Pleasing Terrors

CHARLESTON GOTHIC Episode 4: Tekeli   The Charleston Library Society has survived fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and war—emerging each time with its treasures intact. Among those treasures: the world's most complete archive of Charleston newspapers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.   In this episode, we enter the stacks where a ghost named Hinson is said to wander, where Henry Timrod's blood-stained manuscript bears witness to a poet's final days, and where a century-old scholarly article waited decades for someone to understand what it revealed. What was Edgar Allan Poe really searching for when he visited Charleston's archives during his time at Fort Moultrie? For over a hundred years, the legend said he came looking for pirate treasure—the buried gold that would inspire "The Gold-Bug." But a 1922 discovery by a Texas scholar suggested something far more personal. Following threads that connect the Poetry Society of South Carolina, a Harvard-trained philologist, and the vanished sta