At four-thirty in the afternoon, darkness had already fallen, along with a great deal of rain. The cemetery gates were supposed to close at dusk, which had been blurred by the roiling clouds, and I was convinced they'd shut us in for the night. That wasn't the only thing I was afraid of. I had spent the entire day hunting ghosts, and this was the last stop.
My guide was J.R. Huestis, an enterprising young ghost hunter from Glen Burnie, Maryland, whose group, the Paranormal Research Network, had documented several supposed hauntings in the Baltimore area, even capturing photographic, video, and audio evidence of unexplained phenomena.
And phenomena had become the catchword for the day, as J.R. and I and the third member of our party, Shara Terjung, rocketed from cemetery to cemetery to haunted tavern to cemetery in an attempt to record ghostly manifestations. We were ready for phenomena—I with my camera, Shara with her reporter's notebook, and J.R. with his electromagnetic energy meter (which we all persisted in calling "the tricorder"). But despite perfect weather for an unexplained phenomenon or two, the local ghosts seemed to be giving us a wide berth.
And then we arrived at Druid Ridge Cemetery.
Druid Ridge is a posh, sprawling cemetery in Pikesville, near the intersection of the Baltimore Beltway and Reisterstown Road. Even in the near-darkness and falling rain, we could make out elaborate mausoleums and monuments as the headlights of my car slid slowly over them. Some no doubt date back to the cemetery's establishment in 1896, but many are obviously much newer and display a passion for personal commemoration that I didn't think existed anymore.
But we weren't there to sightsee in this gilded necropolis. We cruised past the South Lawn, Sunnyside Heritage, and Belview sections, until finally, after one wrong turn, we found the proper area: Annandale. And then, there it was. Between a rotting old oak and an overarching sugar maple stood an empty granite pedestal and backdrop, a lonely stage after the actors have taken their final bows. The pedestal bore the name "Agnus."
We stared for a moment before exiting the car. Shara and J.R. took turns with the tricorder, while I snapped random photographs of the area, hoping to catch a ghost by surprise. But there were no ghosts, no electromagnetic readings. Nothing but the wind and the rain and an empty pedestal, which exhibited only a faint outline of statue that once adorned it.
Black Aggie is gone.
It was a rite of passage for over four decades. Some cities have kids who spend the night in "haunted" houses on a dare. Other youngsters ring the doorbell of the neighborhood witch or bogeyman and run away, laughing. The Baltimore area, Pikesville in particular, had Black Aggie.
Ask anyone over forty who's lived around Pikesville all his or her life and you'll hear the legend of Black Aggie, a bronze statue located in Druid Ridge Cemetery from 1925 to 1967—"black" because of its dark color and ascribed malevolence, "Aggie" from General Felix Agnus, whose family grave it marked.
Almost from its installation, the statue of the seated, cloaked, androgynous figure provoked an odd reaction. Rumors began to circulate that Black Aggie's shadow was the shadow of death itself. Pregnant women who passed under it, where grass never grew, would miscarry or suffer stillbirth. The statue's eyes would open and glow bright red when the hour struck midnight. Anyone who met this fiery gaze would be stricken instantly blind.
Teenagers snuck into the cemetery at night and dared each other to sit in Aggie's lap, even to the point of creating intricate rituals of bravado. Ghosthunter Huestis reported that his own mother was one of these pranksters. It was common to have a "victim" sit across the statue's knees while the other kids marched around the grave, ghoulish buzzards circling fresh meat. At an appropriately spooky moment, one of the revelers would drop out of the procession and sneak up behind the evening's victim, grabbing him as if with Black Aggie's own hand. Everyone presumably had a good laugh while the victim screamed bloody murder.
But one night, according to J.R., things did not go according to this established plan. The victim was seated; the circling began—and then abruptly stopped.
"What's wrong?" begged the spooked victim, but the others, including J.R.'s mother, could only stare in horror. Black Aggie's eyes were open...and glowing. And this is where the tale ends, for the ghost hunter's mother refuses to dwell on the rest.
