The Walking Statue of Lancaster Cemetery
May 5, 2024 21:37:45 GMT -5
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Post by Graveyardbride on May 5, 2024 21:37:45 GMT -5
The Walking Statue of Lancaster Cemetery
According to an old legend in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the magnificent larger-than-life statue of a young woman occasional steps down from her perch and strolls through Lancaster Cemetery. Located approximately 125 feet from the fence directly in front of Haupt School at 436 North Lime Street, the sculpture is that of Augusta Harriet Bitner, who died at the age of 21, less than six months after giving birth to a daughter.
Augusta, the privileged only child of Charles W. and Amelia Bitner, was born August 24, 1884. She attended Linden Hall School in Lititz, graduating in 1902. In some versions of the story, she moved on to the Moravian Theology Seminary, also in Lititz, where she studied German, piano and embroidery, however, one writer/researcher claims she attended St. Mary’s Academy in Philadelphia. (This is another case of a researcher failing to do his/her homework: St. Mary’s wasn’t established until 1912, seven years after the young woman’s death.)
In 1900, when Augusta was 16, her parents constructed a fine 2½-story Victorian home, replete with magnificent stained glass windows, a three-story open staircase, built-in china cabinets with leaded glass doors, and ornate interior trim. The house (pictured below) is still standing at 902 Marietta Avenue.
At some point, Augusta met Stanley Hart Tevis (born September 2, 1883) of Philadelphia, and presumably, the two began courting. Whatever the nature of their relationship, the Bitner family ignored the old superstition about May weddings and their daughter and Mr. Tevis were married on May 3, 1905, in the parlor of the grand house owned by the bride’s parents. In the 1960s, an elderly resident of Lancaster who attended the wedding as a teenager recalled the scrumptious cake and delectable finger foods served on white-draped tables bedecked with spring flowers.
The newlyweds established their home in a townhouse (no longer standing) at 4948 Larchwood Avenue in Philadelphia, and not quite eight months later, on Christmas Day, Augusta gave birth to a daughter the couple called Sylvia. Either the child was born more than a month early or Augusta was already in the family way on her wedding day, and evidence points to the latter.
In the spring of 1906, Augusta took her newborn to the home of her parents for an extended visit, and in early May, when she returned to Philadelphia, she became violently ill. The doctor diagnosed typhoid fever, a bacterial disease spread by contaminated food and water or close contact with an infected individual. Symptoms include prolonged high-grade fever, nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, headache and lethargy. Her parents hired Bertha Kurtz, a private nurse, to look after their stricken daughter, and for a while, she seemed to be improving. Unfortunately, toward the end of May, her condition suddenly worsened and a doctor sent a telegram to Charles Bitner requesting he make haste to Philadelphia. Unfortunately, Augusta was dead by the time he arrived. Her death certificate lists intestinal hemorrhage with typhoid septicemia as the cause of death.
Some thought it odd that the lady’s four-month-old child wasn’t affected by the contagious disease, and if she was exposed to typhoid in Lancaster, why weren’t her parents or their servants ill? Her husband and servants in Philadelphia also were disease-free. And finally, the symptoms of typhoid fever and arsenic poisoning are similar.
While there is no hard evidence to suggest Stanley Tevis poisoned his wife, he and Augusta’s parents weren’t on good terms, and immediately following their daughter’s death, Tevis allowed them to take Sylvia back to Lancaster and they assumed legal guardianship of the infant girl.
Despondent over the loss of their only child, shortly after Augusta’s burial, Mr. and Mrs. Bitner commissioned the magnificent 6'5" statue that adorns her final resting place. The sculpture is that of a young woman in a flowing shroud-like garment descending three steps. Her shoulder-length hair falls around her face and she holds a lily, symbolizing the innocence restored to the soul of the departed. A tendril of bronze ivy that has turned green with the passage of time climbs a broken column (indicating a life cut short). Upon the column is engraved “Augusta Harriet Bitner,” along with her dates of birth and death, and the enigmatic phrase: “Could love have kept her?” – an insinuation, perhaps, that had her husband loved her, she wouldn’t be dead? Her married name, “Tevis,” is conspicuously absent, and there is no mention she was both a wife and mother. Accordingly, those unfamiliar with the story would assume she died chaste and, presumably, that’s the way her parents wanted it. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Augusta’s favorite psalm, is inscribed on the base of the column.
