Part 42: Toasting the Toaster

The five of us huddled in the dark catacomb beneath Westminster church, waiting to see what might happen. The frozen bare dirt was as hard as concrete, drawing the heat from my body.

We passed the time talking and taking turns crawling into ancient family tombs holding generations of skeletons, bones tumbling from crumbling wooden coffins.

At around 1:30 a.m., we were startled by a flashlight shining into the catacomb from the outside. Somebody was in the cemetery, trying to peer into the catacomb. We stumbled through the darkness, crawling over burial vaults, trying to get a better view.

The person began rattling the bars enclosing the catacomb and banging on the Plexiglas, moving from arch to arch around the foundation of the church.

He was taunting us, daring us to chase him.

With the catacombs locked from the outside, we had no way out into the cemetery to engage in his sport. We ran back up the stairs into the church, feet pounding on the floorboards, up to the second floor rear window of the parsonage. We peered over a hissing radiator through the window overlooking the cemetery.

“Can you see anything on the grave?” Jerome asked.

“There’s somebody,” I said. “Look at that!”

“Ooh,” said the student standing next to me.

A tall, slender figure stood by a brick wall in the eastern side of the cemetery, in a clearing behind Poe’s grave, looking toward the corner of the church where we would have appeared had we been able to give chase.

He had light hair, blond or gray, and wore what appeared to be a period costume, with a flowing black cape. In his left hand, he held a gold-tipped talking stick.

For a moment, time seemed to stand still. Only for a moment.

Standing at the window next to me, one of the students tapped lightly on the glass. The man’s face swiveled up toward us. He raised his hand holding the walking stick, either waving or shaking his fist at us.

The cape swirled around his body as he seemed to move toward the brick wall, and then he vanished into the night. The other side of the wall, the courtyard of the law school library, allowed three different escape routes to the street.

We went outside and found, at Poe’s original burial spot deeper in the cemetery, a half-empty bottle of cognac and three long-stemmed red roses.

I stood at that roughly 8-foot high wall, as I have many times since then, looking for a handhold or anything else that would explain how the Poe Toaster was able to get over—or through—the wall in one effortless, smooth motion.

We took the cognac and roses back inside the church. Giddy with excitement over what we had witnessed, we each took sips of the remaining cognac to celebrate. Jerome asked us not to reveal the brand of cognac—one of the details he uses to distinguish the genuine Poe Toaster from copycats.

In my hands, the tape recorder capstan was still turning.

Other Parts of the Poe Toaster Tale:

I.
II.
III.
Next: Into the Studio