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.

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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.

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