Augusta Bitner as a child.
Not long after the rather ostentatious memorial was placed at the grave in April 1907, a man passing the cemetery one night reported seeing an ethereal woman in white walking about among the tombstones under the light of a full moon. Following the initial sighting, witnesses became more detailed in their descriptions of what quickly became known as the “Walking Statue.” According to Cynthia Douts Roth, a local historian, some claimed “her eyes spark green” and “she weeps.” There have even been those who waited at the western end of the graveyard to see if the cold, marble likeness of the dead woman would become animated and “walk.” When nothing happened, they assumed it was the lady’s spirit, not the statue itself, that occasionally strolled the graveyard on moonlit nights. Although the ghost is sometimes seen near the sidewalk, so far as is known, she never steps outside the 20-acre confines of the cemetery.
Three years after his daughter’s death, Charles Bitner experienced a reversal of fortune when his warehouse and in excess of a thousand containers of tobacco were destroyed by fire on April 10, 1909. The conflagration spread to nearby structures, which also were burned to the ground. Although the building and contents were insured, the insurance company refused to pay the $100,000 (equivalent to $3.5 million today) claim after determining the fire was the result of arson, however, no one was ever arrested for the crime. Bitner also was sued by his former partner. As a result of the fire and lawsuit, he was forced to sell the family home on Marietta Avenue, and he, his wife and granddaughter moved into a duplex at 134 Pearl Street.
Bitner, who suffered from Bright’s Disease (nephritis), died July 10, 1919. His wife lived to age 77, dying January 6, 1941. Both share a plot with their beloved daughter in Lancaster Cemetery.
Unlike his in-laws, Stanley Hart Tevis wasted little time grieving the woman who married him and bore his child – this is assuming he grieved at all. He quickly began searching for a new wife and married Charlotte Louisa Penna, another well-off young woman, on February 20, 1908. A little less than 11 months later, on January 11, 1909, Charlotte gave birth to a son, Stanley H. Tevis Jr., and in 1905, the pair welcomed a daughter, Dorothea, who married Donald Stafford “Red” Kellett, president and general manager of the Baltimore Colts franchise.
Tevis was an astute businessman, who, in 1932, founded S. H. Tevis and Son Inc., an oil supply company in Westminster, Maryland. (The company, known today as Tevis Energy, is still in operation.)
Stanley Hart Tevis died May 2, 1963, the day before what would have been his 58th wedding anniversary. He is buried in Baltimore’s Druid Ridge Cemetery (above) beside his second wife, who died in December 1961. Eleven years later, his only son unexpectedly died at the age of 65 at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Little is known of the life of Sylvia Tevis, except that she married a man by the name of Guy William Rasbury of Texas who was 19 years her junior. He either owned or operated a liquor store, and at one point, the two lived in Fort Lauderdale, where Stanley Tevis Jr. had a winter home. The house the Rasburys owned in Florida was, unfortunately destroyed during a hurricane in the mid-1960s. Sylvia and her husband had no children. She died of acute congestive heart failure on September 21, 1976, at the age of 70 in Garland, Texas. Guy Rasbury died in August 1983. Both are buried at College Mound Cemetery in Terrell, Texas.
It has now been more than 70 years since the death of the man who wronged Augusta Bitner. And yet, those passing Lancaster Cemetery at night still occasionally see, wandering among the marble and granite stones, a solitary female form glowing in the silvery light of the moon.
Sources: Marlin Bressi, Pennsylvania Oddities, December 1, 2021; Unchartered Lancaster, October 6, 2021; The Journal of Lancaster County’s Historical Society, Vol III, No. 1, Spring 2009; Ancestry.com, and Find-a-Grave.
