In Brief
A bronze angel at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland has wept black streaks down her face for a hundred years. Nobody painted them — the tears are oxidation, an accident of aging metal that made a guardian of death look like she's been crying since the 1920s.
The Full Story
There is a bronze angel at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, with two black streaks running down her face, like she has cried so long the tears stained the metal. She sits on a clean marble base, head bowed, holding a torch turned upside down.
Nobody painted the streaks on. Her name is the Haserot Angel, and the dark tears are oxidation — the slow chemistry of bronze aging in the open air, which by accident gave a guardian of death a weeping face. The base below her stays pale. Only the face streaks.
Her formal title is "The Angel of Death Victorious." A Cleveland industrialist named Francis Haserot commissioned her from the sculptor Herman Matzen after his wife died in 1919, and she was cast sometime in the early 1920s. The upside-down torch is an old funeral symbol, a life put out. Visitors swear her eyes follow them across the plot; the people who study the statue say it's the proportions of the face and the way light catches the metal, nothing more. "It looked like the angel was crying," one woman told a local news crew after photographing her. "It was phenomenal."
She sits in Section 9, on the Haserot family lot, and she isn't the only famous resident watching the grounds. Lake View was laid out in 1869 as a garden cemetery, green and landscaped, and it filled with Cleveland's powerful dead. President James Garfield lies here, his casket and his wife's on open display in a crypt beneath a tower 180 feet high. The ashes of Eliot Ness, the lawman who helped put Al Capone in prison, were tipped into a pond on the grounds in 1997, forty years after he died, while police bagpipes played.
Garfield is the one the ghost story clings to. As locals tell it, in 1979 a man phoned the fire department, gave his name as Garfield, and warned of a fire at the cemetery. Told there was none, he answered that one was going to happen anyway. About a week later, the story goes, the cemetery's maintenance building burned. No newspaper or fire record I could find confirms any of it; the tale lives entirely on being retold.
The angel weeps through all of it. And because the tears are only oxidation, the pattern keeps shifting as the bronze ages — the streaks down her face don't look the same from one decade to the next. She has been crying for a hundred years, and the crying has never once looked the same twice.
