Oblong Box

"The Oblong Box" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1844 in "Godey's Lady's Book."\
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The narrator of the story, while on a packet-ship journey from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City, becomes unusually curious about an oblong pine box being kept in the state room of an old school acquaintance, Cornelius Wyatt. His friend and his party are acting strangely but why is unclear. And then disaster strikes.