried in New York in 1847).

view full location details...

After Poe's death in 1849, he was laid to rest in his family's plot in the Westminster Burying Grounds in Baltimore. E.A. Poe was originally placed in Lot 27, next to his grandfather David Poe, Sr. (from Londonderry, Ireland) and his older brother, William Henry Leonard Poe.

The day he was buried, an obituary appeared in the New York Tribune that depicted Poe as a deranged drunk and a drug-addled misanthrope. Signed by "Ludwig," the piece was actually written by one of Poe's chief literary rivals, Rufus Wilmot Griswold.

Not only did Wilmot's piece get reprinted in several national publications, it was contained in Poe's posthumous writing anthologies (oddly, Griswold had weaseled his way into the position of Poe's literary executor).

While many of Griswold's anonymous character assassinations have proven to be lies, forgeries, or half-truths- the damage had been done. For years, Poe was (and in many ways, is still) depicted as a mad genius.

view full location details...

On October 3, 1849, a distraught, disheveled and semi-conscious Edgar Allan Poe was brought in a carriage to the Washington University Hospital of Baltimore (also called the Washington College Hospital; later known as Church Home or Church Hospital). Four days later on October 7, 1849, Poe was dead at the age of 40.

The circumstances surrounding Poe's death are extremely mysterious. Many theories exist to rationalize Poe's condition: hypoglycemia, depression, drug-induced hallucinations, and conspiratorial murder plots have all been proposed as potential death knells by his biographers.

Poe's own attending physician in his final days, Dr. John J. Moran, proved to be more successful in capitalizing on those last moments of interaction with Poe than actually caring for him as a patient. His accounts of Poe's condition and actions during those last days became more embellished as Moran hit the lecture circuit.

In 1853, several attempts were made to burn down Washington University Hospital by residents of the neighborhood. Apparently, they had grown tired of the hospital's reputation for digging up bodies from the cemetery down the street for dissection.

A hospital worker recalled, "It was said there had been people kidnapped and taken in there which made Washington College a horror to the people in the city of Baltimore. After the sun went down you hardly ever saw a person anywhere near it."

Today, a new housing complex called Broadway Overlook has been built on the former grounds of the hospital. According to The Dome (a John Hopkins Medicine periodical), the room where Poe died is currently occupied.

view full location details...