“THE TRUE CRIME STORY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE MURDERED CIGAR GIRL” #WeirdDarkness

When a beautiful cigar shop girl is found dead under mysterious circumstances, a troubled Edgar Allan Poe becomes obsessed with solving the real-life crime—turning tragedy into fiction in a desperate search for truth.

IN THIS EPISODE: I’m sharing a chapter from the book “Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor, which I narrated the audiobook for. But this chapter by itself was so interesting to me that I thought it would make a great episode of Weird Darkness – plus, it gives you a little peek into what you might get if you purchase the book itself. I’ve left a link to the book in the show notes below. This is the true story about themurder of a girl who worked in a cigar shop, the investigation of it by law enforcement, how Edgar Allan Poe saw it as an opportunity to escalate his career and name… and how it all almost blew up in his face, even with some claiming Poe was the murderer of the poor girl!

SOURCES AND RESOURCES FROM THE EPISODE…
“Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor: https://amzn.to/41e7BxJ
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Originally aired: March, 2022
EPISODE PAGE at WeirdDarkness.com (includes list of sources): https://weirddarkness.com/PoeCigarGirl

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ads heard during the podcasts that are not in my
voice or placed by third party agencies outside of my control.
It should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself.
Stories and content and Weird Darkness can be disturbing for
some listeners, and as intended for mature audiences only, parental
discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos. I'm Daryn Marler, and

(00:28):
this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal,
supernatural legends, lower the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious macabre,
unsolved and unexplained. In this episode, I'm hearing a chapter
from the book never More The Haunted Life and Mysterious

(00:50):
Death of Edgar Allan Poe by Troy Taylor for the
audiobook version. But this chapter by itself was so interesting
to me while I was narrating it. I thought it
make a great episode of Weird Darkness just by itself.
Plus he gives you a little peek into what you
might get if you purchase the book itself. I've left
a link to the book in the show notes. What

(01:10):
I'm about to share is the true story about a
murder of a girl who worked in a cigar shop,
the investigation of it by law enforcement, how Edgar Allan
Poe saw it as an opportunity to escalate his career
and name, and how it all almost blew up in
his face, even with some claiming Poe was the murderer
of the poor girl. Now bult your doors, lock your windows,

(01:36):
turn off your lights, and come with me into the
weird darkness. Men have called me mad, But the question
is not yet settled whether madness is or is not
the loftiest intelligence, Whether much that is glorious, whether all

(02:00):
that is profound does not spring from disease of thought,
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the
general intellect. Edgar Allan Poe. On July twenty eighth, eighteen
forty one, two New Yorkers were walking along the Hoboken
shoreline near the spring at Sibyl's Cave, then a popular

(02:22):
tourist attraction, when they spotted a body floating out in
the Hudson River. As they waited on shore for the
co runner to arrive, a man walked up to them
and claimed that he recognized the corpse from its clothing.
It was He told them the body of Mary Cecilia Rogers,
the missing woman who had recently been in the papers.
Her life story is a bit murky, but Mary Rogers

(02:45):
was probably born in Lime, Connecticut. In eighteen twenty, she
and her widowed mother, Phoebe, moved to Manhattan. In the
eighteen thirties, Phoebe opened a boarding house at one twenty
six Nassau Street, and Mary took a sales job at
Anne Person's tobacco emporium, which had become a fixture of
New York's emerging social scene. It was especially popular with

(03:07):
young men and local writers such as Washington Irving and
James Fenimore Cooper. But while the customers came for owner
John Anderson's tobacco, they stayed for Mary, who was dubbed
the Beautiful cigar Girl by the local press. Within a
year of starting work at the cigar shop, Mary had
become a local celebrity, even sparking a short lived panic

(03:28):
when she failed to show up for work one day
in eighteen thirty eight. Though what made headlines this disappearance
was dismissed as a publicity stunt for Anderson's store. But
was it No one knows. But soon afterward Mary left
her position at the store and returned home to help
her mother run her business. While her life was more

(03:50):
private at the boarding house, she still managed to attract
a lot of attention from men. She had a lot
of admirers who stayed at and hung around the house,
but Mary gave all attention to Daniel Payne, a cork
cutter and boarder who became her fiancee in the summer
of eighteen forty one. Daniel would also become the last

(04:10):
person to see Mary alive, other than her killer. That is,
on the morning of July twenty fifth, Mary left the
Rogers boarding house, telling her mother that she planned to
visit an aunt uptown. What happened after that, as the
hours without word from her turn to days, remains unknown.
At first, it was suggested that she had simply run away,

(04:31):
perhaps in another attempt to get attention. Daniel, though worried
about the gangs of robbers and rapists whose exploits were
then filling the pages of the papers. After two days
of searching, growing more convinced that Mary had been kidnapped,
he had a missing notice printed. The notice caught the
eye of a man named Arthur Crommellian he was a

(04:52):
former boarder at her mother's house and had once courted Mary.
He took his search across the ferry to Hobogan, arriving
just in time to witness the recovery of Mary's body
from the Hudson River and to identify the corpse. After
he was questioned by the police and they were convinced
that Cromellion's arrival on the scene didn't implicate him in
the murder, the authorities turned their attention to other lead suspects.

(05:16):
One of the first people they questioned was John Anderson,
Mary's employer, who had often accompanied her home in the evenings.
Even though he could offer no alibi for the day
of her disappearance, he was released when attention began to
focus on Mary's fiancee, Daniel Payne. Not only was he
the last person to see Mary alive, but there were
rumors that the couple had been fighting and that Mary

(05:38):
had threatened to call off the wedding. None of that
turned out to be true, and after Daniel produced a
solid alibi, the case quickly went cold. Meanwhile, newspapers all
over the country kept a running commentary about the case,
especially in regard to what they claimed was the bungling
investigation by the New York Police. One report complained about

(06:00):
the slovenly manner in which the coroner at Hoboken performs
his duties while outside Philadelphia. Other papers wondered if the
death had been a suicide. Even New York Governor William H.
Seward got involved, announcing in several New York papers a
seven hundred and fifty dollars reward for any information that
helped solve the crime. Then, in early September eighteen forty one,

(06:22):
there seemed to be a break in the case. A
group of boys were playing in a field in Weehawk
and New Jersey, not far from where Mary's body had
been found, and discovered bundles of bloody clothing in some bushes.
After the discovery, in what came to be called the
murder Thicket, one of the boy's mothers, Frederica Loss, who
operated the nearby nick Moorehouse pub, contacted the police. But

(06:45):
Frederica Loss seemed to know a lot more about the
case than just about the discovery of bloody clothes. When
the police questioned her, she admitted that Mary Rogers had
checked in to the nick Moore House on the night
of her death with an unknown man. The pair had
gone out but had never returned to the pub. Frederica
said that she didn't think too much of it at

(07:05):
the time, but remembered hearing someone screaming in the woods
later that night, although it seemed strange that she never
shared this with the police before. Now detectives were apparently
satisfied with her answers. Things took another turn less than
a month later, on October seventh, when Daniel Payne made
a trip to the murder Thicket after spending the evening

(07:26):
drinking and hoboken. While sitting on a nearby bench, she
drank an entire bottle of laudanum and died from an overdose.
His body was found only a few hundred yards from
where Mary's corpse had been discovered. A note in his
pocket read to the world, here I am on the spot.
God forgive me for my misfortune in my misspent time.

