Oakland Cemetery and the Black Angel

The Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery is one of those small obsessions a college town accumulates over the decades. Eight and a half feet of grim, weathered bronze, the angel marks the Feldevert family plot and has been a stop on every dorm-night ghost tour since at least the 1920s.

Cemetery aside, Oakland is a pleasant short walk from downtown, especially in autumn when the maples turn. Brown Street, the route in, is one of the prettiest residential streets in the city.

things to do sight
A story
Local legend holds that anyone who kisses the angel, or a pregnant woman who walks under it, will die within six months. The bronze was a gift from the widow of a Bohemian doctor; it weathered to a coal-black color almost as soon as it was installed in 1913, and that — combined with the cemetery's gentle hill of leaning headstones — was enough to launch a century of stories.