BALTIMORE -- Imaginative tales continue to grow from the house where Edgar Allan Poe wrote his first horror stories almost 170 years ago.
Literary tourists cross paths with city folks every Saturday at Poe's home in West Baltimore, which is surrounded by a public housing complex that bears Poe's name.With the 150th anniversary of the author's death coming up Oct. 7, the meetings of these decidedly different cultures provides a glimpse into what frightens people today and how perceptions and misperceptions mutate into what might be called urban vs. tourist folklore.
Though police say visiting the Poe museum is safe, many tourists are wary of urban violence. They have repeated and exaggerated the story of a 1995 tour-bus robbery near the house so often that it has blossomed into a grotesque legend, curator Jeff Jerome said.
Many local residents are also leery of the museum.
Neighbors have developed an elaborate set of stories based upon a local myth: that Poe's ghost stalks the neighborhood. They tell stories about Poe's spirit appearing as a shadow seated at a writing desk, snatching and torturing children at night, clattering loudly across rooftops and hurling furniture.
Residents sit on their porches and watch the tourists come and go from Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum at 203 N. Amity St. But many who have lived nearby for decades have never ventured inside the literary shrine.
"We've always heard that children who walk past Poe's house at night hear strange noises and see shadows by the window -- then the kids disappear," said Delores Woodson, 35, who lives down the block from the author's home.
Literary connoisseurs feel comfortable exploring the dark and claustrophobic rooms where Poe conjured up images of mutilation, incest and premature burial.
Although the museum always has a police officer posted outside during visiting hours, tourists step quickly into their cars and speed off without making eye contact with the people watching from their porches.
Visitors tell patently false tales about public housing residents pointing them the wrong way through the maze of streets leading to the site, Jerome said.
"It happens all the time," he said. "You'll have a car full of tourists coming down the street, and they look lost. So someone in the neighborhood raises their finger and says, 'It's down there.' But of course, the tourists' windows are closed because they are frightened, and so they come in here and complain, 'They are telling us to get out of the area.' In fact, the people who live here are very nice, and they are just trying to direct them here."
The false tales are told against a surreal backdrop.
The narrow rowhouse from which Poe launched his literary career is beautifully maintained, with brightly painted planters out front. But it sits across the street from a row of boarded-up townhouses haunted by drug addicts, according to local residents.
"This is the home of a great man, but you should see what it looks like down here at 4:30 a.m. when the whole street is full of rats," said Eddie Richardson, 55, who lives in Poe Homes. "They are coming out of all the buildings, 8 inches long and mean. The cats won't even mess with them."
Wallace Holderby Clark III, community manager for Edgewood Management Corp., which manages the 280-unit public housing complex, describes himself as a former "redneck biker trash" tough guy. But he serves as the guardian of the poet's home.
He acknowledged that the city-owned Poe home and the public housing complex are a strange mix. "But we really try to keep things clean here, because this place represents Baltimore," he said.
The neighborhood west of downtown is poor, with boarded-up stores and weedy lots cluttered with overturned furniture and heaps of uncollected garbage.
Poe might have been poor enough to qualify for public housing if it had existed when he was alive.
An orphan neglected by a foster family in Richmond, Va., Poe moved to West Baltimore at age 23, after dropping out of the University of Virginia and being thrown out of West Point, according to Kenneth Silverman's biography "Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never Ending Remembrance."
Poe shared the five-room house on Amity Street from 1832 to 1835 with his grandmother, aunt and two cousins, one of whom, Virginia Clemm, he married when he was 27 and she was 13.
Although he kept his black frock coat clean, Poe was close to starvation, failing to find work as a teacher and editorial assistant.
"Without friends, without any means, consequently of obtaining employment, I am perishing -- absolutely perishing for want of aid. . . . For God's sake pity me, and save me from destruction," Poe wrote in one letter during his time on Amity Street.
His former home remains as dark as his imagination.
The rowhouse has windows hung with heavy curtains, a picture of his wife's corpse and illustrations of hooded skeletons. The museum, which is open from noon to 3:45 p.m. Saturdays, attracts about 5,000 visitors a year.
The atmosphere inside the museum could hardly be more different from the one outside.
On a recent afternoon, residents laughed on their porches as children romped in the spray of a fire hydrant.
Michael Irving, 39, leaned over the railing as tourists filed out of Poe's house and climbed into a car without looking up the street.
"That's how it is," said Irving, who has lived in Poe Homes his whole life but has never gone inside Poe's home. "People just come and go, in and out, they get right into their cars and they're gone. Why don't they stay around the neighborhood longer?"
JoAnne Butler, 29, a psychologist from Italy who was studying at Johns Hopkins University, described the chilling stories circulating among her Baltimore friends about the neighborhood around Poe's home.
"A lot of people said, 'Be careful. It's a ghetto. It's a high-crime area,' " Butler said. "But actually, I really enjoyed walking here. It wasn't bad. It's uncanny that there is so much fear of coming here, and this is the home of the man who practically invented fear."