Learn about his time on Sullivan’s Island and the mysterious woman said to have inspired “Annabel Lee”
There is a story, oft-repeated, that Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting poem “Annabel Lee” was inspired by an ill-fated romance with a Charleston woman during his brief military post at Fort Moultrie from 1827 to 1828. It usually goes something like this: While walking the beach on Sullivan’s Island, the young soldier met and befriended Dr. Edmund Ravenel, a local physician. The doctor’s cousin—or, in some versions, his daughter—was named Anna, and she and Poe fell in love. The pair met in secret among the gravestones of the Unitarian Church cemetery downtown and decided to marry. But Anna was betrothed to another man, and when her father discovered the tryst, he forbade her to see Poe again. Later, Anna fell ill and died. Heartbroken, Poe tried to visit her grave in the same churchyard, but to spite him, Anna’s father left it unmarked until Poe was gone. Later, a simple stone bearing the initials “A.L.R.” appeared, said to stand for Annabel Lee Ravenel.
It’s a compelling tale, but is there any truth to it? In fact, nearly everything we know about Poe’s brief time in the Lowcountry would fit on an index card. He arrived in Charleston Harbor on the brig Waltham on November 18, 1827, from Boston. Fleeing creditors, he gave his name as Edgar A. Perry and his age as 22, although he was 18. Stationed at Fort Moultrie, he served with the First Artillery Regiment of the U.S. Army. He left the Lowcountry the following December, when his battery was reassigned to Hampton, Virginia.
Fifteen years later, when Poe wrote his popular story, “The Gold-Bug,” a tale of buried pirate treasure, he set it on Sullivan’s. Another story, “The Oblong Box,” begins with a ship leaving Charleston for New York; and in a third piece, a hoax presented as a true account in the The New York Sun in 1844, a giant balloon lands on Sullivan’s Island after a transatlantic crossing.
And there, the scant documentary record ends. It’s certainly likely that Poe wandered the island and also made occasional forays into the city, but there is no evidence that he met Ravenel or that the physician had a cousin (or daughter) named Anna. Nonetheless, legends, hypotheses, and fabrications that “Annabel Lee” was based on a local woman have run rampant. Given his tenuous connection to Charleston, why has the author been so deeply written into its cultural history?
Poe, born in Boston in 1809, did have ties to Charleston beyond his military service. His parents, Eliza and David, were both actors who had performed in the Holy City. After being abandoned by her husband, Eliza returned to Charleston in January 1811 with Poe and his two siblings. Four months later, the family was in Richmond, where Eliza died, presumably of tuberculosis. A local couple, John and Frances Allan, took in the orphaned Poe and raised him as their own, though he and his foster father had a turbulent relationship. Eventually, Poe fled back to his birthplace, where he enlisted in the Army.
Exactly when the legend of Annabel Lee took root is impossible to say. As far as we know, it went unmentioned in the decades following Poe’s death in 1849. But in the early 20th century, as Charleston was experiencing a cultural revival of its own, local writers and artists began transforming Poe’s brief stay into a more substantial literary connection.
One of the first was John Bennett, an author, illustrator, and driving force behind the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the revival that became known as the Charleston Renaissance. When a shrine to Poe was erected in Richmond in 1922, Bennett took notice, challenging The State newspaper readers: “Has Carolina anything to say of her share in Poe’s career?”
Two young writers Bennett had mentored did just that. DuBose Heyward, later the author of Porgy, and Hervey Allen, who went on to write the best-selling novel Anthony Adverse, each included a poem about Poe’s time in the Lowcountry in their 1922 collection, Carolina Chansons. Soon after, Charleston Museum director Laura Bragg commissioned sculptor Dwight Franklin to create a diorama titled Poe on Sullivan’s Island, depicting the brooding writer on the dunes near Fort Moultrie.
In 1926, Allen went further with Israfel, his biography of the poet, arguing that the Lowcountry had played an important role in shaping Poe’s literary imagination, though his evidence was largely circumstantial. Yet one important piece of the legend was still missing: Annabel Lee. Despite all the interest in Poe’s Lowcountry years, no one had connected his doomed lover to a local woman—or to the Ravenel name.
A speculative local connection to “Annabel Lee” first appeared in print in 1922, the same year John Bennett issued his call for South Carolina to claim its share of Poe’s legacy. Robert Adger Law, a University of Texas professor and Spartanburg native, published a note pointing out striking similarities between “Annabel Lee” and a poem called “The Mourner,” which had appeared in the Charleston Courier in December 1807, little more than a year before Poe’s birth.
Law hypothesized that while stationed at Fort Moultrie, Poe may have researched his parents’ theatrical careers in old newspaper files, perhaps at the Charleston Library Society, and encountered “The Mourner.” It was an intriguing theory built entirely on conjecture: Poe did not write “Annabel Lee” until more than two decades after leaving Sullivan’s Island, and there is no evidence he ever saw the earlier poem.
Twenty years after Law’s theory, University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Hobson Quinn speculated in his 1941 Poe biography that the poet “had plenty of opportunity to talk with Dr. Edmund Ravenel, an eminent conchologist who lived during Poe’s service on Sullivan’s Island.” Oddly, in an otherwise carefully documented book, Quinn gave no source for the statement.