Stories like this are what kept generations of teenagers coming back for more. Boys used the legends to scare their dates into a soothing embrace, a tendency that no doubt led to another, more verifiable, legend: virgins who witnessed the statue's midnight splendor would quickly lose their chastity.
Local fraternities and sororities used Black Aggie for hazing rituals, ordering prospective inductees to sit on her lap and stare into her eyes at midnight. These visits, too, were woven into the statue's tale, adding a deadly twist to the lore. Popular myth has it that one night (at the stroke of midnight, of course), the watchman heard an unearthly shriek reverberate through the cemetery. A search revealed a young pledge dead at the base of the Agnus grave. The cause? Terror. A story that pops up less frequently is that of a sorority member found draped across the statue's lap, a knife lodged in her heart.
In 1962, there was a new development—this one a matter of public record. A cemetery employee discovered that Aggie's one uncloaked arm had been severed and stolen. The absent appendage, along with a hacksaw, was later discovered in the trunk of a tin worker's car. The suspect was arrested and stood trial, where he testified that Black Aggie must have cut off her own arm and put it where it was discovered. He was sent to jail.
It was probably the public's attention to this case that caused the statue renown to expand. Although Pikesville was more remote in the days before Interstate 695, the legend of Black Aggie spread throughout Baltimore County and City. I have heard reports of Anne Arundel County youngsters spreading the story, and Pinky Shepherd, who was a Howard County high school student in 1966, says that Aggie was well-known there as well.
But the Agnus grave site was not merely discussed. It was visited, trampled, and vandalized by hundreds or even thousands of teenaged pilgrims durin a forty-year period. In addition to the stolen arm, hundreds of names and messages were carved and scrawled on the statue, the granite base, and the backdrop wall. Today, these have been blasted off, and only a few initials remain etched in the bronze memorial to Felix Agnus on the reverse of the backdrop, although one cemetery employee showed me photographs of the full extent of the desecration.
Cemetery groundskeepers planted thorny shrubbery around the gravesite, hoping this would deter the nocturnal visitors, but to no avail. It was still impossible to grow grass there, but this, according to one, was only because of hundreds of trampling feet, not from any supernatural force. It is unclear why the area wasn't better patrolled. One article said that employees picked up "two or three teenagers a week on their way to test their nerve against the statue," but two or three teenagers a week aren't enough to kill the grass and cause such a commotion. For every trespasser caught, dozens of others must have reached their goal. Gaining entrance to the cemetery at night didn't seem to be a problem. Today, the area directly before the Agnus grave is protected by a fence, but other sections of the cemetery are completely without barrier and appear to have always been so.
Eventually, the volume of midnight visitors and the destruction they caused became too much for the cemetery to handle. "It looked like we couldn't protect and maintain the cemetery," one employee tells me, an implication that the sight of the vandalized Agnus grave may have started to hurt business. By the mid-1960s, the cemetery was hard at work in solving the problem. In 1966, they arranged to donate the statue to the Maryland Institute of Art Museum so, according to records at the Baltimore County Historical Society, "the figure, which has become a landmark in the Baltimore area, may be more readily appreciated by lovers of sculpture among the general public and in order that Lot Number 415 and the family of the Lot Owner may be spared further concern caused by the occasional thoughtless visitors to the Lot who may not be fully respectful of the memory of those persons buried in the Lot."
However, this move never took place. Instead, on March 18, 1967, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, agreed to take the bronze figure and place it "with the National Collection of Fine Arts." Contemporary statements from Agnus family members assure any concerned parties that "the statue, of course, is highly thought of and will be put in the large new gallery where once Abraham Lincoln held his Inaugural Ball." But this was not to be. According to the Smithsonian's own records, Black Aggie was turned over to the National Museum of American Art, where it was put immediately into storage and never displayed.
Today, the Agnus site looks well cared for. Grass grows where for many years it never could. The only evidence of Black Aggie's presence is a chipped area on the granite pedestal and a ghostly shadow where the statue's base once stood. But the empty pedestal and backdrop remind visitors of what once was. The Agnus grave site may or may not have been haunted, but it definitely had a soul. Now, all that remains are the stories.
