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CHAPTER 5

Druid Ridge Cemetery

PIKESVILLE

The Blackshere monument at Druid Ridge Cemetery is one of the spots at the site around which people have reported paranormal phenomena.

Almost as soon as the sculpture was in place, it acquired a reputation as something supernatural. Groundskeepers would apprehend two or three teenagers a week trying to test their nerve. The cemetery became a popular site for midnight fraternity initiations, where an anxious pledge might be required to sit on the lap of “Black Aggie” to see whether it was true that her arms would reach out and embrace you. It was said that her eyes turned red after midnight, and that anyone returning her earthly stare would go blind. Just as the clock struck twelve, it was claimed, she would let out a blood-curdling shriek, over a background of clanking chains.

—Mary Ellen Thomsen, Druid Ridge Cemetery

ANY SEARCH FOR INFORMATION about paranormal activity at Druid Ridge Cemetery will turn up innumerable references to the legend of “Black Aggie,” a statue with which there is associated a strange story replete with peculiar details both mundane and preternatural. This is somewhat unfortunate, in that on the one hand it draws attention away from more worthy and genuine stories associated with the beautiful site—and on the other that the statue has not actually resided on the site for more than forty years, despite references in sources published since then that implies it still does.

In 1925, Felix Agnus, a U.S. Army brevet general during the Civil War who thereafter became a prominent publisher, placed over the grave of his wife the bronze statue of an androgynous robed figure by sculptor Edward L.A. Pausch. Controversy sprung up almost immediately around the sculpture, which was an unauthorized, some said inferior, reproduction of an allegorical statue by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens erected at the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C. (ironically, the name Black Aggie has subsequently been applied by many to the original). Agnus successfully sued the party who sold him the imitation statue but thereafter refused to remove it from the gravesite.

Perhaps it would have been better if he had. Almost immediately, the statue became a magnet for young vandals whose criminal depredations were dismissed by those whose property was not being destroyed as “rites of passage.” For four decades, people performed inane rituals at the site, scrawled obscenities on the statue and the marble pedestal upon which it rested, and in one case, actually chopped off part of the statue with a hacksaw.

Eventually, the despairing Agnus family decided to have the statue removed from the site to a place where it might be appreciated. The Maryland Institute of Art expressed interest in the statue but refused to pay for a base to support it. The Smithsonian Institution accepted it in 1967 and promptly put it into apparently permanent deep storage, despite the family’s belief that it would be given a prominent place. It was eventually moved to the rear courtyard of the Dolly Madison House, now part of the Federal Courts building in Washington, D.C. (although legends persist in some circles that the statue was never actually removed from Druid Ridge Cemetery and is actually buried beneath the Agnus family gravesite or hidden elsewhere on the burial grounds).

While removal of the statue ended the history of pranks and vandalism associated specifically with it and the Agnus plot, it did not end the incidence of apparently genuine paranormal phenomena reported by visitors to the site, and it remains a popular venue for investigators.

Psychic Beverly Litsinger of the Maryland Ghosts and Spirits Association, for example, has detected spiritual presences at Druid Ridge Cemetery. She also told me about the apparition of a dark, shadowy figure that appears in the middle of the cemetery and can be seen walking toward one of the graves. Other people have reported a wide variety of other phenomena at specific areas around the cemetery—especially around the Gail, Marburg, and Blackshere family burial plots—to include orbs, mists, EVPs, and apparitions.

Much of such activity, to include phenomena similar to what was traditionally associated with Black Aggie, has been reported around the striking green bronze Gail monument, a distinctly female figure that, despite the fact that it looks very little like Black Aggie, is often erroneously identified with the more famous statue. It is worth noting, however, that many of the stories about Black Aggie mention physical characteristics that it does not have (e.g., an arm that could be sawed off), but which the Gail statue does. This statue is located just a few hundred feet away from where Black Aggie formerly sat.

My mother and I visited Druid Ridge Cemetery in early June 2009 and were immediately struck with the magnificence and size of the place, a sprawling, 208-acre site that is truly a city of the dead. The cemetery includes numerous above-ground family and community mausoleums, columbaria for cremated remains, raised and sunken gravestones, bronze and marble statuary of every sort, and a staggering variety of sculpture that includes everything from obelisks to Celtic crosses and a significant number of monumental benches where people can sit to meditate upon life and death. It is, in short, an essay in stone, earth, and landscaping on the American funerary tradition over the past twelve decades.

The cemetery was established on January 14, 1896, on the site of a large historic estate called “Annandale” that was being operated as a dairy farm. The largest of the more than two dozen sections of the cemetery, where many of the most interesting and impressive monuments can be found today, is named for this historic property.

People have seen and heard any number of strange things around the monument to the Marburgs, a family with a strange and almost gothic history.

Druid Ridge itself, a highland area three miles north of Baltimore, had received its name at least in part because of the massive native oaks—a type of tree strongly associated with the Celtic priests known as druids—that graced its beautiful and mysterious slopes. Some writers have implied that the name of the site is somehow derived from the Ancient Order of Druids, a fraternal organization founded in 1781 that migrated from England to the Americas in 1833 and which called its lodges “groves.” There is no direct evidence, however, that this secret society ever operated a lodge in or around Baltimore in general or on the misty ridge in particular.

