Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley

by Jonathan Kruk

  Critics, like biographer Stanley L. Williams, blame Washington’s lifelong bachelorhood on his lost love, Matilda. Granted, years later, the thirty-seven-year-old author fell for another fay teenage girl, Miss Emily Foster. He placed all the girls he loved on an angelic pedestal. Thus, like Ichabod, Irving never found true love. Washington, however, knew better than to fall for a feisty “coquette” like Katrina van Tassel.

  People often point to the tombstone of Catriena Ecker van Tassel, at the Old Dutch Church, and proclaim, “That’s the young woman in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow!” America’s first author found his Katrina not in a graveyard but among the independent, free-thinking Dutch American lasses he met up and down the Hudson. The steadfast and wily ways of Irving’s other Dutch characters, Brom Bones and Baltus van Tassel, introduced the world to genuine Americans. Bold, brash Brom looks especially like an American archetype. Still, when Irving sets up Brom in the guise of a ghost to ward off an unwanted suitor, he’s following an old Dutch custom. Plus Ichabod suffers a fate worse than being chased from marriage by a headless ghost when “partly in mortification…he turned politician…and had been made a justice in the ten pound court!” (TLSH, 72). The humor riding just below the surface in The Legend here spills over.

  Clearly, there’s more to Irving’s horseman than a love lost and a ghostly gallop. It’s not a mere knockoff of a German fairy tale, sprinkled with Dutch customs. Certainly, Stanley Williams, in the 1930s, scoffed at Irving’s Sketch Book stories as “pilferings” from “age-old legends.” Andrew Burstein, in his 2007 biography, however, proves “Washington Irving looms large.” He brought “important changes to culture.” Rip Van Winkle, the Headless Horseman, Katrina, Brom Bones and Ichabod Crane are all the first folk characters in American literature. Washington Irving’s classics are, indeed, wordy, romantic and sentimental. Nevertheless, they have what interpreter Russell Hubbard described as “enduring appeal.”

  THE LITTLE MAN IN BLACK, AN OLD WOLF AND HEATH

  Our author also got a little help losing a head from a Little Man in Black. Aaron Burr, lightly disguised as the title character in this Irving tale, is described as wearing a “halo of genius.” Longtime friends, the Irving family stood by the little man even after his infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton. Irving, in his tale, praised Burr’s legal mind. The man also had a head for story details. Dining with the vice president turned villain just before his first trip to Europe in 1804, the young lawyer turned writer gleaned an unusual war anecdote.

  A distinguished officer during the American Revolution, Burr served as an aide to General Israel “Wolf” Putnam. The old soldier was himself legendary. He earned this nickname at age twenty after slaying a wolf barehanded. A British officer in the French and Indian War, Putnam escaped Huron warriors trying to burn him at the stake. Later when British dragoons raced to nab “Old Put,” the rebel general escaped by riding his horse down a stone footpath in Horseneck (Greenwich), Connecticut. Frightened militiamen at the Battle of Bunker Hill said it was Putnam who steadied them while the Redcoats approached. He supposedly warned, “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!”

  General Putnam hanged several spies—one until he was “dead, dead, dead!” He also saw soldiers get their heads blown off; one of them was Abraham Onderdonck. He was “killed by a cannon ball from the enemy, separating his head from his shoulders.” Did Irving and Burr chat about decapitation over their lunch? Certainly, the tale-loving Irving pumped his battle-scarred companion for old Revolutionary War stories. Biographer Burstein states, “So, it is not unreasonable to consider that Irving might have known the details of this (headless) story.”

  Irving, a voracious reader and dedicated listener, certainly knew detailed stories from the Battle of White Plains. Thousands of British forces, with regulars, Loyalists and, of course, their Hessian henchmen, marched to a misty marsh the Native folk called Quarropas to chase American Continentals and Minutemen off Chatterton’s Hill. Close to Halloween 1776, Hessians commanded by the fierce Colonels Rall, Heister and Donop spearheaded the British assault. The unseasoned American troops under Washington, Putnam, Heath and Lee fought hard for a time. Lacking cannon, save for a few captained by Alexander Hamilton, the rebels fell back and endured to fight another day.