But the history of Black Aggie is richer than one statue in Druid Ridge. One Baltimore Sun reporter dismissed it all by saying, "So go the legends of Black Aggie, a copy of a statue entitled 'Grief' by an obscure Nineteenth Century French sculptor which has become over the years a sort of black-magic touchstone for northwest Baltimore teen-agers."
There is, however, a lot more to it than that.
Neither French nor obscure, Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the premiere American sculptor at a time when American sculpture was establishing itself as distinct from its European counterpart. Before his death in 1907, he had created some of the most celebrated works in America: the figure of Diana that once graced the roof of Madison Square Garden; monuments to American heroes, such as Lincoln in Chicago, Farragut and Sherman in New York, and Robert Gould Shaw in Boston; and the ten- and twenty-dollar coins commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century.
Students of Saint-Gaudens consider his best work to be the memorial he created for Marian Adams, the wife of Henry Adams, famous writer and statesman and grandson of President John Quincy Adams. Marian, called "Clover" by her friends, sunk into a deep depression after the death of her father in April 1885. In December of that year, she committed suicide by drinking potassium cyanide, leaving her husband lost in grief, a widower at the age of forty-seven.
In search of solace, Adams traveled with his friend, the painter John La Farge, to Japan in June of 1886. He was interested in learning more about Buddhism, and he must have done a great deal of thinking about Clover as well. When he returned from the trip, he decided to replace the simple headstone he had originally purchased for her grave in Washington DC's Rock Creek Cemetery with a much more elaborate memorial. In early 1887, through La Farge, he asked Saint-Gaudens to design a statue. Envisioning a marriage of Eastern spiritual thought and Western form, Adams sent Saint-Gaudens images of Buddha and of the works of Michelangelo.
The massive endeavor took four years to complete, annoying Adams with the slow progress. But the result, according to at least one source, was one of the most powerful and expressive pieces in the history of American art, before or since. It was installed in the cemetery in 1891, placed in a unique setting carefully designed to both showcase the sculpture and separate it from the outside world so visitors might contemplate it without interruption. Adams was delighted with the effect and with the statue, which was never officially named. As the reputation of the sculpture spread, it became known as the "Adams Memorial" and eventually by the popular name of "Grief."
It was this statue that became the template for Black Aggie when sculptor Eduard L.A. Pausch set out to create his own, unauthorized, "freehand" version of the statue in the early years of the twentieth century. But while Aggie attracted teenaged pranksters and miscreants from all over the local area, the Adams Memorial had a more staid and worldly following. Henry Adams himself spent many contemplative hours there, pondering not only the message of the statue but the reactions of other visitors. Mark Twain viewed the memorial in 1906, and it was he who reportedly coined the name Grief. Eleanor Roosevelt, also a habitué of the gravesite, once said that, when she was feeling unhappy, she would visit the statue and come away feeling better and stronger.
One of the visitors who arrived to ponder the Adams Memorial might certainly have been Baltimore's General Felix Agnus. What did he see in the statue that eventually made him desire a duplicate of the Adams Memorial on his own tomb? More importantly, why would he want his memorial to be a copy of someone else's when he, himself, was such a unique man?
Agnus was born in France in 1839. At the age of thirteen, he went on a four-year trip around the world, visiting many distant and exotic locales and rounding both the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. At twenty, he fought in the army of Napoleon III against Austria and later fought with General Garibaldi's forces in Italy. For reasons he never made clear, he emigrated to New York in 1860 to become a silver chaser and sculptor at Tiffany's. When the American Civil War broke out, his military zeal was renewed. He enlisted as a private on the side of the Union and began a war record so incredible that he was promoted to brigadier general by the age of twenty-six. He saw action in many battles and was wounded more than a dozen times by gunfire and even a saber. Agnus often said later that he was "shot thirteen times-and always in the front," and H.L. Mencken remarked that Agnus "had so much lead in him, he rattled when he walked."
