The Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery

In Oakland Cemetery, on the north side of Iowa City, a bronze angel about nine feet tall stands on a four-foot pedestal above the grave of the Feldevert family. The statue was made in Chicago by the Czech-American sculptor Mario Korbel, who was born in Bohemia in 1882 and became a member of the National Academy of Design, and it is dated 1913, although the cemetery’s history gives 1915 as the year it was placed. It was erected as a memorial to Nicholas Feldevert, and the monument shows the birthdate of his wife, Teresa, born Teresa Karásková in Bohemia. Over the decades the bronze oxidized to a greenish black, and that colour gave the monument its name.

Teresa Feldevert is the heart of the real story. She came to Iowa City from Bohemia and her first son, Edward Dolezal, died in 1891; her second husband’s ashes were placed in a repository at the base of the angel, and hers were placed beside them after her death in 1924. Her death date is missing from the monument. The cemetery itself dates from 1843, when its land was deeded to Iowa City residents, and it remains a public cemetery of about forty acres.

The legends grew up around the dark metal. Students and townspeople say the angel is cursed: that touching it will bring death or failing health, that it darkens each year to mark a new victim, that touching it at midnight on Halloween means death within seven years, or that a pregnant woman who walks beneath its wings will miscarry. A common version casts Teresa as a woman who killed her husband and son and put up the statue out of guilt; the sources consulted for this entry give no evidence for that charge, and the monument is a memorial, not a confession. Vandals have broken off fingers, and the statue is closely watched.

The Black Angel has become an Iowa City rite of passage, especially around Halloween. It appears in W. P. Kinsella’s 1986 novel The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, in a 2017 novel and a music video, and in a 2013 episode of the series Haunted Highway. Visitors should treat it as a family’s grave marker in an active public cemetery, not a stage set, and no one should touch or climb it.

Folklore rather than sightings: the statue is said to curse or kill those who touch or kiss it, to darken each year, and to endanger pregnant women who pass beneath its wings. There are no well-documented reports of an apparition.

A grave monument in Oakland Cemetery on the north side of Iowa City; the stories are told especially on Halloween night.

The statue is a fixture of Iowa City Halloween lore. It is mentioned in W. P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017), the band Friendship’s music video “Alive Twice” and the television series Haunted Highway.