  One curious entry in the journal of General William Heath appears to be the holy grail for the source of the Headless Horseman. Heath wrote of witnessing a Hessian artilleryman lose his head at the Battle of White Plains on October 31, 1776!

  HEAD IN THE MUD HESSIAN

  Private Joseph Plumb Martin, who also fought under Old Put, set down in his thoroughly engaging journal a couple of touching tales concerning German soldiers. Returning after a year or so on the scene of the Battle of White Plains, Martin’s unit encountered Hessian remains. Decaying bones and separated skulls had been left out in the open. He mourns the “poor Hessian dying in a fight for a foreign land only to be left unburied.” Further, the compassionate private recounts an event truly worthy of Washington Irving:

  The Van Tassel house, Tarrytown, New York. Photo by Louis Glaser’s Process, published by Harper's Monthly, April 1876. From the collection of the Highland Studio, Inc., Cold Spring, NY.

  There was an Irishman belonging to our infantry, who after the affray was over, seeing a wounded man belonging to the enemy lying in the road and being unable to help himself, took pity on him, as he was in danger of being trodden upon by the horses, and having shouldered him was staggering off with his load, in order to get him to a place of more safety. While crossing a worn out bridge over a very muddy brook, he happened to jostle the poor fellow more than usual, who cried out.

  “Good rebel, don’t hurt poor Hushman.”

  “Who you call a rebel, you scoundrel?” said the Irishman, and tossed him off his shoulders as unceremoniously as though he had been a log of wood. He fell with his head in the mud, and as I passed I saw him struggling for life, but I had other business on my hands than to stop to assist him. I did sincerely pity the poor mortal…Most likely there he made his final exit.

  Stories like these circulated in New York after independence. It’s easy to imagine how accounts of Hessians, heads lost in the mud, their skulls lying on the ground, could find their way to Washington Irving. Indeed, these tales do appear in The Legend. Brom Bones sets the scene for his anecdote of a “race with the galloping Hessian” by first egging on Sleepy Hollow’s veterans to tell their old war stories. Irving gives us a hint on how he works with his narrators’ little preface to those battle tales: “Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of every exploit” (TLSH, 50).

  Irving harvested these recollections from former fighters like Joseph Plumb Martin, Aaron Burr and Generals Putnam and Heath. He “dressed them up” with German lore, Dutch customs, his own heartache and dead-on accurate sketches of local characters encountered. Then through the marshy mists and haze of battle, a galloping horseman rattles all to the core. The rider’s head is lodged in the crook of his sword arm! Truly, this is a tale worth finding, exploring and developing.

  TARRYTOWN TAVERN TALES

  Van Tassel’s tavern, situated on a rise above Tarrytown on Hudson, once welcomed all along Albany Post Road. When two New York City lads, Washington Irving and his buddy James Kirke-Pauling, dropped in for grog and grub, they’d encounter the local denizens: Westchester farmers waiting for the mill to grind for their “tarwe” or Dutch wheat, travelers aching from a bone-jangling carriage, idle tradesmen and grizzled veterans from the Revolution.

  One blue-bearded Dutchman brags about the small cannon he fired at a British warship marauding on the Hudson. He tells them, “I would have sunk the vessel had not me cannon blowed up!”

  The young men laugh. A well-to-do merchant, once a mounted officer, describes parrying a bullet away from General Washington. Again they chuckle. So the locals
bring out their sure-fire yarn. Speaking in hushed tones they describe a ghastly scene:

  We fought at White Plains under MacDougal! The Hessians attacked us on Chatterton’s Hill. Some stood seven feet tall, with two rows of teeth! They came after us, but we held them till an English cannon ball tore open a Massachusetts’ man’s leg. Those New Englanders ran. They feared the same would happen to them if they stayed. We feared them Hessians! They shot three of our men that they’d captured. Hessians grant no quarter. Had we not run too, we’d not be here to tell you the tale.