After being more severely wounded than usual, then-Lieutenant Agnus was brought to Baltimore for treatment. There, he met Charles Carroll Fulton, publisher of The Baltimore American newspaper, and his daughter, Annie, who nursed him back to health. When the war was over, he returned to Baltimore and married his former nurse. He briefly served in the internal revenue office and was appointed as Consul to Londonderry, Ireland by the United States Senate. He declined this position, however, and eventually succeeded his father-in-law as publisher of The Baltimore American, a position he retained for the rest of his life.
When Annie died in 1922, Agnus began construction of a family monument in Druid Ridge Cemetery. It was at this point that he must have purchased the unauthorized copy of the Adams Memorial and had a pedestal and backdrop created to match the setting of the Rock Creek gravesite. Three years later, Agnus himself died of a lingering illness at the age of eighty-six, and he, too, was laid to rest at the feet of Grief's younger sibling.
Soon thereafter, the legend of Black Aggie was born.
Nobody knows just how it started. How does any urban legend begin? Professor Jan Harold Brunvard, an author of many books on modern folklore, wrote that legends are a reflection of the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their times. Some also seem to be borne of necessity.
It's not difficult to imagine the shrouded form of Black Aggie, awash in moonlight, capturing the attention of some creative passerby. But Aggie exploded past the limits of most legends, which are often repeated but rarely acted upon or investigated. Today, when urban legends are more likely to take the form of conspiracy theories, phenomena such as Black Aggie are often dismissed as the products of simpler times. This does a disservice to the power of modern folklore, but there does seem to be one grain of truth to this prejudice. In times where romance and sex were not as glorified by popular culture as they are now and thus considered more taboo, different rituals led to bodily contact. Young lovers could always count on a good scare to bring them closer together, and hugs of reassurance can easily turn into something more intimate. Black Aggie certainly served her purpose in this arena, as the legends indicate.
That explains some of the attraction, but not all. Cemeteries have always been a natural locus for mischievous kids. For the young, death seems distant and mockable. Graveyards, so solemn and sacred, beg to be violated. Acting on these impulses somehow brings the tribe of youth closer together, circling their wagons against the responsibilities of aging. Black Aggie was often used as a rite of passage into various fraternities, clubs, and cliques, but these were also rituals intended to stop the progress of time, futile attempts to remain forever young.
Shara Terjung, my ghosthunting companion and Black Aggie enthusiast in her own right, has another theory: that the kids were just bored.
But J.R. Huestis, the ghost hunter whose mother reported such odd circumstances around the statue, offers a more metaphysical explanation. It is his theory that, in an effort to gain attention, spirits can temporarily "possess" inanimate objects, such as statues. In fact, he claims, numerous reports of weeping or bleeding statues from around the world could be explained by this hypothesis and, he feels, it certainly wouldn't be beyond a clever spirit to cause some of the phenomena associated with Black Aggie.
Regardless of the cause, General Agnus would no doubt think all of the furor surrounding his grave was ridiculous. At the age of the teenagers stealing kisses in his monument's shadow, he had already made his own way to every corner of the globe. When he was not very much older, he was a veteran of three wars. Child's play around a spooky statue would hold no romance for someone who had experienced extremes and delights from around the world. But I'd also like to think that he might be a little proud of (or, at least, amused by) all the excitement he helped to stir. After moving to Baltimore, Agnus became heavily involved in local affairs, wishing to improve and enhance the city as much as possible. But as any fan of John Waters could tell you, one of Baltimore's most distinctive features is the quirkiness of its residents. And Black Aggie is certainly the icing on the quirk. She could just as easily have sat on a stoop as on a grave. Or, as Shara Terjung noted, Aggie is so Baltimore that she probably says "Hey, Hon" as she murders you. A unique Baltimore legacy for a unique Baltimorean.
I wasn't born until over four years after they locked Black Aggie away. By the time I was a teenager in Howard County, the statue's legend was no longer whispered in dark rooms. An avid reader of "true" supernatural tales, I first encountered the account of Aggie in a book called Haunted Houses by Richard Winer and Nancy Osborn. Something about the story intrigued me, and I remember reading it over and over, planning to one day find Druid Ridge Cemetery and visit the scene of the crime.
