Login
Lost Password?
No account yet? Register

Welcome

Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.

What's at Taph?

Taphophilia Home
Thanatology Forums
Taphophile Weblinks
Taph's Article Archive
Contact Deadgirl
Donating to Taphophilia
Book Library

Deadgirl Recommends

Advertisement

Dig Deeper

Literature
Topics at Taphophilia
Deadgirl's Dictionary
Cemetery Photography
Industry News
Carved in Stone

A Taphophilia Thank You...

Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From
its conception and early development, DarkestWeb
was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.

Cemetery Snapshot

BCC_Russian_stone.jpg.jpg

Announcements

Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!

Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!


Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.

Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.

Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.

West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
That fellow Edgar Allan Poe . . . he simply won't be buried PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Sunday, 14 May 2006
What is it about the long-dead master of horror that so enthrals us? And who is the mysterious Toaster who haunts his grave? Alice Fordham investigates

THE POE SHADOW
by Matthew Pearl

ON A SUNNY DAY IN Baltimore, the place to be is down by the harbour. There are tall ships with flags flying and waterfront cafe selling crab cakes. But on the glorious day of my visit there was a steady stream of tourists turning their backs on the sea to go to a nasty neighbourhood. Having stopped to pay their respects in a little graveyard, they had to knock on the door of their destination, a dilapidated terraced house, to be allowed to look round a few small rooms.
Here Edgar Poe lived with his aunt, grandmother and cousins, and wrote some of the stories that draw 5,000 visitors a year.

These fans are not black-clad devotees trying to steal pieces of Poe’s coffin. These days, he is mainstream. The visitors are in a city that has named its football team after a Poe poem, and a country that has been inspired by Poe to produce horror films, episodes of The Simpsons and, increasingly, novels.

The latest is Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow. As others have done before him (notably John Evangelist Walsh in A Midnight Dreary), he is attempting to unravel the death of Poe. This death remains mysterious, but Pearl does an ingenious job of shedding new light on the puzzle.

He creates an eager Poe fan, living in Baltimore in 1849, bent on finding the cause and circumstances of the death. This young man, Quentin Clark, travels to Paris to recruit the detective featured in Poe’s mystery stories. Together they battle adversity in search of the truth, with all manner of scrapes along the way.

Poe was found in a tavern in Baltimore, incapacitated and wearing clothes which did not fit him, on October 3, 1849. He was taken to Washington College Hospital and raved for four days before dying. Around these facts swirl conjectures. Was he drunk? What was he doing in Baltimore, while he was meant to be in Philadelphia? Did he cry out “Reynolds” as he hallucinated? What did this mean? Clark contemplates all this and more — and Pearl tries to disentangle it.

The plot is complicated and there are long periods in which nothing much happens. In its implausibility and drama, it borrows from Poe’s style, although the effect is difficult to sustain over a long narrative. It does however, evoke brilliantly the kind of dedication that Poe still enjoys.

Nowhere is this devotion better seen than in Baltimore. The curator of the Poe museum, Jeff Jerome, tells how, every year, on the writer’s birthday in the blizzards of January, a shadowy figure who has been christened the “Toaster”, creeps into the little graveyard.

He lays three roses and a bottle of cognac on the spot Poe was first buried. This has happened every year since 1949, and Jerome has been watching from the church since 1977.

This anonymous ritual has become a big event and Jerome is joined in his annual vigil by Poe fans and the press. In 1990 Life magazine spent $80,000 (£43,000) on spy equipment to take one bleary picture of the figure.

And as the outside world cares about the Toaster, the Toaster cares about the world. There was much puzzling over a note he left condemning the French, and open outrage in 2001 when he left a note tipping the New York Giants to win the Super Bowl over the Baltimore Ravens. To denigrate a team named after the poet whose grave was being honoured seemed deliciously silly. Poe and his fans are now the subject more of gossip columns than of literary journals.

Where does this popular appeal come from? In his day Poe was an obscure poet — now he enjoys a lively following (particularly among teenage girls, according to Jerome). There has even been a Simpsons tribute (a Hallowe’en episode parodying The Raven) and the football team was named after him ten years ago.

Jerome suggests that Poe tapped in to the fears of the people of the time. As he showed me a coffin designed to be packed with ice, necessary before the introduction of embalming to the US, he said: “Before they were able to delay the decomposition process, people had to be buried within a day or two of death. Being buried alive was a genuine fear that Poe tapped into.”


But perhaps it is because Poe is so adaptable that he keeps cropping up in popular culture. People have suggested that his stories are archetypes of frightening situations — the threat of the stranger, the threat of madness, the nightmare of the enclosed and diminishing space. These universally frightening themes continually bring him to new audiences.
Jerome regrets that Poe’s crime fiction and poetry are not better known, though like most of us he first encountered his work at the cinema. “In the Fifties and Sixties Vincent Price made a number of B-movie horror films based on Poe’s poems. I was too young to be allowed to see them but I would have my brother go in and open a side door to the movie theatre. I loved them.”

  Matthew Pearl, too, remembers his first encounter with Poe, not in a library but on the cover of Sergeant Pepper. “My parents were always playing the Beatles when I was very young,” he says, “and that was my favourite cover. He is right in the centre and I asked my parents who he was. That was my first introduction to Poe as an icon of pop culture.

“I think part of the appeal is that his personality apparently matched his writing. Though we know so little about him we have this image of a larger-than-life, mysterious person, and this ties in with the peculiarities of his writing and the mystery of his death.”

The French came to love Poe after he was translated by Baudelaire, and a chilling set of illustrations for The Raven by Gustav Dora still sells well. Fans of detective fiction credit him with inventing the genre, and turn to his stories of the detective Dupin convinced that everything else they have read has been a poor imitation.

But however mysterious Poe’s life and death may have been, there is no real mystery to his continued appeal. His tightly-written classics inspire popular tributes, and these imitations send people back time and again to the original for good stories — and very bad dreams.


Visit www.eapoe.org or call 001 410 396-7932 for information on the Poe museum, grave and events

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2176091_2,00.html

 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]

Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

Taphophiles Speak

Have you decided on eternal repose?
 

Quote Repository

“Cowards die may times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.”

William ShakespeareFrom Ham

Deadgirl's Favorites

  • Elmwood Cemetery

  • Coffin Books

  • Farber Collection
  • Pushin Daisies
  • Coffin Talk Forums

  • Lewiston,ID Projects

  • Eternal Touch Studios

  • Adipocere
  • Adimundo Forums
  • Find A Death
  • Guardians of the Soul
  • Coffin Gems
  • Stories In Stone
  • Grave Matter
  • AGS Online

    • Recently Exhumed

  • Beheading videos fascinate public
  • Tomb facts/Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
  • Death videos big sellers
  • Presidential Funerals
  • Lamont Bentley, 31
  • Webshot Photo Album -- Manila Chinese Cemetery
  • Ashes to assets, dust to diamonds
  • INSIDES OUT: Cadaver exhibit to make U.S. debut
  • Haunted Inns: Rumors of ghosts float at Southern spots
  • Death Equals Science at Body Farm
  • Hanging is widely used worldwide for execution
  • Michael Louden, 40

    • Shirtless and Sculpted

    The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.

    Image