Quoth Baltimore’s Poe House:’Evermore’

BALTIMORE — On a recent dark, dull day in Baltimore, the sounds of rapping upon the front door of the modest brick house echoed easily up and down Amity Street. With his frock coat and ivory-han- dled cane, the gentle- man demanding admittance was instantly familiar to the neighborhood residents and visitors waiting patiently outside.

They knew him as Edgar Allan Poe himself, the master of the macabre, author of such tales as “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Morella” and “Berenice,” all most likely penned in the very place to which he was now so furiously trying to gain admittance, this time to tell his stories.

This was not 1834, when the not-yet-famous writer regularly made his way to the small narrow space at the top of the stairs in this house to write. Nor was it October 1849, when his soon-to-be lifeless body was found in a Baltimore gutter.

But as the days run swiftly into night and the wind whips sharply down the city streets, Edgar Allan Poe comes again, even in 2006.

And in October at the E.A. Poe House and Museum on Amity Street, the connoisseur of all things ghastly comes on with a bang and a flourish. Performances of some of his most popular stories, such as “The Cask of Amontillado” or “The Tell-Tale Heart” are held in a small, cramped upstairs room, where the audience’s proximity to the performer helps intensify that sense of unlooked-for intimacy and creeping dread familiar to all readers of Poe’s tales.

“It’s a wonderful atmosphere,” says the man dressed as Poe, who has been known occasionally to take on the persona of actor David Keltz.

“There is nothing like performing in a place where Poe actually lived.”

The ever-present Poe

Around this time of year, it seems, Edgar Poe, or some facsimile thereof, is everywhere, ready to retell those dark tales of obsession and revenge that have captivated audiences for well over a century.

“He makes palpable every one of our primary fears,” says Kevin Barr, who has taught Poe as part of his American literature classes at Georgetown Day School in the District for the past 30 years.

“It’s all there, from isolation and alienation to the monster under the bed.”

Beyond what Walt Whitman called the “indescribable magnetism” of Poe’s life and work, there is something about Halloween and Poe that seems a natural — no, supernatural — fit.

Perhaps it is because so many elements of Poe’s work — dungeons, tombs, bodily rot, dismemberment and living death, not to mention black cats with eyes ripped from their sockets — are those the culture dwells upon on the day when, legend has it, the bridge opens between the world of the quick and that of the dead.

Or maybe the attraction has to do with the author’s own story, a life bounded by poverty and slander, and a death that remains to this day mysterious and unresolved.

“He wrote about things that might happen to you,” says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House, who credits Vincent Price and the B movies of the late 1950s and early ‘60s with sparking his own interest in Poe.

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