Through the Eyes of Poe

By Lance Theroux ► July 7, 2014

I like spooky things. From an early age, I loved to take supernatural journeys through books, films, and any real experience I could manage to scare up while exploring abandoned houses, old churches, or ambling through graveyards.

During the mid-1970s, I was given a chance to photograph the newly rediscovered catacombs beneath the 19th-century Westminster Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, my hometown, in what promised to be the creepiest adventure of a lifetime.

Now known as the Westminster Hall Burying Ground and Catacombs, this historic cemetery, crowded with exotic tombs and mausoleums, also happens to be the final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe, one of my literary heroes.

The graveyard was established in 1787 by the First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore. Over the years, it became the burial ground for influential local politicians, merchants, and veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. In 1849, poet and author Edgar Allan Poe was buried there after his untimely and mysterious death at the age of 40.

Two years after Poe was buried, a Gothic Revival church was erected over the cemetery, built on brick and stone arches to preserve and allow access to the graves beneath. Later, the arches were bricked in to prevent vandalism and keep out homeless people who were using the structure as shelter. Stories abound of vagrants, down-and-outs, and street people sleeping, drinking, and dying there – and even a legendary suicide in the dark, cavernous recesses under the church.

After the arches were sealed, the graves beneath the church were lost and forgotten until their rediscovery in the 1970s, when officials from the Edgar Allan Poe House began searching for a way to renovate and preserve the site. That's when I had my adventure, in what felt at the time like a real-life Poe short story.

My goal, while the premises were still in a state of dilapidation and neglect, was to capture the macabre ambience of the place on film as it might have been described by Poe in words. The result was a photo essay, 'Through the Eyes of Poe.'

I spent a day with an assistant helping me lug camera gear and set up lighting equipment throughout the dark spaces and crypts below the church. We walked, crawled, and climbed through a maze of graves and musty, deteriorating vaults where the skeletal remains and rotting coffins of countless departed souls had rested for nearly two centuries.

This cemetery was unlike anything I had ever seen, even in horror films – and the subterranean burial area was dark and creepy. Many of the coffins had crumbled away, leaving the remains of their occupants uncovered.

After a worker had opened a plaster wall before our expedition, we gained access to the catacombs through a utility room that had been constructed beneath the church decades earlier. There, we found tombstones, some toppled by time, and vaults disintegrated by humidity, their contents exposed to the dank air and, for the first time we were aware of, to the prying eyes of the living.

Throughout the photo shoot, I carefully examined every inch in front of me with a spotlight as I moved along in the darkness, afraid I might touch or nudge some mouldering object or ancient body part.

And then, it happened: I found an opening in a vault. I had to bend down to carefully maneuver my camera lens through a small iron door, then looked up to get my bearings. There, just a few feet from my spotlight, a gaunt face appeared out of nowhere and stared back at me, or so I thought in that first chilling instant of confusion and terror. Momentarily, I realized that the “intruder” had no eyes — only black, empty sockets laced with cobwebs.

Unveiled in his decaying coffin before eyes that never should have seen him, the skeleton of a well-dressed gentleman lay positioned almost two centuries after his burial as if he had recently been interred. Above his collarbone, he sported a well-preserved black bow tie.

I couldn't bring myself to photograph him close-up. Today I wish I had.

* * *

In the late 1970s, the building and cemetery were taken over by the University of Maryland School of Law, which occupies the rest of the square block where the Westminster Hall Burying Ground and Catacombs are located. After the law school established the Westminster Preservation Trust to save the landmark site, the premises were cleaned up and refurbished, with many tombs respectfully renovated and resealed.

Today the catacombs can still be observed during walking tours through the restored arches of the building's foundation, but not the way I saw them – as if through the eyes of Poe himself.

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