When I was a senior in college, in 1993, I came across the story again. As an editor at the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, I decided to write a Halloween piece on haunted Baltimore and dredged up the tales of the departed Black Aggie. I was surprised to find out that other people my own age had heard the story. I was even more surprised to get a letter from a reader saying that Black Aggie was on display in the Smithsonian.
This led to a follow-up article, in which I tried to locate Aggie in Washington. By this point, the topic became somewhat of an obsession. It was then that I learned about Saint-Gaudens and the Adams Memorial, which I visited, and also about another copy of "Grief" that was on display in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, but Black Aggie had eluded me again. When the Smithsonian received the statue in 1967, it was not put on display but rather into storage in some dusty basement. There, it remained for twenty years until it was turned over to the General Services Administration, a branch of the government responsible for maintaining and selling federal property.
With high hopes, I phoned several people at the GSA, but the trail, trampled over by too many bureaucratic patent leathers, had grown cold. The office workers I spoke to had no record of Black Aggie, or even a copy of "Grief" that was donated to the Smithsonian from Baltimore. I was dejected, wondering if Aggie's journey from fame to obscurity was the result of sorcery or simply paper-pushing entanglements.
I wrote my second article, basing it heavily on impressions of the original Adams Memorial, but it was time to put Black Aggie aside again. Then, four years later, I read about Shara Terjung, a University of Maryland student reporter who had actually found Black Aggie. Through persistence and luck, she somehow coaxed the necessary information from her contacts at the GSA.
Fascinated, I tracked her down and arranged a meeting. Shara is a witty, self-confident woman, about my age, with a direct gaze and a wide, easy smile. It's easy for me to see how people would fall over themselves to get her the information she wants, and I'm grateful for it, or else Black Aggie would have been lost to me forever. Over iced coffee and hot chocolate, the two of us, who weren't even alive during Aggie's reign of terror, shared our passions for the mysterious statue of Druid Ridge.
It was also through Shara that I learned that Black Aggie's legend is not as dead as I'd thought. She'd been raised hearing it, both from her parents and, of all places, through the Girl Scouts, where the tale of Black Aggie has taken a turn for the even more bizarre. According to Girl Scout lore, Aggie was a turn-of-the-century nurse who was accused of a horrible crime. She was lynched by an indignant mob, but her innocence was discovered the next day. Out of guilt, the townspeople commissioned a black marble statue to be placed on her grave, and it is that statue that was the center of all the supernatural activity. Nobody can say the Girl Scouts don't foster creativity. In a "Bloody Maryesque" twist, they also maintain that, if a person says "Black Aggie" three times at midnight while staring at a mirror, she will appear behind you, cause you to go insane, or transport you directly to hell.
I have yet to attempt this experiment.
Upon learning of its location in the nation's capitol, I immediately planned a pilgrimage to Black Aggie and also decided to visit the other "Grief" siblings, the Adams Memorial and the authorized museum copy, in their own distinct habitats. On a rainy Friday in November, my friend James Bills and I drive to Washington, DC. James, a sculptor himself, is unfamiliar with the work of Saint-Gaudens and has never seen the famed Adams Memorial, but I have made the first leg of this pilgrimage before.
Originally the glebe, or cultivatible field, of Rock Creek Church, Rock Creek Cemetery has been a burial ground for almost two hundred eighty years and is the resting place of centuries of Washington notables. Here, Supreme Court Justices have retired to their chambers, Union and Confederate generals share territory, former DC mayors are rolling over in their graves, the inventor of television gets no reception, and the creator of Wonder Bread waits to rise. It's a vast tract of land, covering the equivalent of several city blocks. Criss-crossing roads at random arcs and angles create amorphous burial areas filled with ornate headstones and tombs, whose white forms, glistening with rain, stand out against the duskiness of the afternoon.
Though only drizzling when we park in front of the cemetery office, by the time James and I navigate through the fields of granite and marble, it's raining steadily. Why does it always rain when I'm investigating these statues? I wonder. We could have driven most of the way through, but the cemetery's roads are narrow and winding, and there is something irreverent in the image of my dented Chevrolet cruising through centuries-old monuments, a feeling I did not get at Druid Ridge Cemetery. I don't mind the walk, which gives us more time to appreciate the macabre arrangements of funereal art, but also more time to get wet. Lingering is out of the question.
