Agnes of Glasgow

Camden is the oldest inland city in South Carolina, and its old burial grounds hold some of the state’s earliest graves. The Quaker Cemetery, founded in 1759 when Samuel Wyly conveyed four acres for a rent of one peppercorn a year, grew into a large cemetery of about fifty acres, and the adjoining Old Presbyterian Cemetery was deeded to it in 1815. Among Camden’s best-loved tales is the one told about a small, fenced grave inside a stone enclosure there, whose worn stone is said to read “Here Lies the Body of Agnes of Glasgow.”

According to the legend, as written up by South Carolina author Tom Poland in 2017, Agnes was a young Scottish woman born in Glasgow who followed her lover, Lieutenant Angus McPherson of the British Army, to the American colonies during the Revolutionary War. She stowed away on a ship, landed in Charleston and set off for Camden, about 127 miles inland, because she believed his regiment was nearby. She wandered through towns and wilderness, fell ill and died in about 1780 at the age of around twenty, before she could find him. In the best-known version a Wateree leader called King Haigler, who had befriended her, buried her at night.

The record is less romantic. According to Wikipedia, Hagler (also written Haigler) died in 1763, long before Agnes would have reached Camden, so the two could not have met as the story says. Local historians quoted on Wikipedia add that the British army was not in Camden when she is supposed to have died, and none of the sources consulted for this entry documents an Angus McPherson or Agnes herself. Even the grave’s location is disputed: Roadside America places it in the Old Presbyterian Cemetery on Meeting Street, the story itself speaks of the Quaker graveyard, and Wikipedia ties the haunting to Bethesda Presbyterian Church. All three lie within the same few blocks.

As a ghost story, the legend is gentle: people say Agnes still walks the cemetery in search of McPherson. Visitors leave coins, stones and other tokens on the grave, and Poland wrote humorously that after a visit he fell ill for three days, without blaming Agnes. A local newspaper listing says simply that she “died of a broken heart.” It has drawn ghost hunters from across the country. If you go, treat the cemetery as a place where real Camden families are buried and visit by day.

Folklore of a woman’s ghost wandering the cemetery looking for her lover; visitors leave coins and stones at the grave. There are no named witnesses or documented investigations.

The small enclosed grave in Camden’s Old Presbyterian and Quaker burying grounds, with the legend also linked to the nearby Bethesda Presbyterian Church.

Agnes appears in South Carolina ghost anthologies, in Tom Poland’s essays, on Roadside America and in Camden’s local guides. Visitors leave offerings on her grave, a custom shared with other legendary graves.