Weird World Adventures Season 2 Spotlight: Episode 7 American Gothic

Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore in 1849 under circumstances that remain, to this day, genuinely unexplained. He was found in a state of delirium outside a tavern wearing clothes that weren’t his, repeatedly calling out the name “Reynolds,” and died four days later without ever becoming lucid enough to explain what had happened to him. Various theories exist: rabies, cooping (a form of electoral fraud that involved forcing men to vote repeatedly while keeping them intoxicated), heart disease, carbon monoxide poisoning. None has been definitively proven. The man who invented the detective story died as his own unsolved mystery, which is either a cosmic joke or a cosmic gift depending on your sense of humor. He was the true American Gothic.

But while Baltimore gets most of the Poe mythology — and rightly so — Richmond, Virginia, is where Poe actually grew up. Where he spent formative years. Where he worked as a literary journalist, fell in and out of love, and developed the sensibility that would eventually produce “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Richmond is, in a meaningful way, where Poe became Poe.

Michael and I spent time in Richmond following his footsteps for this episode of Weird World Adventures, and what I discovered is that the city has done something genuinely interesting with its Poe heritage: it’s woven it into the fabric of the city without making it a caricature. This is harder than it sounds.

The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond is the oldest Poe museum in the world — appropriately, it’s housed in the oldest surviving house in Richmond, even though Poe himself never lived there. The collection includes some extraordinary artifacts: a lock of Poe’s hair, his walking stick, personal belongings that create an odd intimacy with someone who died over 170 years ago. There are letters. There are manuscripts. There are portraits that watch you from the walls with an expression that is either brooding or judgment, and it’s genuinely hard to tell which.

But my favorite stop in this episode is the Byrd Park Pump House, and I want to spend a moment on it because it’s the kind of place that Poe himself might have invented if he hadn’t been busy inventing modern detective fiction. The Pump House is a Victorian waterworks building constructed in 1883 — this extraordinary Romanesque Revival structure on the banks of the James River, all brick arches and ornate detail, designed with an architectural grandeur that was completely unnecessary for a functional pump station and completely necessary for the souls of the people who built it. The Victorians, bless them, believed that even infrastructure should be beautiful.

The Pump House hosted dances and social events in the late 19th century. It fell into disuse. It became the kind of beautiful ruin that makes you acutely aware of the passage of time in your chest rather than just your head. There’s an event called Poe at the Pump House that brings his work back to life in that space, in that atmosphere, in a way that felt absolutely correct. Some writers belong in certain places. Poe, with his preoccupation with decay and beauty and the thin membrane between life and death, belongs in a gorgeous crumbling building by a river.

I’ve been thinking since we filmed this episode about what it means to follow someone’s footsteps through a city — to try to inhabit the physical geography of a life lived differently, in a different century, under different pressures. You can’t become them. You can’t even fully understand them. But you can walk the same ground and let the city tell you something.

American Gothic is streaming on Amazon Prime, free for Prime members internationally. Free streaming is also available through the Fawesome app on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and more. The tell-tale algorithm will keep recommending it. You might as well give in.