Poe Toaster Will Come Nevermore

Edgar Allan Poe fans waited after midnight this morning at the cemetery in Baltimore where the author is buried, but for the third year in a row, no "Poe Toaster" showed up. For around 70 years, a mysterious person visited Poe's grave on the morning of January 19th, Poe's birth date.

Poe House and Museum Curator Jeff Jerome said early Thursday that die-hard fans waited hours past when the tribute bearer normally arrives. But the "Poe Toaster" was a no-show for a third year in a row, leaving another unanswered question in a mystery worthy of the writer's legacy. Poe fans had said they would hold one last vigil this year before calling an end to the tradition. "It's over with," Jerome said wearily. "It will probably hit me later, but I'm too tired now to feel anything else." It is thought that the tributes of an anonymous man wearing black clothes with a white scarf and a wide-brimmed hat, who leaves three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe's original grave on the writer's birthday, date to at least the 1940s. Late Wednesday, a crowd gathered outside the gates of the burial ground surrounding Westminster Hall to watch for the mysterious visitor, yet only three impersonators appeared, Jerome said.

The author was born in 1809 and died 40 years later. Link -via Fark (Image credit: AP)