In contrast to the poetic subdivision names of Druid Ridge, Henry and Marian Adams slumber eternally in "Section E." Approached from the south, their memorial is partially obscured by a small grove of yew trees, but the pinkish granite wall is all I need to see to know we've come to the right place. A path of crushed white stone leads around the side of the wall, through the concealing evergreens, to a raised hexagonal area bordered on three sides by a curving stone bench. It is here that "Grief" holds court, its green-black bronze form absorbing all attention and repelling outside concerns and disturbances.
It rests, androgynous, cloaked, and stately, on a rough granite boulder, with the wall as a backdrop. One hand reaches up as if to brush away a tear or prop a pondering head. The statue is a masterpiece of painstaking detail, from the swirl of individual locks of hair to the serene curve of the lips to the scrupulous folds of the cloak. Yet for all its detail, nothing is revealed. The work remains a study in enigma, which is, of course, the point.
Henry Adams, himself an art critic, was quite pleased with the mysterious nature of the statue, once remarking, "The whole meaning and feeling of the figure is in its universality and anonymity." In a letter to Augustus Saint-Gaudens' son, Adams said that statue was meant to ask a question, not give an answer.
Continuing this notion in his famous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, he wrote: "The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer.... One [priest] after another brought companions there, and apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism, of denial. Like the others, the priest only saw what he brought. Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more."
In contrast to the priest's interpretation, Adams himself privately called the officially unnamed statue "The Peace of God," but he usually referred to the piece publicly as "St. Gaudens' figure at Rock Creek." He in no way wanted his name associated with the work, as if this would somehow influence a viewer's interpretations. This anonymity extended even to the construction of the cemetery monument.
"Is this where they're buried?" James asks, looking around. "There're no names on it." It's true; the gravesite is completely devoid of the names of its occupants, who are presumably buried in the area directly before the statue's feet. The granite wall provides the only clue: a carving of two interlocking laurel wreaths, symbolizing two lives forever joined...
The rain picks up, and we really should head back to the car, but I take one last look at the statue that started it all. I consider its somber nickname, "Grief," and wonder why it has became so universal and why it was coined in the first place. Even with raindrops running down the figure like tears from heaven, it does not appear to be grieving. Is grief what Mark Twain supposedly saw in Saint-Gaudens's artistic mirror, or is it merely a reaction to its sepulchral location?
I find myself in agreement with Father Joseph Gallagher, who wrote in a column for The Baltimore Sun, "How ironic that for so many years so many young people found the copy of this statue in Druid Ridge Cemetery so immeasurably troubling, even terrifying." The Adams Memorial isn't terrifying. It can be unnerving, certainly, and emotionally moving. But it is also placid and thought-provoking, regal in its meditation. I wonder, if this statue could talk, what it would say about its evil and illegitimate sibling, who forsook serenity for horror.
And my heart leaps—or does it skip a beat?—for it is now time to view that so-called horror for the first time, and I want to stare right into its glowing red eyes.
Black Aggie is right where Shara Terjung said it was: in a courtyard between the Dolly Madison House and the Federal Courts' Court of Appeals Building, at the intersection of H and Madison Streets, across from Lafayette Park. My first thought on approaching the corner is one of worry. Have we come all this way for nothing? The Dolly Madison House, now an annex of the Federal Courts Building, is closed to the public.
My second thought is, "Damn, that Dolly Madison really knew how to live!" The house is huge and bright and well-preserved. I'd call it a mansion, but it's dwarfed in magnificence by its more showy neighbor, the White House, which is only a few steps away. Shara mused in the article I read that perhaps the statue's pernicious proximity to the seat of our government is the source of our country's problems. If so, I am about to meet the shaper of national policy...I hope.
It turns out my worries were for nothing. The courtyard, while protected by a wrought iron fence, is easily accessible in daylight hours through gates at either end. James and I enter, turn the corner, and...
Black Aggie.
