The problem? It wasn't remotely true. Poe, a great lover of hoaxes, cooked up the entire thing. Poe's hoax proved to be one of the earliest works of science fiction, extrapolating existing technology to create a plausible account. And he may well have inspired other science fiction writers with his joke. Scholars of Jules Verne note that Verne was a great lover of Poe's writing (and, in fact, wrote a study of Poe's works), and have suggested that Poe's imaginary balloon voyage may have inspired Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon and Around the World in Eighty Days.

The first great balloon hoax [Guardian]

The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, VA already staged a faithful re-enactment of Poe's death last week, but the funeral will be much cooler than the original travesty. According to the Associated Press, Poe's cousin Neilson Poe, never announced his death publicly, and "fewer than ten" people attended the "hasty funeral." A train and derailed and crashed into a stonecutter's yard, shattering Poe's tombstone before it could be installed at his grave. Poe's enemy, Rufus Griswold, wrote him a "libellous obituary" that damaged his reputation for decades.

Sadly, there's not enough left of Poe's actual corpse to dig up and rebury in the new funeral, explains Jeff Jerome, creator of the Poe House & Museum:

When they dug up Poe's body in 1875 to move it, it was mostly skeletal remains. I've seen remains of people who've been in the ground since that time period, and there's hardly anything left.

But Jerome is still determined to make the funeral "as realistic as possible" for the packed house of fans, who are traveling from as far away as Vietnam for the event. So he's commissioned special effects artist Eric Supensky to create a new Poe corpse for the occasion, and it looks amazingly convincing. "I got chills," Jerome told AP. "People are going to freak out."

The funeral's master of ceremonies will be John Astin, better known as Gomez Addams on the Addams Family. Attendees will include actors playing Sarah Helen Whitman (a minor poet whom Poe courted), poet Walt Whitman, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Hitchcock. But the first eulogy will come from none other than Poe's biggest detractor, Griswold — to give the rest of the mourners some anti-Poe vitriol to react against. [AP]

Possibly the weirdest Poe-related event taking place this week is a Poe smackdown in Philadelphia, where a representative of the City Of Brotherly Love will take on representatives of Boston and Baltimore for the right to claim Poe's legacy. The event will include pro-wrestling-style music, and a legion of Poe impersonators to rile up the crowd. (But no actual Poe wrestling. I think.)

Is that not weird enough for you? Then how about the Baltimore Ravens sending a guy in a giant Raven costume out on the field to commemorate Poe's lingering death in Baltimore? (And hoping that the Poe connection will help end their massive losing streakintermittent winning streak?)

On Saturday, Phoenix, AZ plays host to "The Poe Show," including live reenactments of some of Poe's stories, as well as short films. The Smithsonian is hosting a Poe reading, with cake.

And there's a Poe lookalike contest and scavenger hunt in Petersburg, VA. And a Poe-related amontillado tasting in Baltimore. A year-long celebration in Baltimore, "Nevermore," includes a lock of his hair and a chunk of his coffin.

But Poe's also inspiring some actual new literary contributions. Veteran editor Ellen Datlow just published a new anthology of Poe-inspired stories called simply Poe. They're not pastiches or parodies, but rather stories inspired by the master. They include Gregory Frost's "The Final Act," a murder/ghost story about a man dogged by his childhood friend. And in Nicholas Royle's "The Reunion," a school reunion leads to "doppelgangers, identity crisis and unease."

Writes Blogcritics:

The guidelines for each author were simple: write a story inspired by any of the works of Edgar Allan Poe in whatever setting you'd like. As one might expect, the results range all over the place with some stories being funny, others mysterious, and some downright macabre. Yet what each have in common is that one way or another they have managed to capture the spirit of what made Poe's stories so effective. More than just your common garden variety horror story, filled with creaking floorboards and knife wielding maniacs (although he had his fair share of them, too) Poe was famous for his ability to create atmosphere, and in their own way each tale in this collection rises to that challenge in grand style.

Poe penned the dark future tale Mellonta Tauta which is set in the year 2848 as a series of letters written during a balloon voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. These letters satirically comment on the what has happened to the United States during the past thousand years. He'd also written, fourteen years earlier, a story about a man taking a balloon journey to the moon. Seems like Poe really liked hot air for some reason.

Author Thomas Disch posits in his book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of who claims that Mellonta Tauta firmly roots Edgar Allan Poe as the originator of modern science fiction, since Poe loved exploring different realities, many of them dark and brooding. He re-explored futures similar to that one in Mellonta Tauta in both The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sceherazade and A Descent into the Maelstrom.

Sylvester Stallone directing a biopic about Edgar Allan Poe? Welcome to your different reality. Hunky Mortensen, star of Lord of the Rings trilogy and the recent Eastern Promises, is reportedly considering taking the role as long as some changes are made to the script. First up will be cutting the scene of Poe toting an M-60 into battle. Quoth the Rambo: "Nevermore."

Mortensen Up For Poe Biopic [Dark Horizons]
An Introduction To Edgar Allan Poe's Hans Pfaal [Infinity Plus]