Lake View Cemetery

Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland holds over 104,000 graves across 285 acres, including President Garfield's memorial and Eliot Ness's ashes in the pond. The star attraction is the Haserot Angel, a 1923 bronze sculpture whose natural oxidation creates the eerie appearance of black tears streaming down her face.

The black tears showed up on their own. Nobody painted them. The Haserot Angel, a bronze sculpture commissioned by industrialist Francis Henry Haserot after his wife died in 1919, sits on a marble throne in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery holding an upside-down torch. Over the decades, natural oxidation has streaked dark lines from the angel's eyes down her face, giving her the look of something that has been crying for a hundred years. Sculptor Herman Matzen, a Danish-born artist who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for forty years, cast the piece in 1924. He called it "The Angel of Death Victorious." He's buried in the same cemetery.

The angel is the most photographed thing in a 285-acre cemetery that holds over 104,000 graves. Visitors say her eyes track them as they walk past. The effect is probably a trick of the sculpture's proportions and the way light catches bronze, but people keep reporting it independently, year after year. A few have described hearing faint crying near the grave, though the cemetery sits close enough to traffic that sound carries in odd ways.

Lake View was founded on July 28, 1869, by Jeptha Wade, the founder of Western Union, along with other Cleveland business leaders. They designed it as a Victorian garden cemetery, meant to feel more like a park than a burial ground. It worked. The Garfield Memorial, dedicated on May 30, 1890, holds President James A. Garfield and his wife Lucretia in an underground crypt beneath stained glass and a massive marble statue. Wade Memorial Chapel, completed in 1901, was designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany with interior mosaics and a stained glass window called "The Flight of Souls". Some visitors have reported hearing soft, mournful music drifting from the chapel when it's empty, and a few have described shadowy movement inside.

John D. Rockefeller's family monument is here too, an Egyptian-style obelisk standing nearly 66 feet tall and weighing 135 tons. It's the second-largest single-piece shaft erected in the United States after Cleopatra's Needle.

The most curious story involves Eliot Ness. The Untouchables leader spent his final years in Cleveland as the city's Safety Director, and his last wish was cremation with his ashes scattered over water. That didn't happen until 1997, decades after his death, when the Cleveland Police Historical Society held a memorial service at the cemetery. Officers rowed a small boat to the center of Wade Chapel Lake while bagpipes played "Going Home" and "Amazing Grace." They tipped a golden urn into the water and laid a wreath on the surface. His marker in the cemetery is technically a cenotaph, not a grave. Visitors near the pond have reported seeing a solitary figure by the water's edge, though whether that's the ghost of a legendary lawman or just a jogger depends on your willingness to believe.

The cemetery is open daily and free to visit. The Garfield Memorial and Wade Chapel have seasonal hours. If you go, bring a camera for the Haserot Angel, but be aware that the oxidation pattern changes over time. The tears she cries today look different than they did ten years ago. They'll look different ten years from now.