The Most Visited Grave in Alexandria

The Female Stranger: The Most Visited Grave in Alexandria

The most visited grave in Alexandria belongs to a woman no one could name. The Female Stranger’s grave remains one of the most enduring mysteries in American burial history. In September 1816, a veiled woman and her husband arrived in Alexandria after a voyage from the West Indies and, by tradition, took rooms at Gadsby’s Tavern, insisting that their identities remain secret. Within weeks the woman was dead, buried in St. Paul’s Cemetery beneath a monument that kept her secret and sparked more than two centuries of speculation.

The couple traveled with a French-speaking valet and maid. Dr. Samuel Richards attended the ailing woman, and Elizabeth Tretcher Steuart helped nurse her. Elizabeth, whose father, Thomas Tretcher, had sailed as a teenager on Captain Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific, later described the patient as young, refined and strikingly beautiful. Despite every effort, the woman grew worse.

She died on October 14, 1816, reportedly in her husband’s arms.

A Burial Shrouded in Silence

The grieving husband bought a burial plot in St. Paul’s Cemetery and commissioned a tombstone, now the most visited grave in Alexandria, with the famous inscription that deliberately withholds her identity and offers no explanation.

The inscription visible today dates from a later preservation effort: according to The History of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Alexandria, Virginia, it was re-cut in November 1930 by the Society for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.

After the funeral, the husband, valet and maid left Alexandria and were never seen there again. More astonishing still, the $1,500 in English currency they had paid for lodging, meals, medical care, the burial and the monument was later found to be counterfeit.

No official record identifies the couple. The tavern keeper, the physician and the nurse all said they never learned the woman’s name. The mystery was born.

Who Lies in the Most Visited Grave in Alexandria?

Over the next century, Alexandrians, and later the nation, proposed one explanation after another. None can be proven, yet each shows how legend grows in the absence of facts. Much of what is known, or assumed, about the Female Stranger comes from these later attempts to explain the Female Stranger’s grave in Alexandria rather than from records of her own time.

A Lost Daughter of Aaron Burr?

One early theory held that the woman in the most visited grave in Alexandria was Theodosia Burr Alston, the daughter of Aaron Burr, who was believed lost at sea in 1813. In this telling, she survived pirates only to die, unnamed, three years later in Alexandria. No contemporary evidence supports the claim, but it remains one of the most enduring identifications.

A Scandal’s Shadow

Another theory tied her to the notorious Reynolds Affair, suggesting she was the illegitimate daughter of Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds. Still others claimed the couple were professional swindlers, pointing to rumors that the husband later turned up in Sing Sing Prison under the alias “Claremont,” a name that appears near the grave on early cemetery maps.

Witnesses and Whispers: Rosena Fortney’s Role

One of the most compelling local connections to the most visited grave in Alexandria is Rosena Fortney, who is said to have quietly helped during the woman’s final days. According to tradition, Fortney carried soup to the sickroom and, sensing how grave the situation was, went to summon the Reverend William H. Wilmer, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, to give spiritual comfort.

This account, handed down in Alexandria rather than preserved in official records, adds a human dimension to the story and roots the mystery in the town’s own community, keeping details that never made it into the documents.

Rosena Fortney later appears in the records as Rosina Duffey. Born Rosina Latz, she married Jacob Fortney in 1815; after his early death she married George Duffey, which explains the change of surname. The Fortney name also appears with variant spellings, including Forteney, in period records. Jacob Fortney Jr. is buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery, just across Hamilton Lane from St. Paul’s, while Rosina Duffey was buried in the Methodist Protestant Cemetery, a reminder of how closely Alexandria’s residents were connected, even in death.

A Darker Legend: Brother and Sister

Among the most tragic, and most disturbing, legends is the claim that the Female Stranger and her husband were brother and sister.

In this story, the two were orphaned and separated as children. They met again as adults, fell in love and married, and only after the wedding did the bride discover that her husband was her brother. Overcome with horror and despair, the story goes, she soon fell ill and died.

No documentary evidence supports this account, but it appeared often in late nineteenth-century retellings, reflecting the Victorian fascination with forbidden knowledge, guilt and secrecy.

“Claremont” and the Dulany Connection

The name “Claremont,” associated with the grave’s location, may not refer to an alias at all, but to a property.

Claremont was the family home of Mrs. Benjamin Dulany, a wealthy and influential member of St. Paul’s parish. Her husband died in 1816 and was buried on Shuter’s Hill, now the site of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial.

It has long been suggested that Mrs. Dulany, out of compassion or circumstance, gave one of her own cemetery plots for the Female Stranger’s burial. If so, that would explain both where the most visited grave in Alexandria lies and the lasting name “Claremont,” with no deception required.

The Hermit of Four Mile Run

One of the strangest legends claims that the skeleton of a hermit found in the woods near Four Mile Run was secretly buried in the Female Stranger’s grave.

This macabre tale is more likely later folklore than fact, but it shows how the most visited grave in Alexandria became a vessel for Alexandria’s collective imagination, gathering one mystery after another over time.

When the Story of the Most Visited Grave in Alexandria Emerged

Remarkably, no public mention of the Female Stranger appeared until July 1866, fifty years after her death. Once the story was out, it spread quickly, and by the late nineteenth century the most visited grave in Alexandria had become a subject of national curiosity, written up in newspapers far beyond Virginia.

One account, in the Washington Evening Star on June 2, 1898, described a woman who claimed the Stranger as a relative and said she was the wife of a British officer who had defied his family to marry her. After her burial, the officer reportedly left Alexandria for France and never returned to England.

In 1912, Charles T. Johnson Jr. offered yet another version: the woman was the ward of an English lord who was accidentally killed in a confrontation with her lover. The couple fled to America, lived near what is now Cabin John, Maryland, and came to Alexandria seeking medical help. Every year afterward, the story goes, the widower rowed up Cameron Run to lay a flower on her grave.

The Most Visited Grave in Alexandria: A Grave That Refuses to Be Forgotten

Whatever the truth, the Female Stranger’s grave in Alexandria draws visitors all year, especially around the October anniversary of her death, drawing historians, visitors and storytellers alike. No surviving record confirms her stay at Gadsby’s Tavern, yet the story endures, woven from fragments of memory, rumor and loss, and hers remains the most visited grave in Alexandria.

Ghost stories about her still circulate at Gadsby’s Tavern. History, though, leaves her exactly as her monument intended:

Known, but never named.

Sources of Information

Kay, R. L. (1984). The History of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Alexandria, Virginia: November 12, 1809–November 12, 1984. Springfield, VA: The Goets Printing Company.

Miller, T. M., & Smith, W. F. (2001). A Seaport Saga: Portrait of Old Alexandria, Virginia (3rd printing). Virginia Beach, VA: The Donning Company Publishers.

Pippenger, W. E. (2014). Tombstone Inscriptions of Alexandria, Virginia (Vol. 5). Berwyn Heights, MD: Heritage Books.

Powell, M. G. (2000). The History of Old Alexandria, Virginia, from July 13, 1749, to May 24, 1861 (W. E. Pippenger, Ed., new index). Westminster, MD: Willow Bend Books.

This post was updated in October 2026 to incorporate additional historical research and local accounts of the Female Stranger’s grave in Alexandria.