After all these years, I am before the object of my quest, my twisted version of the Holy Grail. But there is something wrong. James and I look at each other, his sculptor's eye and my own obsessed one noticing it at the same time.
Of course, I've known for years that Black Aggie was a different sculptor's unauthorized version of the Adams Memorial—most likely created only by copying photographs and sketches and not even from life or using any of the original artist's casts—but I have given very little thought to the unromantic implications of this. Black Aggie is...crude. Not inexpert, certainly, but there is a subtle grace lacking in its workmanship that is very much present in Saint-Gaudens's creation. Also, the boulder upon which the sculpture rests, while the same shape, is several shades lighter than the Adams Memorial version, and this variation is enough to disrupt the entire impression of unity evoked by the original composition.
It is obvious to me now why Aggie was never displayed by the Smithsonian. Although the American Art museum claims that the statue was not shown because they already had an authorized copy of "Grief" in their collection, they did not acquire this more exact replica until a least two years after they obtained Baltimore version. I had always wondered, but now I know. Black Aggie really is only an illegitimate version of the Adams Memorial.
I realize that at least some of my trepidation comes from the general condition of the statue. While the Adams Memorial is pristine in its uniformity of oxidation, Aggie's dark bronze is marred by splotches of lighter green corrosion. I am surprised, since this copy is at least fifteen years younger than the original and has spent twenty years indoors besides. Still, the differences may be due to more than just the weather. As a national treasure, the Adams Memorial is expertly maintained, while Black Aggie suffered decades of abuse and vandalism from generations of teenagers. Looking closely, I can spot the seam where the sculpture's arm was reattached after being sawed off by the delusional tin worker.
On the base of the polished granite pedestal is a little bronze plaque that bears a sanitized version of the whole sordid tale:
"Eduard L.A. Pausch (after Augustus Saint-Gaudens)
Agnus Memorial (after the Adams Memorial)
ca. 1906-1907
Transfer to the United States General Services Administration, 1987, from the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Gift of Mrs. Felix Agnus Leser."
"Gift" indeed! As if General Agnus's granddaughter-in-law had donated the statue in a fit of generosity instead of a last-ditch effort to save it from desecration!
Strangely disappointed, I take a deep breath and let my eyes wander around the courtyard. It's a lovely space, filled with landscaped plants and metal outdoor furniture. I imagine, on nicer days, it is also filled with bureaucrats from the federal building, smoking, eating lunch, gossiping, laughing. What do they think when their gaze falls upon this statue? Surely it would never occur to them that, in its heyday, Aggie had terrorized an entire county and become the source of hundreds of fanciful tales and legends.
I bring these stories to mind, one by one, trying to recapture the spirit of this entire adventure. I can't quite get back into the mood, but I make a good effort. James and I examine the statue's closed eyes, so famed for opening at the stroke of midnight and glowing with the fires of hell. They're just cold metal, but still...
"You know, they sort of look like they're open already," he says. It's true, they are carved in such a way that, if one were to look into them expecting them to be open, they would appear as if they were staring sightlessly forward. An optical illusion? Maybe.
Aggie old girl, you haven't really lost it, I think, rubbing my hand along the wet bronze of the statue's knee. "Are you going to sit in its lap?" asks James, remembering I had talked about doing it earlier.
"Nah," I say after a pause. Aggie's lips seem to curl into a Mona Lisa-like smile. The artistic mirror? I turn away from the sculpture and shake the drops of water off my hand. "It's too wet," I explain. I don't know if he believes me, but I feel as if I need to prove my fearlessness some other way. "But I do want to come back at midnight."
At the far end of the courtyard where Black Aggie presides is the main entrance to the Court of Appeals Building. Despite the chilly drizzle and Black Aggie's solemn pall, the scene visible through the building's glass doors is somehow even less inviting. The small, stark lobby is sickly lit and resembles a dingy prison corridor, an impression heightened by the presence of two guards manning a boxy x-ray checkpoint. An ominous preview for those unlucky convicts whose appeals have run out?
