19th-century rural-style cemetery established 1846 in Lancaster city, burial place of General John F. Reynolds and painter Charles Demuth, anchored by the Augusta Bitner monument and its debunked-but-enduring 'Walking Ghost' legend.
205 E Lemon St, Lancaster, PA 17602
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to visit during daylight hours. Donations support the nonprofit cemetery's preservation.
Access
Limited Access
Rolling 20-acre cemetery with paved internal drives, grass plots, and uneven historic ground.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1846 · Burial place of Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds (killed at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863) · Burial place of painter Charles Demuth (d. 1935) · Mid-19th-century rural-cemetery movement example
Lancaster Cemetery was incorporated in 1846 and began burials in 1847, founded as a non-sectarian, nonprofit rural-style cemetery to serve the City of Lancaster. The cemetery covers approximately 20 acres on East Lemon Street and reflects the mid-nineteenth-century 'rural cemetery' movement that produced landscaped, park-like burial grounds intended for both interment and daylight public visitation.
The cemetery contains a number of historically significant Lancaster burials. Civil War Union Major General John Fulton Reynolds, born in Lancaster and killed on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, is buried here in the family plot. Reynolds remains one of the highest-ranking Union officers killed during the war. The modernist precisionist painter Charles Demuth, who lived and worked in Lancaster, died at his home on October 23, 1935, and was buried in the family plot in the cemetery.
The cemetery's most-photographed monument is the granite statue of Augusta Harriet Bitner, who died on June 1, 1906. The six-foot-five-inch statue stands in the northeast corner of the grounds beside a broken column carved with bronze ivy; the inscription reads 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.' A second carved phrase—'Could love have kept her?'—appears on a nearby pillar.
Lancaster Cemetery is operated by a nonprofit board and has periodically faced funding challenges, with public reporting on the cemetery's preservation needs appearing in local press. It remains active for visitation and a small number of plot transactions.
Sources
The 'Walking Ghost of Lancaster County' is the cemetery's best-known story. According to a long-running local tradition retold on commercial ghost tours and in regional press, Augusta Bitner's statue is said to weep real tears and to wander the cemetery at night 'with flaming green eyes.' The popular legend frames her as a young bride who died on her wedding day after tripping on her gown and breaking her neck on the stairs, with parental disapproval and a hidden pregnancy added as dramatic flourishes.
The documentary record contradicts that legend, and Lancaster-area journalism has actively pushed back on it. Uncharted Lancaster's October 2021 essay 'The Sad Tale of Augusta Bitner and Her Wandering Statue' lays out the death certificate filed for 'Mrs. Augusta Harriet Tevis,' which records her death at 5:05 AM on June 1, 1906, at 4948 Larchwood Avenue in West Philadelphia, after 40 days of medical care, from 'intestinal hemorrhage with typhoid septicemia.' Bitner married Stanley Tevis more than a year before her death, honeymooned in upstate New York and Canada, settled in West Philadelphia's Garden Court neighborhood, and had a daughter Sylvia born December 25, 1905. WITF's October 2025 piece 'Ghosts, Legends, and the Truth Behind Lancaster County's Most Haunted Stories' likewise reports she 'actually lived about a year [after her wedding], had a child, and then passed away from typhus when she returned to Lancaster to visit family,' attributing the enduring legend to the striking nature of the monument rather than to the documented facts of her death.
The cemetery is also tied to ambient Civil War folklore through the burial of Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds, but no specific reported phenomena associated with his grave appear in mainstream sources. The legend that persists is overwhelmingly the Bitner story, retold with the explicit caveat that it is folklore rather than history.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Visit the 20-acre 19th-century rural-style cemetery during daylight hours. Notable graves include Civil War Union Major General John F. Reynolds (killed at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863) and modernist painter Charles Demuth (died 1935). The Augusta Bitner monument anchors the cemetery's northeast corner.
The Bitner monument and the cemetery's broader Victorian-era backdrop are recurring stops on commercial Lancaster ghost-tour routes, where the (debunked) wedding-day legend is recounted alongside the cemetery's Civil War history.
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