(07:47):
Without easy answers, the press once again created their own
version of events. As a single working woman, Mary became
a kind of symbol for the era's problems and a
warning to parents about the fate that might befall their
own own daughters. In the big city. Many papers even claimed,
with no evidence, of course, that Mary had been a prostitute,
and even hinted that she deserved her fate. The New

(08:10):
York public might have been satisfied with such weak solutions,
but in Philadelphia, Edgar Allan Poe was not. Mary's first
disappearance had occurred while Poe was living in New York,
and he remembered it well. As the news of her
fate reached him through newspaper reports, he became obsessed with
the story and followed every detail. Poe was now living

(08:33):
well in Philadelphia. His annual salary of eight hundred dollars
from Graham's magazine, although far from a fortune, afforded him
a stability like none he'd ever had in his adult life.
By the end of eighteen forty one, he'd moved his
wife and mother in law into a small townhouse on
Coates Street in the north end of the city. As
he'd promised long ago in Richmond, he was finally providing

(08:55):
Virginia with the kind of comfort she deserved. Their new
home was even furnished with a small piano, a harp,
and a pair of songbirds in a gilded cage on
January twentieth, eighteen forty two, the day after Poe turned
thirty three, a small group of friends gathered in the
parlor of the townhouse to hear Virginia play the harp
and sing. It was a perfect evening. Virginia was wearing

(09:19):
a white gown and looked angelic in the firelight. As
she tapped at the keys of the piano. She sang,
the notes became higher, true and clear, and then stopped.
Virginia clutched at her throat and then choked out a
cascade of blood, staining in front of her dress. With crimson.
Poe's face went white. He carried Virginia upstairs, laid her

(09:41):
on the bed, and then ran for a doctor. Poe
must have known, even before the doctor grimly confirmed it,
that the hemorrhage signaled the final stages of tuberculosis. He
also must have known that her chances for survival were slim.
By the time a patient begins coughing up blood, they
were usually beyond help. Even if she could have been helped,

(10:03):
perhaps by moving to a healthier climate or by a
stay at a sanatorium, such things were well beyond the
means of an editor making eight hundred dollars a year.
Virginia spent the next two weeks scarcely able to breathe,
except when fanned with fresh air. At times, her coughing
became so severe that it seemed as if she would

(10:24):
choke to death. She pressed a handkerchief to her mouth
to cover it when she coughed, and it was often
spattered red with blood. Heart aching, Poe remained by her side,
brooding over the poverty stricken existence that he'd forced Virginia
into as his wife that was now killing her. More
than one visitor commented that the cramped house where they lived,

(10:45):
luxurious compared to other places where they had lived, was
likely making Virginia's condition worse. Her sick room was so
small that the sloped roof was almost as low as
her head. George Graham, Poe's employer, noted that Poe's love
for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of
the spirit of beauty, which he felt was fading before
his eyes. I've seen him hovering around her when she

(11:07):
was ill, with all the fond, fear and tender anxiety
of a mother for her first born, her slightest cough
causing him to shudder, a heart chill that was visible.
There are very few among those with a love for
the supernatural who don't also have a passion for Edgar

(11:29):
Allan Poe. Poe wasn't simply a melancholy author who wrote
about premature burials, sinister black hats, and talking ravens. He
was much more. If you've ever read a modern mystery
or horror novel, you can thank Poe. Poe invented the
modern mystery story, mostly invented science fiction, and was the

(11:50):
first writer to take the horror stories of the Gothic
era and set them in modern times, starting a trend
that continues today. With a lifelong interest in Poe, Troy
Taylor decided to take his own look at the mysterious
and macabre writer, his tragic life, unexplained death, and lingering hauntings.

(12:12):
He invites listeners along to delve into the strange and
bizarre world of Edgar Allan Poe, from his early life
to his tragic marriage, his insane grief, his dramatically failed career,
his links to an unsolved murder, and the mystery of
what happened to the writer in the five days before
his unexplained death. Even more than a century and a

(12:33):
half later, no one knows what happened to Poe before
he was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland,
or what killed him. Why did he disappear and then
show up in an incoherent state wearing another man's clothes,
Where did he go when he vanished? And who was
the mysterious Reynolds that Poe whispered about in his dying breath.

(12:55):
And perhaps strangest of all, does he haunt the mysterious
graveyard where his body is buried nevermore? The Haunted Life
and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, written by Troy Taylor,
narrated by Darren Marler. Find a link to the book
on the audiobooks page at Weird Darkness dot com. Virginia's

(13:26):
health seeped into Poe's work, most notably, and they mentioned
the Mask of the Red Death, published just months before
the January attack. He dwelt on themes of horror and
blood because even then he knew what was coming. He'd
seen it before with his mother when he was a
small child in Eleanora, also written in the early stages

(13:47):
of Virginia's illness, Paul returned to the theme and delved
into the grim circumstances of his new life. The story
was about a young man living an idyllic life with
his young cousin Eleanora and her mother. All too soon, though,
Eleanora tells him that she had seen that the finger
of death was upon her Bosom, that like the Ephemeron,
she had been made in perfect loveliness, only to die.

(14:12):
In the months that followed, Poe wavered back and forth
between optimism and utter despair. In February, he told friends
that she was getting better, but by July he declared
that I have scarcely a faint hope for her recovery.
For a time, Poe threw himself into his work, writing poems, stories,
and reviews for Graham's magazine, and finding that his reputation

(14:35):
was growing. When he learned that Charles Dickens would be
touring Philadelphia in March eighteen forty two, he wrote to
request an interview, sending along a copy of his Tales
of the Grotesque and Arabesque. He also included copies of
his past reviews for Dickens's work, attesting to admiration for
the writer he once called the greatest British novelist. Among

(14:56):
them was an article he wrote about the mystery Barnaby Rudge,
written shortly after Dickens's story began to appear in serial form.
Although the book's conclusion would not be published for several months,
Poe was able to predict correctly that Barnaby the Idiot
is the murderer's own son. Dickens was impressed by Poe.

(15:17):
He gave two lengthy interviews to him at Philadelphia's United
States Hotel on March seventh, eighteen forty two. Dickens took
particular note of Poe's reviews and would later describe him
as a man who taketh all of us english Men
of letters to task in print, roundly and uncompromisingly. Even
though the interview was part of his work for Graham's,

(15:37):
Poe used it to his own advantage. By the end
of the meeting, Dickens had agreed to help Poe find
a publisher in England. The two men parted on good terms,
and Dickens's work would make itself felt in Poe's own work,
especially in the case of the talkative raven that appears
within the pages of Barnaby Rutch. Despite his position at
Graham's being the best job that Poe had ever had,

(15:59):
he began to fall into the same resentful state of
mind that had led to difficulties at his earlier positions.
No one recognized the greatness of Edgar Allan Poe like
Poe himself did in this case, though Poe did have
some actual cause for irritation. The magazine's extraordinary success was
making a fortune for Graham, but Poe's salary had stayed

(16:21):
the same. He now considered them so pitiful that it
was almost an insult. As gloom set in over Virginia's illness,
his bitterness deepened. On the morning after the initial hemorrhage,
Poe asked Graham to advance him two months salary to
help ease the unexpected burden. Graham refused. At the same time,
the success of Graham's rekindled Poe's hopes for a magazine

