ladies of lake view cemetery

I’ve spent a few days over these last few weeks hanging out at Lake View Cemetery. Lake View Cemetery is what I would consider Cleveland’s best known cemetery, occasionally referred to as “Cleveland’s outdoor museum.” It occupies 285 acres and more than 107,000 people have been laid to rest there, including President Garfield.

In 2013, before living in Cleveland was ever even a spark of an idea in my mind, I drove up to photograph the cemetery. I was enamored! I wished so badly it was closer to home. Now I’m a mere fifteen minutes away… and never really spend anytime there. Then I saw that there were more than a handful of geocaches located in the cemetery. That was just the motivation I needed to get out and do some more exploring!

After two days of wandering around the grounds I still haven’t gotten all of the caches and definitely haven’t seen all of the cemetery. I’ve been parking my car in a random section then just walking  from cache to cache (gotta get them steps on my Fitbit!) which is fairly exhausting. Lake View is very hilly, and the caches aren’t exactly close to each other. All that walking has given me lots of time to check out headstones. There are tons of incredibly interesting things to see here but I just kept noticing the statues of women. Some angels, some represent deceased, and others are mourning lovers. The detail is just mind blowing. I can’t even imagine how much work it took to carve these or how much money it cost.

Although the post is titled “Ladies of Lake View Cemetery” I had to add these two. Above is the Haserot angel, or sometimes also called “The Angel of Death Victorious.” He holds an upside-down torch to symbolize a life extinguished. Due to weathering he has tear stains running down his cheeks. It’s one of the cemeteries most notable monuments. Not far from the Haserot angel I found the dude below who, in my opinion, is just as creepy! He also looks like he’s crying and I swear those eyes followed me everywhere I moved. The Haserot angel seems like he’s slightly less than life size… or maybe he’s just smaller than me but the guy below was life sized and it felt like he could just walk over to me when I wasn’t expecting it. I’m not one to be frightened by cemeteries, headstones, or anything like that but I was definitely happy to get my shot and get outta view of him.

I’m sure I’ll be back at Lake View again sometime soon to find the rest of the caches and take more photos. It was fun to choose a theme to photograph since it’s easy to be overwhelmed with what to shoot in there because of the size. Until next time, Lake View…
xoxo