Sam believes Poe, who lived a few blocks from the graveyard on Amity Street, frequented the cemetery to visit his grandfather General David Poe and may have been inspired to write some of his macabre stories while wandering around the graveyard.

Sam recalls how creepy the catacombs were.

“Whenever I would go down there to work I would lock myself in. Somehow when I would leave, the doors would mysteriously be open. After that I never went down there alone,” he says.

Sam spent many hours digging through the layers of walls and dirt hiding an archway that led to burial vaults. Sam even describes an encounter with a male ghost who appeared while he was working.

In the 1970s Sam began organizing tours of the graveyard on afternoons and evenings. An “insomniac” tour by candlelight started at 11:00 p.m.

“I had high school and college students who volunteered to give tours,” says Sam. “We dubbed them the ‘Abbeys of Westminster.’ We had people come from all over the world to take the tours. In the beginning they were free, but eventually we started charging $2 a person,” he says.

Sam was awarded one of “Baltimore’s Best” by former Mayor William Donald Schaefer for attracting more than 2,000 people a year to the gravesite with his tours.

The publicity caught the attention of actor Vincent Price who starred in The Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum, two of Poe’s works that were made into movies.

“He was a great guy,” says Sam who holds up a picture of himself taken with the actor in front of Poe’s tombstone.

“I was the president of the Edgar Allan Poe Society at the time. I gave him a tour of the cemetery and awarded him a lifetime membership,” says Sam. “Afterwards I asked him if he would write me a letter saying if he enjoyed the tour.”

That letter along with dozens of articles, photos, letters, awards, and handwritten inscriptions from the tombstones he uncovered and a plat of the cemetery are all tucked away in a homemade scrapbook.

Over the years, there’s been strong speculation that the shadowy figure who leaves a bottle of cognac and three roses at the base of Poe’s memorial on the author’s birthday (January 19) each year is Sam. But Sam insists he has nothing to do with the ritual.