  They whispered about witnessing men get their heads blown off in battle too. Perhaps young Irving bought the veterans a round for the storytelling.

  Years later, threads of these yarns certainly appear in The Legend and other Irving works. He may have met in Van Tassel’s a couple of other interesting characters: a local trapper, part Indian, who acted as Irving’s guide, and a charming coquette of a wench with the common Dutch name of Catrina.

  A LOVE FOR ALL THINGS REVOLUTIONARY AND DUTCH

  The watchman-dragging, Hudson-wandering, lore and language–loving Washington Irving found plenty of inspiration along the ancient Mahicanituck or old North River. Doubtless the land and people on the Hudson infused him with a love of this country. The land then was wild, ragged and raw. The only people who really knew its stories were the Natives, the Dutch and their slaves. Irving knew they were disappearing into the great waves of change and immigration.

  The American Revolution must have been especially intriguing to a young man named after the cause’s greatest hero. Family friend Aaron Burr filled young Irving’s head with war exploits, as did all those tavern tales gleaned from the old Minutemen. It’s possible, then, that Irving read or at least knew the memoirs of Joseph Plumb Martin and William Heath.

  Growing up with the waning of Dutch voices and customs, Irving captured a sense of the 1640s’ New Netherlands in his wildly popular book Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New-York. Later, seeking to perpetuate endearing Dutch customs like visitations from “Sinter Klaas,” Irving helped transform a dour bishop into jolly old Santa Claus. Scholars, like Elisabeth Paling Funk, contend Irving spoke some Dutch. Surely, Dutch New York customs, pranks and all, would interest and inspire Washington Irving.

  This stirred up the writer’s passion. Again, add love lost, a long time away from home and a fascination with fairy tales, and when a bell tolled over the Thames, Irving heard it ring in Sleepy Hollow. Now we turn to the stories, the lore and some history surrounding Washington Irving and the Headless Horseman.

  Chapter 2

  “THE PLACE WAS BEWITCHED”

  An old Indian chief, the prophet of wizard of his tribe, held his pow-wows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual sense of reverie.

  They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots and twilight superstitions (TLSH, 4).

  A sensation of spirits pervades Sleepy Hollow and the surrounding lower Hudson Valley. This unique haunted history ranges from Manhattan’s northernmost point where the “spitting devil” hides. The haunting infiltrates the dense suburbs overlying the ancient Dutch farmlands in Rockland County, home to the last witch trial in New York. It pervades the enchanted waters of the Tappan Zee and finally reaches into the shadows of the Hudson Highlands.

  Judith Richardson, in her scholarly book Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, states:

  There are ghost of Indians and Dutchmen, and of Revolutionary War soldiers and spies, ghosts of presidents, slaves, priests, and laborers. There are neighborhoods of ghost and family ghosts, and ghosts whose identities are unknown. There are haunted cemeteries, houses, mountains, bridges, and factories. There are Spook Rocks and Spook Hollows, and Spook Fields. There are places haunted by famous ghosts.

  Richardson goes on to put forth this hypothesis: “Ghosts operate as a particular, and peculiar, kind of social memory, an alternate form of history-making in which things forgotten, discarded, or repressed become foregrounded.”

  Bewitchment here occurs within all the layers of people who came and settled the region. If the newcomers forget they are in Sleepy Hollow country, a ghost pops up to remind them. This is exactly what happens when the Connecticut Yankee, Ichabod Crane, arrives in Dutch Sleepy Hollow to teach. Thrilled by the spooky locale, the schoolmaster remained blithely oblivious to the local Dutch American customs. Thus he eventually receives a lesson from the Headless Horseman!

  Washington Irving, near the opening of his Legend, explains what happens when people enter these environs: “However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions” (TLSH, 4).

  This witching influence began with the first “layer” of people. The native Lenape, Weckquasgeek, Wappinger, Siwanoy, Munsee and Mahican of the Mahicanituck (the Hudson River) open the door to the haunting yet to come. The Legend of Mahicanituck and Pocantico stems from a mythic meeting of two rivers at the heart of the region.

