Legend has it that if you touch the Black Angel with your bare hand, you will die in seven days.
"Look, look, I'm touching it," Eve Small, 7, said to her art teacher, Jamie Hieronymous, as she laid her hand flat on the side of the more than 8-foot-tall monument that rests over a grave in Iowa City's Oakland Cemetery.
"No, you have your glove on," Hieronymous said.
"Look, I'm touching it with my bare hand now, look," said Eve, one of about 30 students with Willowwind School, 226 S. Johnson St., who visited the cemetery Monday for a special Halloween art project.
"We came to draw some observations of the Black Angel because Halloween is a huge event at our school," Hieronymous said. "We always tell tales and stories, and we always tell ones about the Black Angel."
Fortunately for Eve, Oakland Cemetery Supervisor Jim Wonick said he does not think any of the myths and rumored curses are true.
"I don't believe in any of them," Wonick said.
But Joshua Schaeffler does.
"If you look at her in the eyes, she'll bring you to the graveyard at night," said the 7-year-old Willowwind student.
"I know when she died," said Blake Termini, 9. "She died on her birthday."
According to the legend told in Hieronymous' class, the angel was originally white but turned color late one night when the woman whose grave is marked by the mysterious monument sent down a lighting bolt to strike the statue. Hieronymous said the woman was angry with her unfaithful husband.
"I think it's very cool," she said of the grave's mystery and allure. "I've lived here all my life and this is definitely the place to come around Halloween."
According to cemetery officials, angels on graves usually are positioned with heads and wings uplifted as a symbol of help in the ascent to heaven. However, the black angel is facing down, with her right wing shielding her face and her left wing at her side. A tree stump monument sits next to the angel's cement perch that reads, "The Feldevert Family."
Wonick said Teresa Dolezal Feldevert moved with her son, Eddie Dolezal, to Iowa City in the late 1800s. After her son died of meningitis in 1891, Feldevert erected the tree stump memorial and then left for Oregon, where she married Nicholas Feldevert. Following his death in 1911, she hired Mario Korbel to design the $5,000 angel monument to sit atop the remains of her son and the ashes of her husband.
While the angel arrived in town Nov. 21, 1912, some stories assert that it was stored in a barn for six years as Feldevert fought a court case over her dissatisfaction with the monument. She reportedly refused to pay Korbel because he failed to incorporate a replica of the tree stump monument on the angel statue as she had requested.
According to the story, after the long battle in court, which Feldevert lost, the statue was erected in 1918. When Feldevert died of cancer on Nov. 18 1924, her ashes were also laid under the monument.
"It turned black because of oxidation," Wonick said of the statue, which is bronze. "It is because bronze has steel or iron in it."
But some believe the black color can be credited to Feldevert's evil character, and one story asserts that the angel is black because a preacher's son, whom he murdered, is buried below.
"I couldn't even put a number on the amount of people who come here to see it. ... They even come from out of state," Wonick said, adding that the mythical history draws the crowds. "Some say that if you kiss the black angel you will die instantly, but I haven't seen any piles of people out there, so. ..."
Wonick said that although hundreds of thrill seekers visit the statue each year, they are not supposed to pass the cemetery gates after 4:30 p.m.
"And we stay on Halloween night and ask for extra police patrol," Wonick said. "We stay until 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. ... but our people have a lot of fun watching the people."
According to one of the many legends, on every passing Halloween the angel turns one shade darker as a reminder of the people she has killed.
"It's interesting that people like that kind of stuff," Wonick said. "But I guess that if I believed in stuff like that, I wouldn't be working in a cemetery."
(Original headline: Myth Surrounds Angel )
