According to the most specific story told about the Black Aggie, her arm went missing in 1962. It was found in the car of a local sheet metal worker, who claimed that the statue had ripped it off herself one night and handed it to him. It is an outrageous story, but five minutes in the presence of the statue at night might make you inclined to believe it.
There is a good reason for this statue to be cursed. The Black Aggie is an unsanctioned knockoff of a genuine work of funerary art, the Adams Memorial, which was made to memorialize a woman who killed herself.
Henry Adams, of the influential Adams family that gave us two presidents, returned home one day in December 1885 to find his wife of more than a decade, Marian “Clover” Adams, dead on the floor. She had ingested potassium cyanide, a chemical that she normally used to develop her photography. Nobody knows why she killed herself. If there was a suicide note left behind, her husband destroyed it.
Adams hired famed Irish-born American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a work of art to memorialize his wife that could be placed above her (and eventually his) grave in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC. The sculpture didn’t have a name, but folks who saw it called it Grief and proclaimed it to be one of the most profound expressions of mourning and loss in the funerary art genre. It was immediately famous. Immediately touristed. And, shortly before Saint-Gaudens’s death in 1907, ripped off.
The copycat was the celebrated sculptor Edward Pausch, who created a replica of the Adams Memorial for General Felix Agnus, a French-born Civil War veteran and newspaper publisher in Baltimore. Agnus proudly erected the statue on his family plot in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Maryland, about thirty-five miles from the place where the Adams Memorial loomed. The widow of Saint-Gaudens, Augusta, was outraged by the unauthorized copy of her husband’s statue and threatened legal action. But Agnus refused to remove the statue.
In 1925, Agnus was buried under his bootleg sculpture. But instead of becoming a renowned work of art like its inspiration, the Black Aggie — as it was nicknamed — became the dark shadow of the Adams Memorial. The Jekyll to its Hyde. She became one of Maryland’s most prominent cursed objects.
Things got so bad at Druid Ridge Cemetery, what with the attention and the scary stories and the people who would trespass at night to test their mettle against the statue, that, in 1967, the Black Aggie was removed from the cemetery. The Agnus family donated it to the Smithsonian, the curators of which didn’t want to display the knockoff. Instead, the Black Aggie was shoved in a basement, which ensured that nobody could stare at her glowing eyes or walk through her deadly shadow. Three years later, the museum received an authorized casting of the original Adams Memorial, which they gave a place of honor in the museum proper, and which still sits there today. While the official casting of the Adams Memorial lorded itself in a gallery, the illegal knockoff Black Aggie moldered in the underworld of the museum archives. In 1987, the General Services Administration (GSA) asked for the statue because they thought she would make a great garden gnome.
The GSA installed the statue in the courtyard of the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building on Lafayette Square at 717 Madison Place NW. If you visit the building during business hours, you can walk right up to the more-than-a-century-old statue that countless Baltimore teenagers and college students spent their youth swapping stories about and sneaking up to at night. And let me tell you — I know she’s an unauthorized copy with a sketchy past, but, man, is that statue striking. Even without glowing eyes.
Interestingly, the courthouse is around the corner from the White House. You can almost see it from the statue, and you can definitely see it a dozen steps away from the statue. And that means it’s close to another site. An extremely important site. One that jumpstarted the weird chain of events that yielded this cursed statue.
About five hundred feet from where the Black Aggie sits is the former site of the house where Clover Adams killed herself. The structure was razed to make way for the Hay-Adams Hotel, which is still there today — and which, some say, is haunted by the specter of Clover herself.
The Björketorp Runestone
TYPE OF STONE:
MENHIR
TYPE OF RUNES:
PROTO-NORSE
HEIGHT:
FOURTEEN FEET
AGE:
1,500 years
CURRENT LOCATION:
BLEKINGE, SWEDEN
POSSIBLE FUNCTIONS:
GRAVE, CENOTAPH, SHRINE, BORDER MARKER
The Björketorp Runestone in Sweden is one of the tallest runestones in the world, and judging by the ancient curse inscribed in an ancient language on its ancient flanks, it’s not taking crap from anyone. Vikings, you know?
The Nordic countries have their share of cursed runestones. For instance, the Glavendrup Stone in Denmark threatens to turn anyone who disrespects the stone into a warlock (alternately translated as an outcast). The Tryggevælde Runestone, also in Denmark, and the Saleby Runestone in Sweden feature similar curses. But the curses engraved into these stones are gentle warnings compared to the dramatic curse that is carved into the Björketorp Runestone.
The Björketorp Runestone is located in the county of Blekinge in the southeast corner of Sweden, right on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It’s in an old burial ground in a forest full of tall, freestanding stones called menhirs. The site dates to the Iron Age, sometime in the sixth or seventh century. Some of these menhirs are arranged in circles. One of those circles is composed of three tall stones (so, also technically a triangle), one of which is the Björketorp Runestone. You can tell which one because it bears Proto-Norse runes from proto-Vikings. (Proto-Norse would evolve into Old Norse, which was the language of the Vikings.)
It’s about fourteen feet tall, almost a tree of a stone, and is shaped kind of like a large upright bass, with a long, thin neck and a bulbous bottom. On the back is a short phrase in ancient angular markings that have been weathered almost to invisibility, but which are legible thanks to dutiful preservation with regularly applied red paint: “I predict perdition.” That phrase by itself may or may not be twistable into a curse depending on how you translate it and in what context it’s said. But the stone’s cursed status is cemented by the message on the front, which goes into detail on the predicted perdition. It reads:
I, master of the runes, conceal here runes of power. Incessantly plagued by maleficence, doomed to insidious death is he who breaks this monument. I prophesy destruction.
Or something like that. It depends on the translator. Regardless, it’s a pretty intense curse and, unlike other runestones, whose curses are tacked onto the end of more benign inscriptions, the curse is the full content of the Björketorp stone. Fortunately, insidious death and a plague of maleficence only come into play if you break the monument.