Tag Archives: Washington cemetery

The Legend of Black Aggie

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Photo from DC Curbbed’s collection of female statuary.  http://dc.curbed.com/maps/washington-dc-public-art-female.

by E. A. Black

I have always had a soft spot for cemetery statuary. I own a replica of the Bird Girl statue seen on the cover of the book Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. The original statue resides in a cemetery. (Editor’s note: It use to reside in Bonaventure Cemetery, but out of fear of vandalism, it was moved to the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah.)

When I die, I want to be interred in a huge mausoleum complete with Coptic or Masonic symbols around the door, even though I’m neither Coptic nor a Mason. If I can’t have a mausoleum, I’d love to have a beautiful statue of a shrouded woman or a classic adult female angel hovering over my grave.

I know none of this is possible (or affordable), so instead I have decided to donate my body to the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, popularly known as the Body Farm. I told my husband about it and he’s interested, too. On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to be buried beneath the floorboards of my home, with my skull sitting in a curio cabinet in the living room, so I may haunt the house, but that’s likely illegal, so the Body Farm it is.

Although I love statuary, one particular statue has frightened me since I was a child. Her name is Black Aggie. It was popular in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to scare the bejesus out of kids by telling her story. I didn’t see Black Aggie when I was a kid, although she stood in Druid Ridge Cemetery in nearby Pikesville. I begged my mother to drive me to Druid Ridge to see her, but she refused.

To me and many of my friends, Black Aggie was the stuff of legend. The life-sized statue depicted a grown woman (or man: the sex was indeterminate, but most thought of her as female) seated on a chair wearing a long, flowing shroud. The shroud covered her head, which looked down upon you from its height on a pedestal. Her expression was hard to read. She seemed pensive or sad. Considering her real name was “Grief,” such an expression seemed appropriate.

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The Adams Memorial, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Photo by Loren Rhoads.

The original statue was designed by a premiere sculptor of the late 1800s – Augustus St. Gaudens. She was commissioned by Henry Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams) in honor of his late wife Marion, who had committed suicide following the death of her father. It took St. Gaudens four years to create the statue, but once finished, she was described as “one of the most powerful and expressive pieces in the history of American art, before or since.” She became known as the “Adams Memorial” and later, “Grief.” Some say Mark Twain coined the latter name, after he saw the memorial in 1906.

However, the original statue is not the statue that became known as Black Aggie. That statue is an unauthorized gray replica made in the early 1900s by Eduard L. A. Pausch. The replica sat on the grave of General Felix Agnus, a local publisher. It is this replica for which the legend of Black Aggie was born.

The replica statue was harmless in daylight, but her legend took flight at night. My friends and I had plenty of stories to tell. She moved of her own accord at night. Her eyes supposedly glowed red at the stroke of midnight. If you returned her gaze, you were struck blind. Spirits of the dead rose from their graves to gather around her. Pregnant women touched by her shadow miscarried. Grass refused to grow in front of the statue. If you stood in front of a mirror and repeated “Black Aggie,” she’d scratch your face. The only positive legend about her was that if you left coins in her palms, you’d have good luck — if you were brave enough to get that close.

Rumors abound that a college fraternity hazed initiates by requiring them to spend the night sitting in Black Aggie’s lap. One young man took the dare and was left at dusk in Druid Ridge Cemetery. When his frat buddies returned in the morning to fetch him, they found him lying in the statue’s arms, dead. The horrified expression on his face made it clear he died from fright.

Another story involved a young man who came to visit the statue at night with some of his friends. The friends wanted to leave coins for good luck, but this idiot decided it would be great fun to put his cigarette out in her palm. A decade later, his body was found in a dump in South Carolina. He had been shot in the head. The culprit remained at large, motive unknown. Us kids simply knew Black Aggie was responsible.

Sadly, the statue was vandalized. Names and messages had been scrawled on her, her granite base, and the wall behind her. Although most of the graffiti had been removed, much of it remained, defacing the statue. Despite efforts to prevent further damage, the vandalism continued into the 1960s. The Agnus family sought to donate the statue to the Maryland Institute of Art, but she ended up donated to the Smithsonian.

Her final resting place brings me to my own encounter with the statue.

In the early 1980s, I was working as a camp counselor at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. Several new groups came in every week. One week, a high school camp came in with an architecture teacher. I sat in on his classes and we took a trip to Washington, DC, but this wasn’t your usual trip to the nation’s capitol. Instead of visiting the museums, we toured the various important forms of architecture in the area. I saw parts of DC I had never seen before.

