This story was written by Poe for the Southern Literary Messenger (where he was employed) in 1835. The readers back in that era were horrified by the story's violence and complained to Thomas Willis White the editor of the Messenger. Poe later published a self-censored version of the work he believed he should be judged solely by how many copies were sold. That doesn't surprise me at all people were a lot more superstitious back then than they are nowadays. Had this story been written one hundred years earlier and published he probably would have been burned at the stake. 