The Haserot Angel

A weeping bronze statue at one of Lake View Cemetery's most unsettling graves

Address Lake View Cemetery

The Haserot Angel is a life-size bronze figure at the grave of Francis Haserot in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery — a winged angel of death holding an upturned torch, her face streaked black with what looks like running mascara. The effect is the result of natural oxidation on the bronze, not design, but it has made the statue famous well beyond the Cleveland city limits.

Lake View Cemetery (which also holds James A. Garfield, John D. Rockefeller, and Eliot Ness) is large; the cemetery office hands out a free map at the entrance gate that marks the major graves, including the Haserot.

Cemetery gates open daily during daylight hours; admission free.

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The Haserot family commissioned the angel of death in 1924 from the Cleveland sculptor Herman Matzen. Over the decades the bronze oxidised so that the rivulets running down the face look exactly like black tears — a chemical accident that turned an ordinary memorial into one of the most photographed graves in the Midwest.

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