After the annual visit to Edgar Allen Poe’s grave in Baltimore by a mysterious figure called the “Poe Toaster” failed to occur this year for the third straight time, it appears the tradition has ended forever.

After the annual visit to Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore by a mysterious figure called the “Poe Toaster” failed to occur this year for the third straight time, it appears the tradition has ended forever.

The tributes of an anonymous man in black with a white scarf and a wide-brimmed hat, who leaves three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe’s original grave on the writer’s birthday, are thought to date to least the 1940s. A crowd gathered outside the gates of the burial ground surrounding Westminster Hall to watch for the mysterious visitor. While three impersonators appeared, the real “Poe Toaster” did not, said [Jeff Jerome, Poe House and Museum Curator].

To this day no one really knows who the man was.