3 stories mention Edgar Allan Poe on DeadlyCurious.
For roughly two centuries, Europe was gripped by the fear of premature burial — fed by imperfect diagnosis of death, cholera-era haste, and Poe. The answer was the safety coffin: bells, flags, breathing tubes, and escape hatches operable by the awakened dead, patented by the dozen. Germany built entire 'waiting mortuaries' where corpses lay wired to alarms until they visibly decomposed.
Read the story →Olbers' paradox asks why the night sky is dark rather than uniformly bright. In an infinite, eternal, static universe with uniformly distributed stars, every line of sight should eventually intersect a stellar surface — making the entire sky as bright as the sun. The answer requires the universe to be finite in age, or expanding, or both.
Read the story →Edgar Allan Poe was found semi-conscious outside Ryan's Tavern, a Baltimore polling place, on 3 October 1849. He was wearing cheap secondhand clothes that were not his. He died at Washington College Hospital on 7 October, aged 40, without ever giving a coherent account of the preceding week. The cause of death has been variously diagnosed as alcoholism, rabies, cooping, syphilis, and brain tumour.
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