The highlight was the Dolley Madison house. I can’t remember anything about the architecture anymore. I believe it was American Colonial. We toured the house inside and out and it was lovely. The garden was especially gorgeous. I wandered around by myself and came across a beautiful, life-sized statue of a person. In a shroud. Sitting on a chair. The teacher was standing next to me with a big shit-eating grin on his face. I stared at the statue and finally said, “Is this…?”

“Yup, it sure is.”

I stood in front of Black Aggie!

It was broad daylight. I couldn’t pull myself away. I turned to the teacher and laughed. “Her eyes aren’t glowing red.”

“Not during the day. Wait until nighttime. Bwahahaha!”

I don’t recall whether or not both of her arms were intact. There were stories that one of her arms had been severed. I also didn’t see any graffiti. Despite my childhood fears and the tall tales I had heard, I felt reverent standing in front of Black Aggie. She was an incredibly beautiful statue. Bigger than life. Kind of grayish. Her pensive expression was indeed very sad, as if she had suffered great loss. Her hands were exquisitely sculpted and quite large. I imagined that frat boy who supposedly died in her arms. Gave me the shivers.

I couldn’t resist. I touched her. The marble felt cool. Nothing happened to me. I didn’t drop dead a second later, nor was I rendered blind. I didn’t notice if any grass grew around her. She sat in the shade of some trees and seemed downright peaceful. I glanced at the ground and saw that her shadow fell across me.

“Good thing I’m not pregnant,” I said.

“Yup,” the teacher said. “You’d be a goner by now.”

Luckily, I had a camera with me and took a few pictures, but sadly I have not retained them. Still, I was delighted to have finally stood in front of the statue that scared the piss out of me when I was a kid. I was pleasantly surprised to see how beautiful she was.

I’d have been honored to have such a statue sitting on my grave. The local kids would come visit in fear of seeing her eyes glow bright red. I’d have risen from the dead just to see them running off, screaming. Black Aggie is one of the more exciting legends from my youth and I got to see her in the flesh (so to speak) when I grew up. As far as I know, she still sits in the garden courtyard of the Dolley Madison House. I should stop by for a visit the next time I’m in DC.

I’ll bring coins.

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elizabeth_blackE. A. Black has written dark fiction and horror for numerous publications including Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales Of Body Enhancements Gone BadMirages: Tales From Authors Of The Macabre, Teeming Terrors, and Wicked Tales: The Journal Of The New England Horror Writers Vol. 3

Ms. Black’s latest release, her erotic sci fi thriller Roughing It, is available at Amazon.

She also wrote about visiting Poe’s grave for Cemetery Travel.

E. A. Black Amazon Author Page

E. A. Black blog and website

Elizabeth Black Facebook page

Elizabeth Black Twitter

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Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

For the next year, I’m planning to put a cemetery essay up every Friday. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation — or if you got married in one. The submissions guidelines are here.

 

 

 

 

Cemetery of the Week #132: Rock Creek Cemetery

The beautiful entry gate to Rock Creek Cemetery

The beautiful entry gate to Rock Creek Cemetery

Rock Creek Cemetery
201 Allison St NW, Washington, DC 20011
Telephone: (202) 726-2080
Founded: 1719
Size: 86 acres
Numbers of interments: 13,000 interments or more
Open: Open daily, including holidays, from 8 am to 6 pm. The office is open weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm.
GPS coordinates for the Adams Memorial: 38° 56’ 55” N 77° 0’ 32” W

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Rock Creek Parish, began in 1712 as a mission church. It is the only surviving colonial church in what is now Washington, DC. According to the church’s website, “The cemetery’s beautiful, park-like setting is now a place of pilgrimage for people from all over the world, who come to see the remarkable variety of monuments and sculpture and often to visit the renowned Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.”

In September 1719, vestryman Colonel John Bradford donated 100 acres for the support of the church, which determined the site of the chapel. The land was logged, then farmed, and the proceeds supported the church for many years. Almost from the start, though, the area directly surrounding the church was used as a burial ground for parishioners. Some of those old grave markers still survive.

View of the goldfish pond

View of the goldfish pond

In the 1830s, the church decided to expand the area it used for burials and convert its land from farming to a public graveyard. Inspired by the success of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they utilized the natural rolling landscape when they laid out the roads like a rural cemetery. An Act of Congress established Rock Creek Cemetery as a burial ground for the city of Washington.

In the early 20th century, the church sold 14 acres of their graveyard for the construction of New Hampshire Avenue.

