Black Aggie

Black Aggie was the nickname of a bronze statue of a hooded, seated woman that stood over the Agnus family plot in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville. Felix Agnus was a Union general, diplomat and publisher of the Baltimore American; sources agree he bought the statue from sculptor Eduard Pausch around 1905 and that it was installed at Druid Ridge in the mid-1920s.

The figure is an unauthorised copy of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ “Grief”, the memorial to Marian “Clover” Adams at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Clover Adams died in 1885; her husband, the historian Henry Adams, never named the original, and the title “Grief” was popularly attached to it. The Maryland copy was a funerary monument, not the figure of any one person.

After Agnus’s death, local folklore grew quickly. It was said that Aggie’s eyes glowed red at midnight, that the dead gathered around her, that grass would not grow in her shadow and that anyone who sat in her lap at night would be haunted. Teenagers and fraternity pledges came to test the stories, which annoyed the family and, by the 1950s, the cemetery. In 1967 the statue was donated to the Smithsonian, which stored it as a copy; it passed to the General Services Administration and now sits in a courtyard near Lafayette Square in Washington. The empty pedestal remains at Druid Ridge, and Pikesville groups have recently asked for the statue’s return.

Black Aggie is a ghost story about the statue itself, with no named witness or documented encounter. It is a good example of how a grave marker acquires a legend, and of why respectful visitors should leave a working cemetery alone after hours.

Folklore that the statue’s eyes glowed, that it moved at night and that sitting in its lap brought a haunting. No investigated report exists.

The Agnus family plot at Druid Ridge Cemetery, Pikesville, and now the courtyard in Washington, D.C. where the statue is displayed.

Black Aggie appears in Maryland folklore books, newspaper columns and Baltimore urban-legend lists, and in recent local campaigns to bring the statue home.