(16:44):
of his own. This was another source of grievance against
his employer. However, Graham had promised when Poe joined his
magazine that he would help to launch Poe's own Penn
magazine within a year. But as Graham's grew in circulation
and became more profitable, the promise was forgotten. Poe was
a victim of his own success. He later wrote, every

(17:06):
exertion made by myself served to make Grahams a greater
source of profit and left its owner less willing to
keep his word with me. The matter reached a crisis
point in April eighteen forty two. After a brief time
away caused by illness, Poe returned to the office to
find that his duties had been taken over by Charles Peterson,
an associate editor. It may be that Peterson simply covered

(17:29):
for Poe while the other man was away, but we
only know Poe's side of it, and he was offended.
Always sensitive about his status as an editor, he believed
that he had been slighted and perhaps even passed over
for a promotion, so he quit as usual. There would
be a difference of opinion as to whether Poe left

(17:50):
or was fired. Graham later said either Peterson or Poe
would have to go. The two cannot get along together.
Poe insisted that he left to pursue his own interests,
citing his disgust with the namby Pamby mainstream character of
the magazine and the insulting salary in contrast to his
hostility towards Thomas White and William Burton. Though Poe spoke

(18:13):
well of Graham and claimed to have no misunderstanding with him.
Whatever the reason for leaving, Poe soon found himself broke again,
with Virginia's illness adding to his worries. We can only
puzzle over why Poe would make such a change. We
could only assume that he simply couldn't help sabotaging himself.
There were very few studies of mental illness in those days,

(18:35):
and certainly there was no one who could get inside
the head of Edgar Allan Poe. He often spoke of
the nervous restlessness that haunted me as a fiend, as
a reason for many of the things that he did
that might seem baffling to others. He used the excuse
of wanting to start a magazine of his own as
a reason for leaving, but deep down he surely knew

(18:55):
that he would never be able to afford. He was
a man of enable talent, but he seemed eager to
destroy his reputation. This marked beginning of what some have
called Poe's irregularities, which for the rest of his life
would destroy his hopes and put his reputation into the
hands of people who hated him. Those irregularities began almost

(19:18):
at once. For the most part, Poe had stayed away
from liquor during his time at Graham's, but now he
returned to the bottle with devastating consequences. As mentioned earlier,
Poe had a dramatically low tolerance for alcohol. It wasn't
how much he drank, it was that he drank at all.
He seemed to have a strange reaction to it. At

(19:40):
a time when dram shops and taverns lined the streets,
Poe's lack of tolerance left him uniquely vulnerable. He could
never stop with a single drink. Even the first drink
transformed him from a personable man to a coarse, staggering drunk.
His friend Frederick Thomas noted, if he took one glass

(20:00):
of weak wine or cider, it always ended in excess
and sickness. Poe's excuses for drinking were plain enough, Virginia's illness,
his poverty, his literary disappointments, but turning to alcohol always
made things worse. For instance, over the course of the
fourteen months that he worked at Graham's, he made about

(20:21):
one thousand dollars in salary and contributor's fees. His literary
income over the next three years added up to only
one hundred twenty one dollars, all thanks to the bottle.
Poe now abandoned his writing, or at least began to
supplement it with less taxing forms of work, although he
still dreamed of starting his own magazine. He also pursued

(20:42):
the possibility of a job at the Philadelphia Customs House.
It was a government job and it paid well, but
Poe failed to get a local appointment, so he traveled
to Washington in hopes of pleading his case directly to
President Tyler, whose son Robert was a fan of Poe's writing.
Nervous about the important interview, he attempted to calm his

(21:03):
nerves with a glass of port. Soon after, he was
seen stumbling around the city with a green tint to
his face and his coat turned inside out. Poe did
not meet the President, nor did he make a favorable
impression on anyone who might have helped him to obtain
the employment he was seeking. Back at his writing desk,
Poe sought new publishers for some of his magazine stories. Earlier,

(21:25):
while working at Graham's, he had written to Lean Blanchard,
the publishers of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, to
offer a revised collection of his work, expanded to include
some news stories like the Murders and the Roue Morgue.
They declined, replying that they had not yet sold out
of the first edition. Despite the refusal, Poe did hope
to work with them again in the future. His hopes

(21:47):
may have been raised further when Lean Blanchard published a
book by William Gilmore Simms called Beauchamp, which took inspiration
from the real life Beauchamp Sharp Murder case in eighteen
twenty five. That's they had also been the inspiration for
an unfinished work by Poe. Believe it or not, Poe
actually admired William Gilmore Simms and had once called him

(22:08):
immeasurably the best writer of fiction in America, so there's
no doubt that he was aware of this book and
undoubtedly took note of the way that Sims had crafted
the true story into a popular novel. At the same time,
he must have been irritated that Lee and Blanchard had
accepted sims book and made it successful while declining Poe's

(22:30):
collection of stories. In the uncertain days that followed the
loss of his editor's position, Poe's mind must have turned
in the direction of writing a story that was based
on a well known crime. Poe had every reason to
feel that his skills in this area were as good
or better than those of Sims. He had long made
a specialty of solving puzzles and posing conundrums to his readers,

(22:53):
ranging from coded messages to this recent success of the
murders in the Roue Morgue. But even then, Poe chided
himself over the fact that while rumorg had been clever,
it suffered from the artificial contrivance of its solution, a
puzzle he would later write created for the express purpose
of unraveling. Poe wanted to fix his attentions on a

(23:15):
crime that had not yet been solved, that he knew
would be the true test of his skill. He cannot
be accused of constructing his own puzzle, nor would the
reader know the solution until Poe himself provided it. This
would not only make the story dramatically satisfying, but it
would be proof of Poe's analytical reasoning. There's no record

(23:36):
of how Poe chose the Mary Rogers case for his inspiration,
although we do know that he had been following it
since its start. He remembered the celebrated cigar Girl from
his time in New York and had followed the investigation
from a distance. The story had gotten a lot of
attention in Philadelphia, and the crime had been heavily reported
on in the city's newspapers. The death of Daniel Payne

(23:58):
in October had likely brought the case back to Poe's
attention at a time when he was especially susceptible to
writing another mystery story. In June eighteen forty two, Poe
sent a letter to Joseph Evans Snodgrass, the Baltimore editor
with whom he had remained friends over the years. Snodgrass
had recently taken over the Baltimore Sunday Visitor, the same

(24:19):
paper that had awarded a fifty dollars prize to ms
found in a bottle nearly ten years earlier. In a letter,
Poe proposed a sequel to The Murders and the Room Morgue,
featuring a different crime that would be based on the
murder of Mary Rogers. He would change the location to France,
slightly alter the girl's name, and allow his detective Dupin

(24:40):
to solve the mystery. At the same time, Poe would
be entering into an analysis of the real tragedy in
New York. He added, the press has been entirely on
the wrong scent. In fact, I really believe not only
have I demonstrated the falsity of the idea that the
girl was the victim of a gang of ruffians, but
have indicated the assassin. Poe truly believed that through fiction

(25:04):
he could solve the real life murder. For all his
enthusiasm about the decision to revive Augusta Dupin for the
new story, though it likely had more to do with
good business than solving a mystery. Rue morg had been
widely praised when it was released, and to put it simply,
Poe needed a hit. By presenting the news story as

(25:25):
a sequel to a popular one, it could also serve
as an enticement for a new collection of stories in
the future. Poe's letter made it clear that he was
not hedging his bets. It would be easy to move
the Mary Rogers case to the safe distance of Paris.
That way, if any of the details didn't match, he
could blame it on the change of venue. But Poe