The Adams Memorial, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

The Adams Memorial, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

The memorial that everyone comes to see belongs to Henry Brooks Adams, a grandson of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the US, and great-grandson of John Adams, the second president. Henry Brooks Adams himself was a Professor of Medieval History at Harvard. His autobiography won a Pulitzer Prize, but he considered The History of the United States of America 1801 to 1817 to be his masterwork. After his wife Marian (called Clover) committed suicide by poisoning herself with photographic chemicals in DC, he commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt a monument to her. The statue is commonly referred to as Grief, but Saint-Gaudens called it The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace of God that Passeth Understanding.

I assumed that a world-famous memorial might be easy to locate, but since we visited on a Sunday, the office was closed. Church had let out for the day, save for choir practice, which I didn’t want to interrupt. After wandering for an hour – and admiring lots of lovely sculpture – we turned to the internet. The photo I found on Findagrave showed the memorial on a hill, facing away from the slope. We couldn’t find that view anywhere. The first GPS coordinates my husband Mason found led us back to the cemetery gate. Eventually we were able to find a map of the cemetery online that included section designations. The Adams Memorial is in section E.

The Adams Memorial's cypress are in the distance here.

The Adams Memorial’s cypress are in the distance here.

After you enter the cemetery, head toward the church. Before you reach it, turn right. Down slope from you, you will see a family plot encircled by a hedge of cypress trees. You have to walk through the hedge to find the statue.

The cemetery has a wealth of lovely sculpture. These include Rabboni by Gutzon Borglum (sculptor of Mount Rushmore) on the grave of Charles M. Ffoulkes, a Washington banker who collected tapestries; The Seven Ages of Memory by William Ordway Partridge, on the grave of Samuel H. Kauffman, who owned the Washington Star; and Brenda Putnam’s statue of a child on Anna Simon’s grave. There are many, many more worth seeing.

Detail of the Seven Ages of Memory

Detail of the Seven Ages of Memory

Other famous burials include Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, Charles Francis Jenkins, the inventor of television; Abraham Baldwin, a signer of the Constitution; Charles Corby, the creator of Wonder Bread; Gilbert H. Grosvenor, chairman of the National Geographic Society; two mayors of Washington, three Union Army generals, and four Supreme Court Justices. There are also a number of family members of famous people: the father of Alexander Graham Bell, the grandfather of Douglas MacArthur, the sister of Edgar Allan Poe, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt.

My family took the metro to Fort Totten and then walked through the little park past the police station to North Capitol Street. That takes you to the back of the cemetery. One of the gates on North Capitol Street is open on Sunday mornings, when church is in session. Otherwise, you have to walk around to where Rock Creek Church Road meets Webster to find an open gate. It’s a hike and there are no facilities when the office is closed.  You might be better off to rent a car.

The Fort Totten/Michigan Park neighborhood seems to be reasonably safe. People on Street Advisor warn against petty crime and robbery, but we walked all over without any trouble.

Useful links:

Rock Creek Cemetery homepage

The National Park Service’s page on Rock Creek Cemetery

A Huffington Post feature on the cemetery

Cemetery history

A Quickie Guide to the Cemeteries of Seattle

Cemeteries of Seattle (Images of America (Arcadia Publishing))Cemeteries of Seattle (Images of America) by Robin Shannon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good addition to the Images of America graveyard books. As is typical, the text is circular and no doubt leaves much out, but if it inspires a true guide (with color pictures!) to Seattle’s lovely Lake View Cemetery, then it will have done its job.

It did guide my own visits to the graves of Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee, despite the typo in the listing of Hendrix’s final resting place. Lucky for me, there is no Evergreen Cemetery in Renton, Washington.

The author did a good job with the Seattle pioneers buried in Lake View, including both photos of the people and of their tombstones.  Some cemetery books actually forget to show you what you’re looking for.

You can inspire your own exploration of Seattle’s permanent residents by getting your own copy at Amazon: Cemeteries of Seattle (Images of America: Washington).

Cemeteries of Seattle on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #49: Greenwood Memorial Park, Renton, Washington

Cemetery of the Week #69: Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Cemetery of the Week #69: Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery

Lake View's view of the lakeLake View Cemetery
1554 15th Avenue E
Seattle, Washington 98112
Telephone: (206) 322-1582
Email: office@lakeviewcemeteryassociation.com
Founded: October 16, 1872
Size: 40 acres
Number of interments: 17,000 or more
Open: 9 a.m. to dusk daily (4:15 in winter, 6 p.m. in spring, 8 p.m. in summer)

As opposed to Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, which looks out onto Lake Erie, Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery looks down from Capitol Hill toward Lake Union, Portage Bay, and Lake Washington.

