During Spiritualism’s Victorian Era heyday, millions of devotees crowded around séance tables to contact their dearly departed loved ones. While Spiritualism’s levitating tables and trance mediums are familiar to most, much less known is poet Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on the movement. Join Chris Semtner, the Poe Museum’s curator and the author of Haunting Poe, as he reveals Poe’s associations with Spiritualism’s early practitioners and how his stories inspired and popularized their beliefs. The Webster Award-winning author has written several articles and chapters in addition to eight books about Poe, visual art, horror, pop culture, and cryptography. Semtner has written for Biography.com, Crime Writers’ Chronicle, Resources for American Literary Study, and other publications. He regularly speaks about strange and macabre subjects at various venues from the Steampunk World’s Fair and GalaxyCon to the U.S.