For more than half a century, a mysterious visitor would make an annual pilgrimage to Edgar Allan Poe’s grave site to leave three roses and a bottle of cognac to mark the anniversary of the author’s birth. The Seattle Times reports that for the first time in six decades, the illusive mourner failed to show on January 19 of this year. This unexpected absence has left many wondering if the stranger in the black hat and white scarf has met an untimely end, and if he’ll ever return. “I’m confused, befuddled,” said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum. “I don’t know what’s going on.” The first written reference to the visitor was published in a 1949 issue of The Evening Sun of Baltimore. Since then the mysterious mourner has developed a following of his own, with Jerome and many other Poe enthusiasts staking out Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, to watch the dark figure leave his gifts at Poe’s grave stone each year.
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Apparently, the Heene family has cribbed a page from Edgar Allan Poe. Though the family recently created a media circus with the false claim that their son had floated away in a helium balloon, the idea of a balloon hoax is not original. According to The Guardian, the April 13, 1844 issue of the New York Sun reported an exclusive account of the balloon “Victoria” crossing the Atlantic Ocean in just 75 hours. The newspaper published excerpts from the diary of the balloon’s navigators, and the story culminated with their “sighting” near the South Carolina coast. But, the entire account was revealed as a hoax a couple days later, with Edgar Allan Poe named as the perpetrator. (A real balloon would not make the transatlantic trip until 1919, when the British dirigible R-34 arrived in New York after a 108 hour voyage.) Always the master storyteller, Poe loved a good hoax, and the balloon story was just one of five hoaxes that he contrived through out his life. Like the Heenes, he was thrilled at all the public attention surrounding his fabrication: “. . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper.” Poe beat the Heenes to the punch by 165 years, though it seems unlikely that the family knew about the original hoax. At least no one has cause to call child protective services on Poe.

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