She was young. Beautiful. Familiar to the city’s restless men and sharp-eyed journalists. By day, she sold cigars in a little shop on Broadway—just a girl behind the counter. But when her body surfaced near Hoboken, facedown and bruised, she became something else entirely: a cautionary tale, a public spectacle, a mystery.

Mary Rogers was given many names. The Beautiful Cigar Girl. The Muse of Broadway. A siren lured to ruin. And long before we had podcasts or detective dramas, her story captivated a nation hungry for scandal. It drew in reporters, moral crusaders—and one very famous writer who believed he could solve her case from the page.

Macabrium is produced by Macabrium Creative and hosted by Megan Alda and Derek Stephen Brown, with writing and research by Chloë Kibbe, Megan Alda and Derek Stephen Brown. 

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Episode Reference Material

The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York – Amy Gilman SrebnickEdgar Allan Poe Tried and Failed to Crack the Mysterious Murder of Mary Rogers
The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers
The Life of Mary Rogers
The Mysterious Murder of “Cigar Girl” Mary Rogers, 1841
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

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