A closer look

Edgar Allan Poe practically invented the modern detective genre but died under bizarre circumstances that not even his most cynical fictional characters could solve. In 1849, the notoriously gloomy author was found wandering the streets of Baltimore in severe distress, wearing someone else's ill-fitting, cheap clothes instead of his usual black suit. He spent his final days in a hospital experiencing wild hallucinations and repeatedly shouting the name 'Reynolds', before dying of a completely unknown cause. Theories range from rabies to a violent voter fraud scheme known as cooping, leaving the ultimate master of mystery with the most incredibly on-brand, unsolved death imaginable