(25:45):
implied that he would name the killer and solve the case.
Was it just a ruse to make more money perhaps?
Poe did go on to mention that if Snodgrass was
unable to pay him at least forty dollars, he could
publish the story somewhere else, But that same day he
sent an identical letter to George Roberts, editor of the

(26:05):
Boston Notion, adding that he really wanted to have the
story published in Boston, and raised the price to fifty dollars.
Neither man took debait. It's possible that the price, modest
as it was, seemed excessive when compared to the material
they already had. At the time, magazine editors could take
advantage of the total absence of international copyright restrictions by

(26:28):
publishing any foreign authors they pleased. Although many editors made
an effort to give preference to America's writers, there were
many less expensive options at hand. Poe's bargain price for
his story could not compete with the free material that
was available from overseas. Concerned, Poe turned to William Snowden
of The Ladies Companion in New York. As you can imagine,

(26:52):
it wasn't a particularly good match. Earlier that same year,
Poe had complained about the contemptible pictures, fashion plates, music,
and love tales that filled the pages of Graham's The
Lady's Companion offered these same features many times over, and,
as the title clearly indicated, with the sensibilities of women
in mind, Snowden worked to attract ladies of exquisite refinement

(27:15):
and taste, though Poe would later deride the magazine for
offering neither of those things. A typical issue in eighteen
forty two featured stories and poems with titles like Birthnight, Reveries,
and The Smile of Love, along with commentary on the
latest dresses and sheet music for popular new songs. Based
on this, a story by Edgar Allan Poe seemed wildly

(27:38):
out of place, and yet it was in The Ladies
Companion where the story would first appear. Snowden had good
reasons for wanting to publish Poe's story. Snowden had been
a member of a group of concerned New Yorkers called
the Committee of Safety, who'd been involved in trying to
solve the murder of Mary Rogers. In fact, Snowden had

(27:58):
been one of the largest contributors. The committee had been
very disappointed when their efforts failed to produce any results.
Nearly a year had passed and yet Mary's killer still
remained at large. In accepting Poe's story for publication, Snowden
may have hoped to revive interest in the case and
spark a renewed investigation. After completing the sale to the

(28:20):
Ladies Companion, Poe sank into a depression, largely brought on
by the deterioration of conditions at home. He confess to
a friend, the state of my mind has in fact
forced me to abandon all mental exertion. The renewed and
hopeless illness of my wife, ill health on my part,
and pecuniary embarrassments have nearly driven me to distraction. But

(28:42):
there were more embarrassments over money to come. If you
were someone you know is struggling with depression, dark thoughts,
or addiction, please visit the Hope in the Darkness page
at Weird Darkness dot Com. There, I've gathered numerous resources

(29:05):
to find hope and solutions for those suffering from thoughts
of suicide or self harm. There is the Suicide and
Crisis Lifeline as well as the Crisis text Line. Both
have trained counselors at all hours to help those in need,
and the page even includes text numbers for those in
the US, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland. Those struggling with
depression can get help through the Seven Cups website and app,

(29:27):
and there's information for anyone to read more about what
depression truly is and how to identify it through our
friends at ifread dot org. There are resources for those
who battle addictions, be it drugs, alcohol, or self destructive behavior,
along with help for those related to addicts. The page
has links to help to find a therapist or counselor
to find help for those who have a family member
with Alzheimer's or deventia, help for those in a crisis, pregnancy,

(29:50):
and more. These resources are always there when you or
someone you love needs them on the Hope in the
Darkness page at Weird Darkness dot com. In October eighteen
forty two, the issue of The Lady's Companion that contained
the Mystery of Marie Rogett rolled off the presses two

(30:11):
weeks ahead of schedule. Post story was too long to
be published in a single issue, so Snowden had divided
it into three installments that would appear in three consecutive issues.
Billed as a sequel to The Murders and The Room Morgue.
The first installment was stuck between an article about the
Bible and a story called The Old Oak Chest by

(30:31):
missus Caroline Orn. Snowden's readers were accustomed to a quiet
and morally uplifting tone in the magazine, and Snowden likely
took a pause before releasing Poe's graphic, blood drenched tale. Still,
even though a year had passed since the death of
Mary Rogers, Snowden knew that people were still fascinated by

(30:52):
the fate of the Beautiful Cigar Girl. Nearly every reader
of The Lady's Companion would be familiar with the story,
and perhaps had even visited the area where her body
had been found. Most would also be aware of the
conflicting theories about the case and the fact that it
was unsolved. Poe's story, no matter how unseemly in its details,

(31:14):
was familiar ground for New Yorkers, even if the action
had been transferred to Paris. Poe changed the names, but
kept most other details the same. And in case there
was any doubt as to the inspiration of the story,
Poe's unnamed narrator, the friend of c Augusta Dupin, offered
a clear statement of intent in the opening pages of
the story, echoing the words that Poe had included in

(31:37):
his letter to prospective publishers. The extraordinary details which I
am now called upon to make public will be found
to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch
of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or
concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the
late murder of Mary Cecilia Rodgers at New York. In

(31:59):
reading the story these coincidences, the term Poe used to
indicate a calculated design rather than an accidental happening, soon
became apparent. Poe introduces the working class woman Marie Roget,
the daughter of Estelle Roget, who keeps a boarding house.
Marie at a job with a perfumer, Monsieur LeBlanc, and
the shop became notorious thanks to the charms of the

(32:21):
lovely young woman. Readers soon learned that a man named
Bervet wanted to marry her, but Marie became engaged to
a man named Saint Eustac instead. After Marie had worked
behind the counter of the perfumery for about a year,
her admirers were thrown into confusion by her sudden disappearance
from the shop. LeBlanc is unable to account for her absence,

(32:42):
while the newspapers are calling for action and the police
are getting ready to investigate. Marie reappears in good health
but with a somewhat saddened air. No explanation for her
vanishing is offered, except to say that it was a
private matter. Five months later, Marie leaves home to visit
an aunt, but never arrives. After four days, her battered

(33:04):
corpse is found floating in the Seine, and well, you
get the idea. It's the same story as that of
Mary Rogers, just taking place in Paris. Paul was careful
to insert a number of details taken from the official
accounts of the Mary Rogers investigation, drawing in particular from
statements by Daniel Payne and Alfred Cromelian, who are represented

(33:26):
by Saint Eustac and Bervet. He also used the testimony
of the Hoboken coroner doctor Cook so that his story
would mirror the actual murder. He used crucial details, indicating
that a strip of fabric found at Marie's waist was
tied in a sort of hitch, and that the strings
of Marie's bonnet had been tied in a knot that

(33:46):
was not a lady's but a slip or sailor's knot.
As the story goes on, the details continue to run
parallel with the events of the New York investigation. Although
a speedy solution to the crime is expected, the police
soon founder, false arrests are made and rumors spread. Eventually,
the scene of the murder is found in some woods

(34:07):
near a public house owned by a woman named du Luke,
who claims to a scene Marie in the company of
a young man of dark complexion. Finally, Saint Eustac is
found dead with a vial of laudanum in his hand.
In spite of this, the police make no progress in
solving the case, which leads them to ask Dupin for help.
The first installment ends with the narrator stating I waited