Established as Seattle’s Masonic Cemetery in 1872, the cemetery was renamed in 1890. It lies adjacent to Volunteer Park, which served as Washelli Cemetery until Leigh Hunt, editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, demanded that the bodies lying there be moved so that the area could be enjoyed by the living. Some of these people had already been moved once before, when the city took over an original pioneer graveyard to make Denny Park.

The Denny family plot

Among those buried in Lake View Cemetery is Princess Angeline, the eldest daughter of Chief Sealth who gave his name to Seattle. Angeline’s given name was Kikisoblu, but after her conversion to Christianity, she was given a new name because she was “too handsome a woman to carry a name like that.”

At the crest of the hill rest four generations of the Denny family. Arthur Armstrong Denny and his wife Mary Boren Denny are credited with founding Seattle. Also in Lake View are Washington’s first governor (Elisha P. Ferry), Seattle’s first mayor (John Leary), Seattle’s first banker (Dexter Horton), and Seattle’s first shopkeeper (Dr. David Swinson Maynard, who declared his first wife dead so he could marry his second. Things turned awkward when wife #1 moved in with them, claiming half of Maynard’s land).

In the northeast corner stands the Nisei War Memorial Monument, dedicated in 1949 to Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight in World War II as a way to escape internment camps like the one in Puyallup, Washington.

Some of Lake View’s most interesting monuments draw from a wide variety of ethnic traditions, from Japanese, to Chinese, to Native American. One of my favorites was this one:

Lake View’s most famous permanent resident is Bruce Lee, who died in 1973 at the young age of 32 from cerebral edema caused by a bad reaction to a headache tablet. Beside him lies is son Brandon, who perished 20 years later at the age of 28, after being shot with an improperly loaded gun on the set of the original The Crow movie.

Bruce and Brandon Lee

Bruce’s large red granite slab identifies him as the founder of Jeet Kune Do (the Way of the Intercepting Fist), but his fans adore him for his movies: Enter the Dragon, Fists of Fury, and for upstaging the Green Hornet when he played Kato in the 1960s TV series. San Francisco-born Bruce Lee opened martial arts studios in Oakland, California and in Los Angeles, where he taught Steve McQueen and James Coburn, both of whom served as his pallbearers.

Brandon Lee’s monument is even more striking. Made of polished black granite, it has a swooping protuberance as if a shrouded figure is stepping clear of the stone. It includes a long epitaph which says in part: “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so limitless.”

Flowers, coins, pebbles, and other tributes often surround both graves, which lie just beneath the crest of the hill facing the water.

Useful Links:
Lake View Cemetery homepage

A History of the Capitol Hill neighborhood

More information about the removable of graves from the Washelli Cemetery

Famous gravesites in Seattle

More information about Princess Angeline

Haunted Lake View Cemetery‘s report on Princess Angeline

GPS coordinates from CemeteryRegistry.us

Other Seattle links on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #49:  Greenwood Memorial Park

My visit to Greenwood Memorial Park to see Jimi Hendrix

My review of Cemeteries of Seattle (Images of America)

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

Inside Jimi Hendrix’s monument, Greenwood Cemetery

The photo prompt for this week is another one that’s tough to illustrate in a cemetery.  I want to write about Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery for tomorrow’s Cemetery of the Week, so I’ll stick close geographically, if not in the same immediate grounds.

During my trip to Washington in February 2009, I wanted to visit Hendrix’s grave because his guitar-playing was so influential for my husband.  We were staying with two musician friends in Seattle, so they were kind enough to chauffer me out to Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton.  The weather was chilly and gray, but the rain held off while we poked around.

My host William chuckled about the conversation he’d face at work on the Monday after our visit. “Oh, what did you do this weekend?” he’d be asked.  “Oh, nothing,” he’d say.  “Just hung out in some cemeteries.”

I didn’t immediately recognize that some people might find such a thing unusual.  I’ve been going to graveyards so long that it’s second nature.  I always seek out graveyards when I travel.  Even at home, I may spend as much time in graveyards as I do in the park.  If I have some time on my own to kill, I often find the closest graveyard to explore.

I wasn’t sure if I should apologize to William, but he just laughed at me.  “I know how you are,” he said.  “It’s no problem.”

At least my hobby gets me outside.