Image from the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus/Wikimedia Commons /Wikimedia Commons. The letter was selected for publication in The Sunday Times after journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call for tales of “striking coincidence." Striking indeed. The extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities between the novel's scene and the actual event. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival cannibalism route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. Now here's where it gets weird(er): In 1884, 46 years after the novel's publication, four men would be set adrift following the sinking of their yacht. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently eaten.
Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a sacrifice. Published in 1838, Poe's only completed novel details a mutiny on a whaling ship lost at sea. Photo by Albert Sterner/Wikimedia Commons. OK, here we go…Įxhibit A: "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-eating floaters, crunched skull survivors, and primordial particles. No, my time travel theory concerns the author's creative output, which you'll soon see is so flukishly prophetic as to make my outlandish claim seem plausible - nay, probable!
Tragic and curious, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could transcend the limits of space and time. Nor am I referring to the head-scratching details of the days leading up to his death: how he was found on the street near a voting poll wearing someone else's clothes, and during his subsequent hospitalization, he was alleged to babble incoherently about an unidentified person named “Reynolds."Īnd I won't even get into the confounding reports of a nameless figure who, for seven decades, would show up to Poe's gravesite in the early hours of his birthday with a glass of cognac and three roses. It's not just the well-known circumstances of his life - orphaned at a young age, father of the mystery novel, master of cryptology, maestro of the macabre. I'm pretty positive that Edgar Allan Poe had (has?) the power to travel through time. This story was originally published on HistoryBuff.
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