"Can I help you?" asks one of the guards, immediately stepping forward to face us over the airport-like parcel x-ray. He obviously senses James and I are out of place, either because of our sodden, casual appearance or the fact that we haven't stepped through the metal detector.
"Uh, yes. I was wondering if the courtyard outside here is open at night," I say, knowing full well the answer will be no. It's written all over his face.
"No. It's closed at six. After that, no one gets in or out."
"I'd like to come in later. Is there some way to get special clearance? Maybe an escort?" I persist.
The guard starts to shake his head. Behind me, James the Greek Chorus puts his two cents in. "Tell him why!"
The dreaded moment has arrived. James is right, of course, but what am I supposed to say? That the sculpture sitting a hundred feet away from us is a famous haunted statue from Baltimore rumored to come to life at the stroke of midnight and kill people?
Okay. I say that.
Of course, the guard starts laughing. I hear a muffled snort from other one, but I don't spare him a glance. "Look," I am told. "That's just the way it is. After six, nobody comes in. Nobody. Just like you're not allowed to park over there across the street anymore for security purposes." He indicates Lafayette Park through the lobby window. "It's just not possible." It occurs to me that if Aggie had been so well guarded thirty years ago, I wouldn't be going through all this now!
We turn to leave, but I can't resist. "Well, when it comes to life, don't come crying to me," I mutter.
"If it comes to life, I'll be running in the other direction. I guarantee."
They don't even have the decency to wait until we're out of earshot to start howling with laughter. Even with the doors shut behind us, I can still hear their amusement halfway across the courtyard, as we pass Black Aggie and step once again into the world of the living.
If the oldest Grief sibling is a noble and pensive sentinel over the Adamses' remains, and the middle, illegitimate, sibling is the black sheep of the family, the youngest of this eccentric clan has had a somewhat more comfortable and genteel existence. Today, the last statue receives callers in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art as if the small gallery on the second floor were its own parlor. There it rests, surrounded by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century representations of angels, in a room with hardwood floors and clean white baseboards.
Cast in 1969 from the Adams Memorial, the third "Grief" is more of a clone than a copy. It was created, I am told, by coating the original statue in some sort of substance, probably latex, then filling the resulting mold with bronze. Unlike Black Aggie, it is an exact duplicate of the original. And yet, it is not...
Lighter in color due to its youth and sheltered existence, the Smithsonian's statue rests on an almost-white replica of the Adams Memorial's base, including the backdrop wall. The whole thing strikes me as a pale imitation, failing to provoke a portion of the emotional reaction of the Adams Memorial or even Black Aggie.
It must be the setting. Saint-Gaudens had intended his masterpiece to be funerary art, and Aggie had conformed to that vision, even now bringing some sensibility of the tomb into its posh little plaza. But, although the Smithsonian version was once displayed in a sheltered inner courtyard of the American Art museum, it has never been in a natural setting. And it shows, somehow. By bringing a mockery of a grave into a Victorian drawing room, the Smithsonian does not enhance the impact of the statue through shock value. Rather, the entire effect is muted.
Even the plush bench before the statue does not invite contemplation. Here in the museum, there is nothing to contemplate. The Adams Memorial has provoked a host of responses and Black Aggie has provoked terror, but this bronze casting, flanked by two hideous artificial plants, provokes nothing.
For some reason, my earlier disappointment is soothed. Black Aggie may not be an exact duplicate of the Adams Memorial, but at least it has its own character and spirit. Imperfect as it may be, Aggie has regained my respect and admiration. I wish I could have seen her during her reign of terror in Baltimore. Would I have participated in the furor, sat in her lap at midnight, scrawled my name on her backdrop to document my bravery?
During the course of my research, I was asked, rather nastily, by a discouraging Baltimore Sun columnist how I would feel if it had been my own family's memorial that had been so violated. It occurs to me that, vandalism aside, I wouldn't be as upset as he'd like. Old as he is now, he misses the point. The phenomenon of Black Aggie was not about destruction or death, but rather an affirmation of life and youth. Like the Adams Memorial, Black Aggie is a case of the deceased sparking contemplation and creativity in the generations that come after.
I know now that the legend Black Aggie will never die. Not if I can help it.