(34:30):
for some explanation from Dupin. He, along with the readers,
had to wait until the magazine's next issue. As with
the serial publication of Charles Dickens's novels, it was likely
thought that spacing out the story would generate suspense and
give Poe more time in which to turn the publicity
to his advantage. Unfortunately, though, Snowden did a pretty poor

(34:51):
job of dividing up the manuscript, cutting it without any
regard for the flow of the story. The first section
broke off almost in mid sentence during a dis gusha
of floating bodies, and the second ended abruptly in the
middle of Dupin's contemplation of the murdercy. These interruptions did
nothing to encourage the reader's continued interest. Regardless, Poe was

(35:12):
encouraged by the warm response of friends and colleagues after
the first installment appeared. His spirit lifted further when the
conditions at home started to improve. Virginia's health had gotten better, and,
as he wrote to a friend, perhaps all will yet
go well. Although Poe was still broke, he hoped that
Marie Roget would restore some of the status that he'd

(35:32):
lost after leaving Graham's and helped secure his own dream
of starting a literary journal. The second installment was supposed
to appear during the third week in November, and the
third and final section, which Poe knew would contain the
dramatic solution, would be published during the holiday season. Poe
was so confident of his deductive skills that he promised

(35:54):
to solve the real life case of Mary Rogers. In
the final section of his story, he wrote, all argument
founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth, and
the investigation of the truth was the object. The conclusion
of the Mystery of Marie Roget was going to be
the talk of New York, he believed, and perhaps it
would have been if not for an incident that brought

(36:16):
the name Mary Rogers back into the newspapers and derailed
Poe's plans for a definite solution to his fictionalized mystery.
On November one, eighteen forty two, Frederica Loss, proprietor of
Nick Moore's tavern in Weehawken, was accidentally shot by one
of her sons while he was cleaning his gun. She

(36:36):
spent the next ten days dying in agony, babbling incoherently
in a string of broken English in German. Hallucinating. She
claimed that the spirit of a young woman was tormenting
her and then made her final confession. As the New
York Tribune reported it, Mary Rogers had come to Hoboken
in company of a young physician who undertook to procure

(36:58):
for her a premature delivery, in other words, an illegal abortion.
Mary had died during the operation, after which Loss's sons
had dumped the body in the river and scattered the
clothes to avoid suspicion. Following their mother's death, the two
eldest Lost sons were briefly charged in connection with Mary's murder,

(37:18):
implicated at least in the illegal disposal of a body.
The lack of heart evidence, other witnesses, and missus Loss's
condition during her confession were too much for the court, however,
and the case against them was quickly dismissed. The police
did turn their attentions to a Madame Rostelle, a female
physician and professor of midwifery who had a career as

(37:40):
an abortionist that was so well known that some called
her the wickedest woman in New York. Madame Rostelle, whose
real name was Anne Troe Lohmann, had come to New
York from England in eighteen thirty one and started on
a professional path that would earn her and estimated one
million dollars, and a lavish Fifth Avenue brownstone that was
dubbed the Mans Built on Baby Skulls. At the time

(38:02):
of Mary Rogers's death, Madame Ristelle was also in the news.
In July eighteen forty one, just days before Mary's body
was discovered, she was tried in New York's Court of
Special Sessions for administering certain noxious medicine and procuring a
miscarriage by the use of instruments, the same not being
necessary for the preservation of life. Abortion was still a

(38:24):
misdemeanor at the time, but the case in which Madame
Ristelle was being tried had resulted in the death of
the patient. This elevated her charge to murder. In the end,
she was convicted and sentenced to spend a year in prison,
but never served the time. At the time, Madame Merstelle
ran her business from a house on Chambers Street, not

(38:44):
far from Phoebe Rogers boarding house and steps away from
City Hall. The fashionable address allowed her to draw customers
from every social class in New York. She also ran
a network of abortion shops that stretched across the river
to Hoboken. The newspapers were filled with the possible story
of ties between Madame Ristelle and Mary Rogers, but the

(39:05):
police gazette worked especially hard to draw a link between
the abortionist and the cigar girl. After the death and
alleged confession of Frederica Loss, the rumors and suppositions assumed
the tone of established fact. Although there was no official
connection between Rostelle and Loss, it was assumed that nick
Moor's tavern was one of the abortion shops under Ristelle's management.

(39:28):
Some accused Loss of performing an operation on Mary Rogers,
while others suggested that she had simply provided the facilities
for an anonymous physician. As mentioned, Horace Greeley's Tribune was
the first newspaper to go on record and claim that
Mary had died as the result of an abortion. It
would not be the last, despite the fact that there
was no actual evidence of it. As soon as the

(39:51):
story ran, however, just as Gilbert Merritt, who had overseen
the investigation of the case, stepped forward to smother the claims,
he insisted that the a newspaper had gone too far
with its reporting. He stated that the story was inaccurate
and that he did not receive a confession from missus Loss,
who was in a deranged state of mind, but the
Tribune refused to back down. Although Greeley admitted that he

(40:15):
had made an error when saying the confession had been
made directly to Merit, he continued to insist that a
confession had been made. We gave the facts as they
were told to us by two magistrates of his city,
he insisted, and we understood them on the authority of
a statement made by mister Merritt himself to Mayor Morris.
The editors of the competing New York Herald were thrilled

(40:36):
to see that Greeley's paper had botched the story. To
underscore the mess, they reprinted the Tribune's original story and
then reprinted Merrit's denial right next to it. When Greeley
repeated his claim that two magistrates had corroborated the story,
the Herald demanded their names. The Tribune declined to respond.

(40:58):
Justice Merrit meanwhile, stayed out of the public pray. In
spite of his denials about the story, he firmly believed
that the events had transpired the way the Tribune had
reported it, and that Missus Lass's sons were also involved,
he just didn't have the evidence to prove it. On
November nineteenth, a week after the death of Rhetorica Loss,
a hearing was convened in the Court of Justice Stephen

(41:20):
Ludkins of Jersey City, Missus Lass's two oldest sons, were
subjected to a grueling round of questions designed to expose
the nefarious nature of the Nick moorehouse and their mother's
role in the death of Mary Rogers. By all accounts,
the hearing was a confused and disappointing affair. A team
of lawyers working for the Loss family objected to most

(41:41):
of the questions, and the sons easily turned aside the
accusations against them, dismissing the most serious charges as nothing
but hearsay. The hearing closed on an inconclusive note, with
no charges being filed, but this didn't stop the city's
newspapers from reuniting behind the idea that Mary had died
during an abortion. The case remained legally unexplained, but it

(42:03):
was believed that the recent statement of the manner of
her death is true, again, though this seems hard to believe.
At the initial inquest, the coroner had stated that Mary
had been brutally violated by no fewer than three assailants,
but also asserted that prior to that, Mary had been
a virgin. According to the new theory of the crime,
the coroner had mistaken evidence of a horribly botched abortion

(42:26):
with a sexual assault, which seemed unlikely if true, though
it left other questions unanswered. Mary had been found with
a lace cord tied around her neck and deep fingerprint
bruises on her throat. Whatever may have clouded the coroner's
mind about her feminine region, he had been perfectly clear
about the evidence for strangulation. He described in detail the

(42:49):
mark left by the lace cord and the bruises in
the shape of the man's fingers. A bungled abortion, no
matter how horrific, could not account for the clear signs
of the young woman being strangled. The theory also failed
to account for the behavior of missus Loss and her sons.
The discovery of Mary's clothing and the murder thicket brought
attention to Missus Loss and the nick Moore house. If

