What was with Poe's fixation on bricking bodies in walls?

The other night we we're watching Homicide: Life on the Street, and it's an episode where Munch is assigned a 10 year old case of a man bricked up alive inside a wall, which he finds out is similar to a story Edgar Allen Poe wrote. He never said which story, which annoyed me because there seem to be several, I have 3 books of Poe's stories and while I can't remember the names, 2 stories back to back involved a man being sealed up inside a wall, then you have the Black Cat in which he sealed a corpse up in a wall but that's more like the Tell-Tale Heart but I digress.

My mother says Poe must've done something like that himself, or wanted to, if he thought about it so much he wrote about it several times. I on the other hand wonder if he had been a witness to something like that and this was his way of getting it out what he had seen. Either way I don't think it's too likely, but I still wonder about it, anybody else have a guess?

Its just an Eerie way of disposing of someone knowing that life goes on around that wall and no one would know the secret it contains. Maybe he did wall up a few people.