St. James Episcopal Cemetery

At St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia, there's a marble woman standing over a family grave, and the dare is to make her weep. For decades, local teenagers have passed it down the same way: run around the statue thirteen times, then ask her, "Oh Mary, oh Mary, what happened to your babies?" The story goes that if you do it right, she starts to cry. There's a Halloween version too — three laps instead of thirteen, and a colder question: "Mary, Mary, how did your children die?"

Kids who've done it swear the place answers back. They report a woman sobbing somewhere near the memorial. A child's voice calling "Mommy." Tears of blood on the statue's face. And the strangest detail of all: the two stone infants in the monument, said to quietly switch positions when no one is watching.

The marble woman is Marion "Mary" Meinert, and the truth under the legend is sadder than the dare lets on. She was a Marietta woman known for charity work — her obituary, as it's been retold, described her "visiting the poor and sick." She died in 1898, at 34, of a lung ailment that was most likely tuberculosis. Not childbirth, not a house fire, the way the legend tells it. She left a husband and six children, including twin girls who were about four weeks old when she died. The twins are the ones carved into the stone.

In 2005, a local ghost-hunting group came out to investigate. They reported two camera batteries draining at the same moment near the statue, and footsteps in a cemetery where they were the only ones standing.

The cemetery itself was laid out in 1849 as a parish burial ground at the corner of Polk and Winn streets. Plenty of notable Mariettans rest here. But the visitors come for one grave — the marble woman, and the question you're dared to ask her. They still leave pennies and loose change at her feet.