(43:12):
in fact, missus Loss had been operating an abortion shop there,
why would she have called attention to herself up to
the point where she came forward with Mary's personal effects.
There had been no connection between the tavern and the murder.
But even with all the doubts and contradictions, the idea
that Mary had perished during an abortion became the solution

(43:32):
to the case for the public. Newspapers began declaring that
the mystery has at last been solved. This eagerness to
accept an unproven solution had more to do with a
sense of public outrage than evidence. Thanks to the abortion angle,
as well as the many editorials crying out for reform
and punishment for Madame Ristelle, the Mary Rogers story took

(43:54):
on a new and even darker atmosphere. At the same time,
Mary herself began to be seen in a different and
unflattering light. If the accusations against missus Lass were true,
then the beautiful cigar girl could no longer be seen
as an innocent victim. She was now an unfortunate, if
not entirely blameless, victim of a barbaric practice. She was

(44:17):
to be pitied for certain, but she was also a
casualty of her own sins. In the middle of all
of this, though, it was easy for people to overlook
the fact that it had not been clearly established that
an abortion had actually taken place. By the end of November,
the uproar in the press had subsided. Though further developments
were expected. Newspapers hoped that a final resolution would be

(44:40):
coming soon. For now, they admitted there was nothing further
to be learned. As once stated, this mysterious matter sleeps
for the present. For Poe, this new drama in Weehawken
could not have come at a worse time. The third
and final installment of Marie Rogett, which included his solution
to the case, was only days away from publication. Until

(45:03):
the news of missus Lass's confession and death. Poe believed
that he had crafted an elegant and entirely plausible theory. Now,
as the idea that Mary Rogers had died during an
abortion was spreading like wildfire, Poe's conclusion would be proved false,
opening him up to devastating public humiliation at the very
time that he was trying again to restore his reputation.

(45:27):
The critics would be ruthless. There were many in New
York that had not forgotten the stinging reviews that he
had printed in the Southern Literary Messenger. There was also
the delight he had taken in savaging Theodore Fay's book,
which had also been inspired by a sensational murder case.
Poe had gone out of his way to sneer at
the poetical licenses that Faye had taken. Now that Poe

(45:50):
had done the same thing, he could only imagine the
reviews that were going to tear him apart. Are you
a member of the Darkness Syndicate. The Darkness Syndicate as
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(46:11):
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(46:31):
get all of these benefits and more starting at only
five dollars per month. Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate at
Weird Darkness dot com slash syndicate that's Weird Darkness dot
com slash syndicate. Humiliation was bad enough, but if the

(46:54):
critics tore apart Marie Roget and his plans for launching
his own literary magazine, which he planned to call The Stylusts,
would be destroyed. In the last months of eighteen forty two,
as the first of the Ladies Companion installments appeared, Poe
began discussions with the influential Philadelphia editor Thomas C. Clark
about financing the magazine. When Clark agreed to enter into

(47:17):
a partnership with him, Poe had every reason to believe
that his dream would soon be realized. He told a
friend that George Graham had recently made him a good
offer to return to Graham's but he felt so sure
about the deal to launch The Stylus that he declined.
As he wrote to the friend, the difficulties that impeded
me last year have vanished, and there will now be

(47:38):
nothing to prevent success. Poe desperately needed that success. His
financial problems had worsened and sent him to new depths
of poverty. Worse yet, according to his friend Frederick Thomas,
Poe had started drinking again to excess, leaving his home
and his sick wife in a state of agitation and despair.
An acquaintance who ran into him during the time described

(48:01):
how Poe begged him for fifty cents so that he
could buy a meal. That in November, Poe's plans for
the Stylus were dealt a serious blow. The financing of
the magazine had been contingent on Poe getting that position
at the Philadelphia Customs House, the job prospect he had
ruined by being drunk. That was followed the very next

(48:21):
day by the news of the developments in Weehawken. That
news was printed in a Philadelphia newspaper under the headline
New York Mystery solved. Poe knew that he had to
act at once. The first two installments of the story
had already either appeared or were just about to in
the case of the second part. The third and final

(48:41):
installment with the solution, was scheduled for the following month
and may have already been set in type. If it
appeared as originally written, Dupin's theories would look completely misguided
considering what was now happening. Even more embarrassing, all of
Poe's brash claims at the start of the story about
his own solution to the mystery would be exposed as

(49:02):
having been an empty boast. It was too late for
Poe to make any changes to the first two installments
of the story, but the third and final section was
still in the hands of William Snowden. Changes could be made.
Poe calculated the odds, picked up his pen, and began
trying to plot his way out of the mess that
he found himself in. As he struggled to salvage his story,

(49:25):
Poe took a close look at what he had already written,
and then tried to rework the fiction and facts to
build a new theory. He drew a clear parallel between
Marie's disappearance from the perfumery and the episode from the
life of Mary Rogers when she vanished for a brief
time from the tobacco shop in eighteen thirty eight. In
Dupin's mind, the murder and the earlier disappearance had to

(49:47):
be viewed as two parts of a single event. If so,
the man who lured Marie away from home in eighteen
thirty eight and the man she went to meet on
that fateful day in eighteen forty one were one and
the same. In linking the two disappearances In this way,
Poe opened a new line of thought. Although the earlier
disappearance had not been completely overlooked in the New York investigation,

(50:10):
the episode didn't draw much comment in connection with the murder.
Poe suggested that the New York police had missed an
opportunity by concentrating their energy only on the crime of
eighteen forty one. Poe believed that by giving equal weight
to the earlier disappearance, it would provide an entirely new
way to track the murderer, which, of course Dupin does

(50:31):
in the story, suggesting that Marie planned to Elope with
a secret lover, not her fiancee Saint Eustac, but the
man she had disappeared with the first time. Dupin and
Poe believed that the second episode was merely a continuation
of the first event, not a second unrelated entanglement. But
who was this mysterious man? This is where things get complicated.

(50:56):
In a story, Dupin points to a young naval officer
much NovoEd for his debaucheries. Poe plucked this character from
real life. In a New York Herald art at Golefer
August third, eighteen forty one, there's mention of this possibility,
it read, this young girl, Mary Rogers, was missing from
Anderson's store three years ago for two weeks. It is
asserted that she was seduced by an officer of the

(51:17):
US Navy and kept at Hoboken for two weeks. His
name is well known aboard his ship. These three lines
are the only known reference to a naval officer being
implicated in the affair. But Poe, through Dupin, fastened on
this brief mention and whipped it into a theory of
the crime. Once he explained his reasoning, Dupin boldly pronounced

(51:41):
that the murderer would be captured, leaving the reader to
believe that a resolution might be revealed in the real
life drama too. But Poe had backed himself into a corner.
The murders in the room. Morgue had offered a tidy ending.
Poe had no sooner laid out his conclusions than the
murderer arrived with a knock at the door. This time
would not be so easy, but it did promise an

(52:03):
even more dramatic climax. It was a story that was
happening in the real world at the same time that
it was being played out on paper of course, this
was Poe's biggest problem. Since the actual Mary Rogers investigation
had failed to produce a solid arrest, Poe's story could
not name a villain without deviating from established fact. Poe

