It is 1838 and John Anderson’s Liberty Street cigar shop was hopping with newspapermen of New York City. They weren’t there just to buy their cigars, but to buy their cigars and fawn over "The Cigar Girl" - Mary Rogers. In 1941, Mary went missing after a trip to New Jersey and her body was found
near Sybil’s Cave, a bucolic Hudson riverside spot in Hoboken, New Jersey. Many speculations arose. Was it her fiance? Her ex fiance? Or could it have been her good friend Edgar Allan Poe?
Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”; “The Mary Rogers Mystery Explained”, New-York
Daily Tribune, Nov. 18, 1842; “The Case of Mary C. Rogers”, The
New-Yorker; Aug. 14, 1841; Stashower, Daniel, The Beautiful Cigar
Girl (PenguinBooks, 2006); Srebnick, Amy Gilman, The Mysterious
Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth Century New York (Oxford
University Press, 1995); Meyers, Jeffrey, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and
Legacy (Cooper Square Press, 1992)