Hey there, strangers. We thought we'd surprise you during this off week with a special bonus feed drop, a preview of the kind of premium material we release in our Patreon feed. Each month, we put out a Patreon-only episode of one strange thing, covering more well-known and famous cases of the strange, inexplicable, and downright bizarre.

And we even let our listeners vote on their favorite topics.

You can also find a premium blog write-up each month, sharing a forgotten story from the archives,

and plenty of fun news snippets that couldn't quite make a whole episode,

but that we couldn't resist sharing either.

We hope you'll enjoy this surprise release of The Poet,

written by the author of all of our Patreon episodes, Liv Fallon,

and consider joining us over there for lots more good, clean, and very weird fun.

I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's

news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

For today's story, we went back to the dark ages.

No, not the medieval ones. We're talking about

America in the 1800s, when newspapers were filled with the gruesome and the gloomy. It was a time

when dark romanticism, the goth cousin of famous works like leaves of grass and Walden,

took hold of the public imagination. And there was no one who could craft the macabre

quite like Edgar Allan Poe. Now, if you're a fan of horror or mysteries, you probably saw this coming, and you are among

friends. If you're new here, buckle up, because the death of Edgar Allan Poe was, and still is, a real-life

mystery. The end of Edgar Allen Poe's life began on Thursday,

September 27, 1849. Poe was in Richmond, Virginia, giving public lectures and gathering donations

for a new literary magazine, The Stylus.

Although Poe was born in Boston, he grew up with his foster parents in Richmond

and frequently returned there for literary work.

...