(52:24):
had sketched out a compelling theory, but he didn't leave
himself away to create a satisfying ending. Unlike rum Org,
there would be no climactic confrontation and no unmasking of
the killer. When Poe ended his tale, he printed the
name of the killer, but it was removed from the
manuscript by the editors, or so he claimed. An editor's

(52:45):
note explained, for reasons which we shall not specify, but
to which many readers will appear obvious, we have taken
the liberty of here omitting from the manuscript placed in
our hands such portion as details following up the apparently
slight clue obtained by Dupe, we feel it is advisable
to state in brief that the result desired was brought
to pass, that an individual assassin was convicted upon his

(53:08):
own confession of the murder of Marie Roget, and the
prefect fulfilled punctually, although with reluctance, the terms of his
compact with the Chevalier Paul leaves the reader to understand
that Dupin's conjectures were entirely and brilliantly correct, and that
the villain was apprehended precisely along the lines of investigation
he suggested. Instead of joining in the discovery, the reader

(53:30):
is asked to accept that it happened off stage, although
it clearly states that Poe supplied the killer's identity in
the story, the editor is cast in the role of
a censor and removes the presumably thrilling details for unstated
reasons of propriety. It's a clever way of handling it,
but this bait and switch leaves the reader with the
feeling of having missed an important part of the story.

(53:53):
The third installment of The Mystery of Marie Roget appeared
in February eighteen forty three, with no explanation for the
delay one month. The story made a startling impression on
its readers, for whom the details of the Mary Rogers
case were still closely recalled. In one review, critic Thomas
Dunn English praised the story and noted its connection to

(54:13):
the real life unsolved case. He wrote to this day,
with the exception of the light afforded by the tale
of mister Poe, in which the faculty of analysis is
applied to the facts, the whole matter is completely shrouded
in mystery. We think he had proven very conclusively that
which he attempts at all events, he has dissipated in
our mind all belief that the murder was perpetrated by
more than one. Although Poe had no specific references to

(54:37):
Mary rogers presumed death at the hands of an abortionist,
he did strip away that idea that many still had
about Mary being raped and murdered by a gang of men.
This aligned well with the public perception of the case
the previous year, when it was thought that Mary had
fallen victim to a gang of criminals. The newspapers had
united in calling for a more efficient police force, But now,

(54:59):
in the wake of Missus losses death and the drama
that went with it, the editorial pages were calling for
the law to crack down on abortionists. Any kind of
publicity attached to the story was good for Poe. It
put him back in the spotlight and restored his reputation,
but it also had a few who were not fans
of the writer to ask other questions about Poe. It

(55:19):
was not long after the story was published that people
began to speculate that perhaps Poe knew more about the
real Mary Rogers case than he was willing to disclose.
Did Poe know who the actual killer was and just
couldn't name him in print? Later Poe blurred the line
between Mary Rogers and Marie Roget as best he could.
He received many letters about the story from readers, including

(55:42):
one that he responded to from George Evelyth in January
eighteen forty eight. Poe wrote, nothing was omitted in Marie Roget,
but what I omitted myself. The naval officer who committed
the murder confessed it, and the whole matter is well understood.
But for the sake of relatives, this is a topic
on which I'm let's not speak further. This further increased

(56:03):
the suspicion that Poe knew more than he was saying.
John Ingram, an early biographer of Poe, later added to
the confusion about the naval officer. Writing about the story
in eighteen seventy four, Ingram insisted that it was based
in fact, although the incidents of the tragedy differed widely
from those recounted in the tale, the naval officer implicated
was named Spencer. Ingram didn't elaborate further, and he offered

(56:27):
no source for the identification of the officer, though it
may have come from Sarah Helen Whitman, a young widow
that Poe knew in his last years. Those who have
followed up on this tantalizing clue have tracked it to
a prominent seagoing family headed by a Captain William Spencer.
At first glance, he seems to be a promising suspect.
He was known to have been in New York in

(56:48):
both eighteen thirty eight and eighteen forty one, and his
family was influential enough to cover up any scandals, as
was assumed the naval officer's family did to keep him
from being arrested. However, Captain Spencer would have been forty
eight years old at the time of Mary's murder, too
old to be her young lover. However, Captain Spencer did

(57:09):
have a nephew who would have been the right age.
Philip Spencer was a young midshipman who was also in
New York during the times in question. In eighteen forty two,
a year after Mary was murdered. He was hanged at
sea for attempting to start a mutiny, an incident that
inspired Herman Melville's Billy Budd, But Poe's theory required the
officer to have also been involved in Mary's appearance in

(57:31):
eighteen thirty eight, when Philip Spencer was a fifteen year
old schoolboy at an academy one hundred fifty miles from
the city. A more compelling theory places the blame on
Daniel Payne, Mary's fiance. His suicide at Weehawken certainly seems
to point to a guilty conscience. In this theory, Payne
learns that Mary's pregnant and helps her to arrange an

(57:52):
abortion at the Lost Tavern. In gratitude, Mary agrees to
marry him, but then changes her mind after the procedures finished.
In a rage, Pain strangles her, but then, unable to
live with himself, takes his own life two months later.
This is an interesting idea because it accounts for both
the abortion and for the obvious signs of death by strangulation.

(58:15):
The problem, though, is that Payne had an alibi. He
was one of the first suspects, and the police thoroughly
looked into his whereabouts and movements on the day Mary
went missing and the following day two and that leads
us to Alfred Cromelian, the ex suitor who identified Mary's body.
Mary is known to have called at his office at
least two times in the days before her death. Although

(58:37):
it's plausible that she came seeking money to pay for
an abortion, it's also plausible that Crommellian might have believed
that Mary had fallen in love with him again. When
she told him that she hadn't, He might have killed her,
but Crommellian too had an alibi for the time of
the murder. He also made a nuisance of himself with
the police during the search for Mary that it seems

(58:57):
he had little to hinde. Also in post they the
killer also knew Mary back in eighteen thirty eight when
she first vanished. Neither Cromellan nor Daniel Payne knew her
three years earlier, but there was someone who did know
Mary Rogers at the time of her first disappearance, tobacco
shop owner John Anderson. His interest in Mary seems to

(59:19):
have exceeded that of a typical employer. Mary and her
mother lived with him for a time before purchasing the
boarding house, and when Mary quit her job at the
cigar store, Anderson is said to have literally got on
his knees and begged her to stay. Anderson's business grew
steadily in the years after Mary's death. He invested in
real estate and became one of the wealthiest men in

(59:40):
the city. For all his success, though, it was impossible
for him to escape from the suspicion that he might
have had something to do with the death of the
beautiful cigar Girl. Rumors spread that he had been having
an affair with her, leading perhaps to an unwonted pregnancy
and its deadly consequences. He had managed to suppress the
information that he had been interrogated by the police in

(01:00:02):
connection to the crime, but the stories about him didn't stop,
creating the impression that one of New York's leading citizens
had a very ugly skeleton in his closet that he
wanted to hide. This seemed to destroy any political ambitions
that he had. At one point, political power brokers tried
to encourage Anderson to run for the office of mayor,

(01:00:22):
but Anderson declined, fearing that the publicity would cause even
more speculation about his links to the Mary Rogers case.
He grew bitter later in life and frequently blamed Mary's
death for thwarting his political misfortunes. His business partner, Felix
mcclowsky recalled one occasion when they walked past the place
that had once been the Rogers boarding house, and Anderson

(01:00:43):
cursed the young girl's memory as the cause of driving
him out of politics and belittling him in New York.
On another occasion, McCloskey quoted him as saying, I want
people to believe that I had no hand in taking
her off, but then added that he hadn't anything directly
himself to do with it. That's a statement that seems
to leave a lot unsaid about what Anderson knew and

(01:01:05):
when he knew it. Years passed, and Anderson became involved
in the spiritualist movement, the belief that the dead could
and did communicate with the living. He confided to several
friends that he was now in regular communication with Mary's spirit.
He said she appeared to him in the spirit from
time to time. I have had a great deal of

(01:01:25):
trouble about Mary Rogers, but everything is settled now. I
take great pleasure in communicating with her face to face.
An attorney who looked into Anderson's business affairs in later
years said that the murder made an impression which he was,
in after years, never able to shake off, and which,
when his faculties began to fail, an old age creep
upon him, lent a controlling force which undermined his intellectual powers.

