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Heavily Investigated

At the center of Oakland Cemetery stands something that doesn't quite feel like a memorial — it feels like a warning. The Black Angel, a nine-foot bronze figure now oxidized to an unsettling coal black, looms over the Feldevert family plot, and locals swear the color change was no accident of chemistry. Touch it and you'll die, they say. Kiss someone beneath it at midnight on Halloween and you have seven years — at most. The statue has been seen glowing in the dark, drifting across the grounds. Stand before it long enough, and the legend starts to feel less like folklore and more like instruction.

Oakland Cemetery was deeded to Iowa City by the territorial legislature on February 13, 1843, and has quietly served as the city's main public burial ground for over 180 years, growing to 40 acres and some 16,000 graves. The infamous Black Angel was commissioned by Teresa Dolezal Feldevert — a Bohemian immigrant and physician — and erected in 1913 by Chicago sculptor Mario Korbel to memorialize her son Eddie, dead of meningitis at 18, and her husband Nicholas. The statue's bronze turned irreversibly black by the time Teresa died in 1924. Science says oxidation; Iowa City, naturally, says otherwise.