HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
An 1896 Baltimore County cemetery once home to Black Aggie, the bootleg statue whose legend outlived its 1967 removal.
7900 Park Heights Ave, Pikesville, MD 21208
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to visit
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved cemetery roads across roughly 200 acres
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1896 · Established 1896, dedicated 1898 · Burial site of General Felix Agnus and numerous notable Marylanders · Former home of the Black Aggie statue, 1926-1967
Druid Ridge Cemetery was established in 1896 and formally dedicated two years later in Pikesville, just outside Baltimore. The grounds, landscaped in the rural-cemetery style popular at the time, span roughly 200 acres and hold more than 18,000 interments, including work by Baltimore sculptor Hans Schuler and the graves of figures including cardiovascular-surgery pioneer Alfred Blalock, neurosurgery pioneer Walter Dandy, soprano Rosa Ponselle, and World War II spy Virginia Hall.
The cemetery's most notorious monument stood over the grave of General Felix Agnus, a Civil War veteran and longtime publisher of the Baltimore American newspaper, who died in 1925. Agnus commissioned sculptor Edward Pausch to create a bronze grave figure closely modeled on Augustus Saint-Gaudens' 1891 Grief, the memorial Saint-Gaudens designed for Marian "Clover" Adams at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. Saint-Gaudens' estate objected to the unauthorized copy, but Agnus kept it in place; it was installed in 1926, the year after his death, and became known locally as Black Aggie.
Decades of nighttime visitors, vandalism, and damage to the grave site led the Agnus family to donate the statue to the Smithsonian Institution in 1967. It later moved to a courtyard behind the Dolley Madison House on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., where it remains today, on federal property not generally open to casual public viewing. An empty pedestal now marks the statue's original spot at Druid Ridge.
Sources
Black Aggie accumulated a dense body of legend during her four decades at Druid Ridge. The most common dares held that her eyes turned red at midnight, that a pregnant woman who walked past would miscarry, and that anyone who sat on her lap after dark would be dead within two weeks. A separate strand of the legend claimed that grass would not grow within the reach of her shadow, and that the spirits of everyone buried nearby convened around her once a year.
The statue's brooding, shrouded pose, copied from Saint-Gaudens' famously ambiguous Grief, did much of the legend's work on its own; visitors and cemetery staff alike found it unsettling regardless of any specific story attached to it. That reputation drew increasing numbers of nighttime trespassers through the 1950s and 1960s, with reports of broken fencing and damage to the surrounding plot, which is what ultimately pushed the Agnus family toward the 1967 donation.
The legend outlived the statue's presence at the cemetery. Black Aggie remains a fixture of Maryland ghost-story collections and Baltimore-area ghost tours even though the object itself has sat in Washington, D.C. for more than fifty years, and Pikesville civic leaders have periodically floated the idea of bringing a version of the statue back to the cemetery.
Notable Entities
Druid Ridge remains an active cemetery open to visitors during standard daylight hours. The Black Aggie statue itself was removed in 1967 and is no longer on site; an empty pedestal marks its former location near the Agnus family plot.
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