(01:01:49):
Anderson eventually withdrew into a mansion in Tarrytown, where he
installed steel lined shutters to ward off a threat that
he was unable to name. He came to believe that
his children were trying to poison him, and that his
cook was plotting to kill him by putting pins in
his roast beef. Anderson died in Paris in November eighteen
eighty one. He was sixty nine, and he had outlived

(01:02:11):
Mary Rogers by forty years. At the time of his death,
he was widely believed to be insane. Some said that
Mary's spirit had driven him that way as a result
of his mental instability. His heirs would contest his final
will and testament for more than a decade. It was
during this period of legal wrangling in May eighteen eighty seven,

(01:02:33):
that discussion occurred about Anderson Poe and the Mystery of
Marie Rogett. There was a claim that Anderson had hired
Poe to write the story to draw suspicion away from himself.
No evidence exists to say this did or didn't happen,
but it is not as far fetched as it might seem.
It should be remembered that Poe and Anderson were acquaintances,

(01:02:54):
and that Poe, as the author of The Ill Fated
Conchologist's first book, would have been known by Andrewson as
a man willing to undertake almost any sort of hack
work for a price. It should also be noted that
in eighteen forty five, Poe took over the helm of
a magazine called The Broadway Journal, and that two weeks later,
advertisements for Anderson's tobacco Emporium began running in its pages.

(01:03:18):
At a time when Poe desperately needed money to save
the struggling magazine, Anderson paid in advance for three months
worth of advertisements. He was the only tobacconist in the
city to do so. While this does not prove that
Anderson commissioned Marie roget as a smokescreen, it is certainly interesting.
There's also a bit more. Felix McCloskey, Anderson's business partner,

(01:03:41):
later testified that Anderson had told him that Mary had
received an abortion the year before her murder took place,
and that he got into some trouble about it. Outside
of that, there was no grounds on earth for anybody
to suppose he had anything to do with the murder.
Although mccloskey's memory of dates may have been a little
off when he recalled this fifty years later, it does
suggest that Mary's first disappearance came about because of an abortion.

(01:04:06):
Whether Anderson was responsible for the pregnancy or merely paid
for it, is unclear, but the recollection that he got
into some trouble about it certainly explains his sensitivity about
the murder as the years went by. Even if Anderson
had nothing to do with the events of eighteen forty one,
which remains an open question, he would have placed himself
in a delicate situation if he had provided the money

(01:04:28):
for the earlier abortion, especially if Mary died while undergoing
a second operation three years later. Even if, as he
later claimed, he had no hand in her taking off,
his part in the earlier abortion, whatever it was, would
have branded him as a villain who helped set her
on the path to destruction. Given the level of outrage

(01:04:49):
about the case, one can only imagine Anderson's thoughts as
suspicion turned against him. But if the killer wasn't John Anderson,
then who could Poe have gained his intimate knowledge of
the crime from. Was he covering up for someone else,
or worse yet, could the writer have been involved in
the crime. There are those who have claimed that Poe

(01:05:10):
did indicate the murderer in his story, although he did
not name him, and that the murderer was Poe himself.
A few theorists have suggested that Poe met the young
woman while visiting the shop of his friend John Anderson.

(01:05:32):
If Mary did have an abortion three years before she vanished,
perhaps Anderson encouraged her to become involved with some of
the well known and often wealthy clients of the store.
Could this explain a relationship that Poe might have had
with Mary, if a relationship existed at all. It had
long been suggested that Poe engaged in romances outside of

(01:05:53):
his marriage, and by the time he returned to New
York with his wife and mother in law, Virginia was
already ill could have driven him into the arms of
Mary Rogers. However, by the time Mary died, Poe was
living in Philadelphia. He stated that he only learned the
case in the newspapers, but could he have been in
New York. It wasn't a long journey between Philadelphia and

(01:06:15):
New York even in eighteen forty one, so it's possible
that Poe could have made the trip. But was Poe
capable of murder? At this period in his life, Poe
was oppressed by poverty and a lack of literary recognition.
He was continuing to fight his battles with alcohol, and
his wife was dying. To his family and friends, he

(01:06:35):
appeared physically, if not mentally ill. Poe's state of mind
was mirrored by many of the characters in his stories.
He gave his literary creations the opportunity to indulge in crime, murder,
and bloodshed, and it's been suggested that these characters were
simply the darker side of Poe himself. They committed the
deeds that he would never dare to act on himself,

(01:06:59):
or would he. Could Poe, in a moment of mental
or alcohol induced frenzy, have surrendered to the dark instincts
that he kept trapped inside and allowed the bizarre behavior
of his written characters to emerge. Could he have killed
Mary Rogers? Most would say no, but behavioral psychologists have

(01:07:21):
demonstrated that criminals often give tips to reveal their identities
to the police, especially those consumed with guilt and with
a subconscious desire to be caught. Was this what Poe
was doing when he gave his decisive hint about the
identity of Marie Rogett's murderer? The writer was just like
the killer in the story, described as dark skinned with

(01:07:43):
a full head of black hair falling over his large forehead.
Before we go any further with this, I will step
in and say that this is very unlikely, as others
have found, though it is intriguing, There is, of course,
no evidence to link Poe to Mary rogers murder, aside
from that he probably knew her, frequented the cigar store,

(01:08:04):
and was acquainted with John Anderson. Even so, there are
many who argue that Poe simply knew too much about
the case. His story was just too detailed for a
man turning a newspaper story into a fictional tale. Poe
did rewrite portions of the story to fit his imagined facts, and,
as we'll soon see, made even more changes before it

(01:08:26):
appeared in a collection of his stories. But does that
point to his guilt? Did he know things about the
case that no one else possibly could? Did he really
know what went through the mind of a killer? Again?
Probably not, but it is interesting to consider how literary
history might have been dramatically altered if Edgar Allan Poe

(01:08:50):
was literally creating his own tales of murder and horror.
Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share

(01:09:13):
it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or
strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do.
The Beautiful Cigar Girl is a true story, and it's
a chapter from Troy Taylor's book Never More, The Haunted
Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, currently available
on paperback and as an audiobook. I have placed a link

(01:09:35):
to it in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a
production and trademark of Marler House Productions, Copyright Weird Darkness.
And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll
leave you with a little light. Proverbs thirteen, verse sixteen
A wise man thinks ahead, a fool doesn't and even
brags about it. And a final thought, I have learned

(01:09:59):
that what we have we done for ourselves alone dies
with us, but what we've done for others and the
world remains and is immortal. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for
joining me in the weird darkness.