  THE LEGEND OF MAHICANITUCK AND POCANTICO

  Our grandmothers tell those of us who listen of love found and lost by the Mahicanituck. When the Grandfathers, the Delaware people, neglected to say “En-na-shee”—thank you to the sleeping giant—he stood up. The lake, which his great body dammed, rushed beneath his legs, pushing into the ocean. The great waters pushed back, forming Mahicanituck, “the river-that-flows-both-ways.”

  Twirling over the Hokohonkgus, the place where the waters fall and twist with eels, a deep pool formed at Mahicanituck’s side. Leaping into the mist, dashing over the stones to escape into her hollow, Pocantico danced her kent-kow alone. Always moving himself, Mahicanituck never tarried long enough to dance with her.

  Then the Thunder Beings fought. Standing as tall as trees with bodies like birds and heads like men, they raged. Flapping their monstrous wings, the old ones bellowed; the young ones crackled sharply back. Their battle drove Mahicanituck hard and very high. The Mahicanituck swelled over the hollow, into Pocantico. He swirled in with her.

  “Hi-yee!” he shrieked. “We two rivers move as one!” Together they danced into a kent-kow.

  The Thunder Beings soon abandoned their fight. Drawing back wind and water, they pulled Mahicanituck apart from Pocantico. They left the place of Hokohonkgus, flattened and writhing with eels. Where the two rivers had danced, an immense chestnut tree grew. The Mahican people held powwows, dancing kent-kows beneath the great branches.

  Now, that tree has fallen, and those who once lived near it have mostly gone away. Still, when the Thunder Beings make a great storm, Mahicanituck returns to Pocantico. They again dance their kent-kow at the waterfall.

  This story emerges from the Algonquin words Mahicanituck and Pocantico. Mahicanituck essentially means “the river that flows both ways.” Earlier creation myths suggest the awakening of a sleeping giant. A lake, which formed against his body, races to the sea, becoming that ever-shifting river. Coincidentally, this tale echoes the scientific explanation of the Hudson River’s formation. When the last Ice Age ended some twenty thousand years ago, lingering glaciers in the region broke like old dams. Pent-up waters, known as Lake Albany, flowed again into an ancient riverbed. They gouged a deep channel reaching miles into the ocean. Eventually, the meltwater subsided, and the Atlantic pushed back. The Hudson River then returned but now as an arm of the sea, a tidal estuary, rising high and north and south all the way to Troy, New York.

  The Pocantico River now flows through Sleepy Hollow hard by the Old Dutch Church. It cascades pastorally over the Philipseburg Manor milldam
to meander into the Hudson. When, in 1681, the superintendent of Frederick Philipse’s manor first wrote down on his lordship’s deed “pocantico,” a Native phrase for “a stream between the two hills,” he identified a local feature for his boss. There a small waterfall broke up the Pocantico River just before it reached the Hudson River. An immense chestnut tree, later known as the Hokohonkgus, stood nearby.

  “Pak,” in the Munsee Algonquin tongue, roughly refers to a flat place. “Kent-kow” tripped off the tongues of Dutch and English settlers as “canticoy,” now an archaic word signifying a dance. Local Native peoples evidently met under the Hokohonkgus tree to hold high councils. The landmark tree, which stood until 1905, certainly caught the attention of Washington Irving. Local Indian lore would captivate curious young Irving, especially stories of the land being bewitched.

  Spook hand on Ichabod, 1899 illustration. By Frederich Simpson Coburn for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.

  When those two rivers meet, watch out for a stormy dance! Once every hundred years or so, the Thunder Beings reunite the Hudson with the Pocantico. Hurricane Floyd arranged for another such engagement in 2003. Situated adjacent to the dam, Sleepy Hollow’s Philipseburg Manor came very close to being washed out. Then site manager Melinda Terpening just barely saved the historic Hudson Valley site from destruction by organizing a sandbag brigade against the surging merging waters. It seems where these two rivers converge the spell of a “kent-kow” will pervade. The curse of Mahicanituck and Pocantico’s dance still falls on Sleepy Hollow.