Ask anyone in Iowa City, Iowa about the Black Angel, and you will hear a different spooky story from each one, mostly revolving around touching or defacing the statue and subsequently suffering injury or death.
The Black Angel is an imposing 8.5 foot statue commissioned by Teresa Feldevert for the Feldevert family. There are three sets of remains under the statue, including Eddie Dolezeal, Teresa's son, Nicholas Feldevert, Theresa's husband, and Teresa herself. The statue itself is quite odd for a burial monument, depicting an angel looking down with a somber expression and cold, odd-looking eyes with somewhat drooping eyelids that many people find quite unnerving. Most angels in cemeteries are looking upward with wings stretched up towards the heavens as if to help the dead find their way, but the Black Angel looks downward with the wings out, but relatively downwardly pointed. The blackish color of the statue, however, is the feature that attracts the most attention. It originally had a bronze finish that has tarnished with age and has resisted every attempt at polishing or cleaning it. Legend has it that it turns a shade darker every year at Halloween as a reminder of the people it has killed.
Next to the Black Angel is Eddie's original marker, a cement stone shaped into a tree trunk. Teresa moved Eddies body when her husband died, and he now rests under the Angel, with his old headstone off to the side. Though it has no real legends associated with it, it is interesting in that there are no dates inscribed on it, and indeed, Teresa's own date of death is not inscribed on the Angel monument either.
Other than many comments about an uneasy feeling in the vicinity of the Angel related to the eyes that seem to follow one around, few stories of paranormal occurrences have been reported in the presence of the Angel by cemetery visitors. Amazingly, during our research, we found no controlled investigations of this site. Someone needs to get out there and take some readings!
However, the main phenomena here appears not to be something lingering in the cemetery, but something that vandals and disrespectful people take away from the cemetery. Many stories involve people who have touched or desecrated the Angel in some way who were rewarded subsequently by death. One well-known story is about four boys who urinated on the monument, and died later that night in a car wreck. Another tells of a young man who used a hacksaw to cut the thumb off the Angel (and indeed a thumb and a few fingers are missing) who basically lost his mind and was eventually found dead in the Chicago River. His cause of death was strangulation, and the sole piece of evidence was a single thumbprint on his neck. Days later, a caretaker supposedly found a blackened piece of bronze in the shape of a thumb at the base of the Black Angel monument.
Oakland Cemetery is located in Iowa City, Iowa at 1000 Brown Street. It is open between 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Special use permits are available for groups or special projects. (319) 356-5105.
