Grace Rocky Hill Lutheran Church Cemetery

The Rocky Hill bleeding tombstone tradition centers on Mary Ann Fox, who died in 1783. The tradition reports that Mary Ann warned her husband before her death that if he remarried and his new wife mistreated their children, her tombstone would bleed in protest. Local retellings hold that the husband did remarry, that the stepmother was unkind, and that the marker began to show red discoloration shortly afterward.

The stone is reported in regional folklore writing to have been replaced more than once. Each replacement is said to begin showing the same red staining within a short period. A current inscription beside the grave reproduces the tradition in verse form: This stone is at the grave of a mother who died leaving several small children. The husband remarried as husbands do, and tis said that he and the stepmother were very cruel and unkind to the children, but Death could not this mother's anguish kill, when the gnarled oaks groan, and the pine trees moan, in this grave yard at Rocky Hill, the tale oft told on many a lonely stretch, is that this stone breaks out in bloody sweats, in this grave yard at Rocky Hill.

Visitor accounts consistently describe locating the marker in the cemetery's left rear corner, with two smaller adjacent stones for George and Mary Fox. The red staining is widely attributed by skeptics to iron oxide weathering of locally quarried stone, which is the most plausible mineralogical explanation; the tradition retains the marker's status as one of the most-photographed folklore sites in Frederick County.