“There was an abandoned church with a dangerous graveyard. Yes, dangerous. Officially dangerous. The gates were chained up and there was a big sign saying KEEP OUT DANGEROUS STRUCTURE. Well, could you have resisted? I went and peered through the bars. And there, among all the ancient leaning gravestones was the statue of lamenting angel. The way it looked at me, I felt sure this was the dangerous structure in question. A dangerous statue hidden in a graveyard! … A few Christmases later, long after Blink, we were back at the hotel. My son Joshua and I went for a walk past the church and it all came flooding back. “Hey,” I said. “Want to see the original Weeping Angel?” I took him to peer through the bars of the damaged graveyard. “Dad…..there’s no angel there.” There wasn’t. There really wasn’t. We left, fairly quickly.”— Steven Moffat on his inspiration for the Weeping Angels | Doctor Who Magazine February 2013 (via tonightsadangernight)
True story: a friend of mine grew up near a cemetery called Wildwood. It was one of those big, wealthy, groomed necropolis types of cemetery, almost a park with lots of fancy monuments and things. Kids from her high school would go there on weekends to hang out. But when they went there, the first thing they always did was drive past this one place in the cemetery that had a statue of an angel.
They did it to make sure it was there. Every so often, it wasn’t. On nights that the angel wasn’t where it was supposed to be, you didn’t go into the cemetery.