History & local legend
In Lancaster Cemetery, Augusta Harriet Bitner’s memorial depicts a woman holding lilies and extending her other hand. Local stories give the statue a life of its own: it screams when someone takes its hand, sheds tears, and leaves its pedestal to walk through the cemetery on Halloween. One version explains the haunting by saying Augusta fell down the stairs in her wedding dress and died.
Augusta’s actual life followed a different course. She married Stanley Hart Tevis in her parents’ Lancaster home on May 3, 1905, and the couple settled in Philadelphia. On June 1, 1906, she died there of typhoid at twenty-one. She left a husband and an infant daughter, Sylvia, whom Augusta’s parents later adopted.
The memorial was installed in April 1907. Its figure represents Memory; beside it stands a broken column entwined with bronze ivy.
Sources
- Cynthia Douts Roth, Augusta’s Story, Journal of Lancaster County’s Historical Society, Spring 2009, pp. 7–11
- Adam Zurn, Uncharted Lancaster, monument visit, photographs and exact position
- WITF, local historian Adam Zurn on the walking statue
- Lancaster Cemetery, official location and Augusta Bitner burial