But it would be safe to say that to us the site did indeed feel magical, very possibly haunted, and undeniably—although not surprisingly, it being a cemetery—somewhat melancholy. It rained steadily the entire time we were there, the heavens mourning the nearly forty-thousand departed souls buried in the fields around us.

During our visit to the cemetery we were each drawn to particular memorials about which we knew nothing before our visit—which made it all the more startling when we discovered that of the thousands around us, they were among a handful that have been highlighted in various published works about the cemetery and around which other visitors have reported paranormal phenomena.

One of these was the Marburg family monument, which my mother was undeniably drawn to. It consists of a large private mausoleum, before which is a statue of what I immediately took to be Icarus. The inscription upon it revealed it to be dedicated to Theodore Marburg Jr., an American who had served with the British Royal Flying Corps during World War I and died four years after the conflict ended, at the age of just twenty-nine. What might have caused his spirit to remain at the site was not immediately obvious, although we wondered if some sort of lingering illness from the Great War might not have contributed to his demise. (Some research after our visit revealed a strangely gothic family history and any number of possible candidates for ghosthood, including a manipulative father and a deranged maiden aunt; see the sidebar to this chapter for more.)

At around the time my mother was occupied with the Marburg monument, I was exploring nearby and kept catching movement out of the corner of my eye, all from the direction of a memorial that I could not make out well from where I was. This happened several times, but each time I looked, there did not seem to be anything there but immobile stone. My eye was consistently drawn, however, to the back of a white stone sculpture a few hundred feet away, which closer examination revealed to be a mourning woman in classical garb standing watch over the Blackshere family sepulcher. The movement in the corner of my eye ceased once I reached it, and was replaced by the odd feeling that there was a presence of some sort centered on the statue, which seemed as if it might animate at any moment. I was not surprised to subsequently learn that other people have, in fact, reported similar experiences around the Blackshere monument and that many consider it to be haunted by the spirits of at least some of the family it memorializes.

Based on our cursory experiences at Druid Ridge Cemetery, we were not surprised that many other people had come away from the place believing it was haunted or having experienced paranormal phenomena there. Black Aggie is no longer there but thousands of souls and innumerable other stories are, and the place certainly warrants continued investigation.

Spotlight on Ghosts: The Marburg Monument

One of the monuments at Druid Ridge Cemetery at which people have reported experiencing various paranormal phenomena—including sensing a spiritual presence, seeing apparitions, and capturing mists and orbs in photographs—is the Marburg family mausoleum, in front of which is a bronze figure of Icarus.

The base of this statue is fitted with a plaque dedicating it to Theodore Marburg Jr., which mentions his service with the British Royal Flying Corps during World War I and includes some rather strange verbiage about the need for an American presence in Europe. It also indicates that Theodore was born in 1893 and died in 1922, begging the question of how he might have died not during the war but a mere four years after it ended.

Investigation after our return from the site revealed the strange, convoluted, almost gothic history of the Marburg family in general and the macabre events surrounding the death of Theodore in particular. A brief review of Theodore’s life during and after the war would certainly suggest he was an almost classically tormented soul, and it was not hard to believe he might haunt the final resting place of his remains.

When the Great War began, Theodore was a student at Oxford, in England, and in the furor to stop the German advance across Europe he joined the British Royal Flying Corps—despite the fact that Americans were prohibited from serving in foreign military organizations and that his father was a career diplomat and a friend of former President William Howard Taft.

In 1916, Theodore’s plane crashed while flying a frontline mission and, as a result of the injuries he sustained, he had to have his left leg amputated. During his convalescence, he met and married a Belgian baroness who was also a divorcee and the mother of a three-year-old girl and whose background was, suffice it to say, a bit questionable.

Not much about the couple’s life together is known, but two years later, when Theodore became a partner in a cattle ranch in New Mexico, the baroness refused to go with him. In an exception to the norms of the era, he claimed abandonment and they were divorced shortly thereafter.

In early January 1922, Theodore was married again, this time to a woman ten years his junior. She was not with him at his ranch either when he put an automatic pistol to his head seven weeks later and shot himself. It took him a week to die, during which the doctors had to remove his eyes. His wife arrived from Baltimore after he had expired.

There is a lot that is not known about the mounting tragedies that afflicted Theodore in life, but it is not too hard to imagine that his tormented spirit might still linger on our own sphere after his earthly troubles had been brought to an end. But, as it turns out, a number of the other Marburgs have weird stories as well, and it is easy to conceive of any number of them lingering on as ghosts. These include Theodore Marburg Sr., a man who cultivated a reputation as a peacemaker but urged the United States to enter World War I, and his sister, an increasingly desperate spinster who at one point unsuccessfully offered a European tour guide two-hundred-thousand dollars to marry her (he declined, opting for her niece instead). Any of them—maybe all of them—might be among the spirits that continue to linger among the sepulchers and monuments of Druid Ridge Cemetery.

“Black Aggie” no longer sits over the Agnus family plot at Druid Ridge Cemetery, but some say her presence can still be felt there.