Eighteenth-Century Lutheran Cemetery · Maryland Folklore Site
Grace Rocky Hill Lutheran Church Cemetery sits on Coppermine Road in Woodsboro, in the rural northeast of Frederick County, Maryland. The burial ground is adjacent to Grace Lutheran Church and is documented in Find a Grave and BillionGraves listings under several names, including Rocky Hill Cemetery and Saint Peter Rocky Hill Cemetery.
The marker associated with the bleeding-stone tradition stands in the Fox family plot. Its epitaph is completely worn away, so the deceased is not named on the stone itself; regional folklore writing (Odd Things I've Seen) tentatively identifies the grave as that of the first wife of George Fox, who died leaving young children. The stone has been replaced more than once over the centuries, and a brass plaque beside the grave now carries a verse-form inscription that retells the bleeding tradition rather than supplying biographical detail.
The cemetery is privately owned by the Grace Lutheran congregation but is openly accessible to visitors during daylight hours. Visitors also note nearby stones for other Fox-family members, including George Fox and his wife Mary; Find a Grave records contain additional Fox-family burials in the cemetery.
Sources
- https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1430460/grace-rocky-hill-lutheran-church-cemetery
- https://www.oddthingsiveseen.com/2019/09/bloody-sweats-bleeding-gravestone-of.html
- https://billiongraves.com/cemetery/Grace-Rocky-Hill-Lutheran-Church-CemeteryRocky-Hill-CemeterySaint-Peter-Rocky/121935
Residual haunting
The Rocky Hill bleeding tombstone tradition centers on a worn stone in the Fox family plot, whose epitaph is no longer legible. Folklore writing tentatively identifies the grave as that of the first wife of George Fox, a mother who died leaving several small children. The tradition reports that she 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.
Notable Entities
The mother of the bleeding tombstone (unnamed; Fox family plot)