His theory appears to have rested largely on coincidence. Dr. Ravenel was an avid collector of mollusk shells, while Poe, years after leaving Sullivan’s Island, was paid to edit and lend his name to The Conchologist’s First Book, a shell-collecting manual. From those facts emerged the possibility that Poe had developed an interest in conchology while living on the island—and therefore might have known Ravenel.
It was a considerable leap. Poe showed no particular interest in studying shells or natural history before or after the project. More likely, Poe took the assignment for the same reason he took on other jobs: perpetually broke, he needed the money. Nevertheless, another piece of the legend had fallen into place. Charleston had already supplied Poe with a setting, a literary influence had been proposed for “Annabel Lee,” and now a Ravenel had entered the story. All that remained was to shape those disconnected threads into a relationship.
Flash forward to 1968, when a 19-year-old College of Charleston classics major named Caroline T. Leland wrote a letter to the News and Courier suggesting that the city’s historic past could be promoted more “to lucrative advantage.” For example, she matter-of-factly declared, “Edgar Allan Poe’s great love, Annabel Lee, certainly lived at Sullivan’s Island, the ‘Kingdom by the Sea,’ and is probably buried not too far from Fort Moultrie.”
The letter attracted the notice of Elizabeth “Betty” Verner Hamilton, daughter of famed local artist Elizabeth O’Neill Verner. Hamilton was preparing a limited “Sullivan’s Island” edition of “The Gold-Bug” under her Tradd Street Press imprint and sent Leland’s letter to Citadel professor Frank Durham, who was writing the introduction. His response was unequivocal: The idea of a Charlestonian Annabel Lee was “pure moonshine.”
Undeterred, Hamilton learned that Leland’s letter had been suggested by her professor, Alexander Lenard, who taught Latin and Greek at the college from 1967 to 1969. A Hungarian Jew who had emigrated to Brazil to escape the Holocaust, Lenard was a physician, novelist, poet, painter, musician, and translator, perhaps most famously translating Winnie-the-Pooh into Latin.
Hamilton happened upon Lenard at the post office just before he returned to Brazil. Lenard happily confirmed that he was behind the letter: “He twinkled and said, ‘I found a tombstone in a mossy cemetery. A wonderful trysting place for lovers. I’ll draw you a map.’”
And he did. Through Leland, Lenard sent Hamilton a small sketch of part of the Unitarian Church cemetery, marking a grave inscribed with the initials “A.L.R.” Enchanted by the story, Hamilton reproduced the map as a postscript to her edition of “The Gold-Bug” and added her own speculation: “Professor Lenard thinks ‘A.L.R.’ stands for Annabel Lee Requiescat.... But the R could be Ravenel.”
With that, the scattered pieces of the legend finally came together: Poe, Sullivan’s Island, Annabel Lee, a Ravenel, and a mysterious grave in a romantic Charleston cemetery. There was just one problem: The “A.L.R.” headstone belonged to the Rose family plot, not the Ravenels. Nevertheless, Hamilton’s edition generated enough interest that the Unitarian Church had to explain the discrepancy to visitors who arrived looking for the grave of Poe’s lost love.
The story gained another boost in 1982, when Charleston Evening Post writer Jack Leland revisited the mystery in his January 20 column, “Who Was Annabel Lee?” He repeated the theory advanced more than a decade earlier by what he coyly dubbed “the searching duo” without revealing that one half of that duo, Caroline Leland, was his daughter. He also disclosed just how casually the Ravenel name had entered the story: “the college pair…had gone through other aristocratic names such as Rutledge, Rouppel, and Roper, all beginning with the letter ‘R’” before settling on Ravenel.
No monument to Poe has been erected here, but he hasn’t lacked for tributes. In the early aughts, the now-defunct Creative Spark staged Poe: Back from the Grave, a series of vignettes from his stories and poems performed each Halloween in and around Fort Moultrie. In 2019, Julian Wiles’s 1996 play, Nevermore, imagining Poe’s final journey from Baltimore to New York, played again at the Dock Street Theatre with a character named Annabel Lee appearing throughout. And downtown ghost tours continue to tell the tale of Poe’s alleged romance, highlighting the Unitarian cemetery and describing sightings there of a woman in white searching for her lost love.
Sullivan’s Island lays claim to Poe more overtly. Its public library branch, housed in an artillery battery built for the Spanish-American War, bears the poet’s name. Popular restaurant Poe’s Tavern is crammed with photos and memorabilia devoted to the writer; in the men’s room, a recording of Vincent Price reading “The Gold-Bug” plays on a continuous loop. The tiny town even has three streets invoking him and his works: Poe Avenue, Raven Drive, and Goldbug Avenue.
Then there’s the tree. At Station 27 and Goldbug Avenue stands a magnificent oak with gnarled branches, long associated locally with the tree in “The Gold-Bug.” There’s just one hitch: Poe described Jupiter climbing a tulip tree.
Go just about anywhere on Sullivan’s Island today, and you will likely run into something that reminds you that Poe was there. Just don’t go looking for Annabel Lee.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingéd seraphs in Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Edgar Allan Poe
Published posthumously in 1849
For more on the writer’s life and literary legacy, turn to these titles—including a biography by this feature’s author
Poe by James Hutchisson (University Press of Mississippi, 20th anniversary edition, 2025)
Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe by J. W. Ocker (Countryman Press, 2014)
The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe by Scott Peeples (Camden House, 2004)
Listen to a recording of Vincent Price reading “The Gold-Bug” in 1974:
