Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley

by Jonathan Kruk

  The black figure, that had disappeared for a few moments out of John’s view, emerged from among the bushes, and advanced towards the road. It was now plain to be seen that John’s eye had taken a false measure—the man on foot had an head as well as other people, only he did not wear it, according to the usual fashion, between his shoulders, but carried it under his arm, just as if it had been a lap-dog.

  Washington Irving uses the same device to bring his monster out of the brush and shadows. Granted, Number-Nip V is on foot rather than horseback. Note the same reference to the shoulders in each passage:

  On mounting a rising ground, which brought his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless! But his horror was still more increased on observing that the head which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried on the pommel of his saddle (TLSH, 65)!

  The headless Hessian’s chase of Ichabod Crane takes inspiration from the earlier Wildgrave story. Irving, however, gives a more dramatic race. His is indeed another wild haunt, one rich with tangible images. The saddle breaks. Ichabod clutches Gunpowder until “he verily feared would cleave him asunder!” This scene ignited the imaginations of master painters like Washington Allston and John Quidor.

  When Musaus’s goblin readies to deliver the coup de grace, John first attempts to give the proper greeting. The ghoul interrupts like Wildgrave, hurling a fleshy projectile:

  John, against whom the formidable figure in the black seemed to be meditating some design, began, in the anguish of his heart, the salutation appointed to be addressed to all good sprits, but before he could speak it out the monster took his head from under his arm, and hurled it at John: it stuck him right on the forehead, and the blow was so severe that he tumbled headlong from the box over the fore-wheel.

  Once again Irving finds this way a useful template:

  Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his cranium with a tremendous crash—he was tumbled headlong into the dust, and Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider, passed by like a whirlwind (TLSH, 68).

  Musaus goes for the immediacy of comic relief to end his scene: “The mask and drapery were presently stripped away, and out there came a well-proportioned curly-pated fellow…he doubted not but the horseman was Number-Nip himself.”

  Irving masterfully exits his goblin and Ichabod into the mists of Sleepy Hollow. Their spirits disperse, leaving us to wonder. We are left still haunted today.

  Tam O’Shanter

  Irving borrowed another page from a book of wonder found on the shelves of Sir Walter’s library. The Doon River Kirk Bridge proves most daunting to the chasing ghoul in Tam O’Shanter. The epic poem, written in 1791 by the bard of Scotland, Robert Burns, features a hen-pecked fellow beguiled by his landlord’s wife and a comely witch wearing nothing but a “cutty-sark.” Tam, hotly pursued by that witch, urges his horse to cross over the Doon at a stone bridge, hard by the ruinous Alloway Church.

  Supernatural spirits shun water crossings. Apparently they fear any stream could become the River Styx. Cross it, and Hades will snatch your wayward soul to hold forever. Desperate to catch Tam, the witch lunges, but Tam and most of his horse, Meg, have gotten across. All she manages to catch of Tam, before vanishing, is his horse’s tail. The remaining stub gave rise to a certain style of cap known as the tam-o’-shanter.

  Irving follows the tradition of escaping a ghost at a church bridge with an accuracy sure to please the poets of old. Before he gets his ghost to blaze, however, there’s the proverbial ride through purgatory. Burns set Tam on the path that the frightful Ichabod would follow. They both pass through their own little odysseys of grim and ghostly sites:

  Alloway’s Church was drawing near,

  Where ghosts and owls nightly cry.

  By this time he was across the ford,

  Where in the snow the peddler got smothered;

  And past the birch trees and the huge stone,

  Where drunken Charlie broke his neck bone;

  And through the thorns, and past the monument,

  Where hunters found the murdered child;

  And near the thorn, above the well,

  Where Mungo’s mother hung herself.

  Before him the river Doon pours all his floods.

  Wildgrave tramples poor peasants, their cows, their churches and anything in their way, creating the same sort of sorrowful passage. Following Katrina van Tassel’s rejection of the schoolmaster’s marriage proposal, he must travel through the forlorn night on a sway-backed, one-eyed horse. Here’s a touch of Ichabod’s descent into the ghost realm of Wiley’s Swamp:

  A few rough logs, laid side by side, served for a bridge over this stream. On that side of the road where the brook entered the wood, a group of oaks and chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines, threw a cavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severest trial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate Andre was captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts and vines were the sturdy yeomen concealed who surprised him. This has ever since been considered a haunted stream, and fearful are the feelings of the school-boy who has to pass it alone after dark (TLSH, 62).

  Irving lines up a local cast of spooks to match Burns’s “smothered peddler” and “murdered child.” Ichabod has to run a gauntlet of ghosts. He passed a tree with an eerie resemblance to the specter of the White Lady of Raven Rock. The “unfortunate Andre,” of course, refers to the hanged British officer turned spy. Ichabod missed that ghost’s wailings. They mark the appalling passageway to the scary chase. Here Irving’s not stealing from the Scottish and German bards but just tipping his hat to them. They all follow a timeless ghost-story tradition. You don’t just bump into the principal spirit. Ancient poets like Homer and Dante foretold of the harrowing journey necessary before the descent to the darkest realm.

  The odyssey to the dark side transforms. Ichabod’s turned into a ghost or, worse, a city lawyer. One final tale found by Reichart “among the papers” of Washington Irving also hints at the thrill, chill and relief felt after an encounter with Sleepy Hollow’s headless wonder.

  The Headless Horseman chases Ichabod, illustration. By George Boughton for Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.

  The Headless Grey Huntsman

  The old frau knew she had strayed too far from Dresden when she found herself recalling her grandfather.

  He always warned: never wander to where you cannot smell the hearth fires! Now she smelled only the oaks, shading the glen at Lost Waters. Working quickly to fill her basket with acorns, she felt a chill.

  Next, a shrill hunting horn broke the thick air. The old frau stood up. There was a thrashing in the forest—falling branches accompanied the trumpet blasts.

  She crouched behind a tree trunk. A great grey horse brayed. She peered out and caught a look at the rider. Hidden in a flowing grey cape, she gasped, “The headless hunter!”

  She noticed his spurred boots, bow and head.

  “I pray for the one he murdered! I pray for this one who had to lose his head!”

  The headless grey huntsman reined in. The old frau froze. Then he resumed riding by Lost Waters.

  The old frau spilled out her acorns and slipped back to where the smoke scented the air. There she began collecting nuts again while counting her blessings.

  Chapter 9

  THE STORYTELLER

  There is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have traveled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. T
his is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long-established Dutch communities (TLSH, 52).

  STORYTELLERS

  Diedrich Knickerbocker, Geoffrey Crayon and Washington Irving together gathered the stories found within The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Indeed, we hear of ghosts rising from Native lore, Dutch American customs, traditional German tales, Revolutionary War journals and, ultimately, Irving’s imagination. Our storyteller’s perspective on all these sources colors the lore of The Legend.

  Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace comment in their tome Gotham: “Indeed Irving’s History can be read as one long screed, tempered somewhat by comparing them to a fictive Dutch Golden Age when every thing was better than it has ever been since.” People travel in and away from the neighborhood of Sleepy Hollow with such frightening frequency that they misunderstand those ghosts of “Golden” times. Again, Judith Richardson says that this is precisely why spirits crowd into the consciousness today: “The area’s hauntings emanate from social and historical tensions created by a rapid pace of development and obsolescence.” The storyteller of Sleepy Hollow, longing for the old dream of the Hudson Valley, emerges from the hustle and bustle of change to recall for us the old stories. He carries us back to an earlier age, but it is a contrived scene.

  Diedrich Knickerbocker, that storyteller with a significant name, stepped out from the dream into the busy streets of New York first as a shrewd publicity stunt. An advertisement appeared in 1809 New York newspapers just before the publishing of Washington Irving’s History of New-York. It requested help locating “a shabby looking gentlemen” who had left a sheaf of writings of that title in a hotel. Irving succeeded in piquing interest in his coming book while putting forth a vision of himself in the future. “Died Rich Knicker Booker,” as biographer Burnstein notes, seems to refer to a wealthy fellow nodding off cozy among his old books. Granted, Irving knew a real Congressman Herman Knickerbocker but selected the name to help tell his nostalgic tales.

  Historic Hudson Valley’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow storyteller Jonathan Kruk, 2009. Photo by Todd Atteberry, www.thehistorytrekker.com.

  Geoffrey Crayon seems to causally happen upon Knickerbocker’s manuscript while ostensibly just out to make some written “sketches” on the Hudson Valley. He downplays The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as just another chronicle. All the influences from German, Scottish and other sources are hidden in these found papers. The old saw then sounds against Washington Irving as a copycat, stealing the story from Musaus and others. The great New York folklorist Harold W. Thompson, in his book Body Boots and Britches, reminds, “Irving did not need to visit Germany—which he did two years after writing the Sketch Book—nor must we suppose that he was just introduced to German Legends in Sir Walter Scott’s library. He could have heard plenty of German as well as Dutch legends along the Hudson.”

  OTHER HEADLESS HORSEMEN IN NEW YORK

  Irving, indeed, heard many other tales too along the Hudson. A few significant standouts prove the air changes in the lower Hudson Valley with the spirits still abounding between the layers. New York holds a surfeit of decapitated spirits, which may have filtered into Irving’s ever-active imagination. Louis C. Jones, the master-collector of New York lore, in the 1940s reports a tale from the Schenevus Valley of the Catskills.

  Withering Hans

  Once upon a time, Hans was a shafer, tougher than a catamount and so Dutch that he had sauerkraut hanging out of his ears. Always he’d be the first to leap up to help and the last to stop flirting with the ladies. When out came the roasting apples, long pipes and longer tales of the Catskill ghosts and witches, Hans laughed, where everyone else jumped.

  One yarn of a headless revolutionary rider filled him with the biggest doubt. Folks told that this ghost casts spells over those who crossed his spooking path. Hans listened to all of it and declared over and over, “I’d like to meet the Headless Rider some day. I’ll trade him my own head for a loaf of bread.”

  Careless Hans got what he wished for! A day of horror came! Sauntering along a wooded track one evening, Hans met up with the Headless Rider. Our sturdy fellow became nervous as a cat with wet feet. He could not speak, let alone make and jest about trading his head for bread!

  When Hans returned to Schenevus, he had an “unknowing, unseeing” look in his sky-blue eyes. Folks found poor Hans’s mind just withered away after encountering that Headless Rider.

  Crawbucky Hessians

  This is one of several legends told by the old-timers on various occasions in the Crawbucky Fish House, to while away the hours before hauling in the seine. Legends had been handed down father to son in Westchester County. Washington Irving undoubtedly founded his Legend of Sleepy Hollow from just the same source (The Crawbucky Tales, 1920).

  Croton on Hudson, with its storied Teller’s Point, lies about ten miles north of Sleepy Hollow. Major Andre planned to rendezvous with the British warship, The Vulture, until a couple Patriots chased it off with a cannon they dragged to Crawbucky Beach. Fishermen there swapped quite a few yarns known as the Crawbucky Tales. They illuminate close calls with witches, a fiery señorita, devilish fires and treasure hidden at Money Hill by the privateer turned pirate William Kidd. One curious adventure takes Uncle Ben out rowing for a pot of money spied just floating near the point. Whenever the fishermen get near the loot, it blazes before vanishing like the Headless Horseman at the bridge by the Old Dutch Church. Among the Revolutionary Yarns is an account of the Hessian foragers. Following the Battle of White Plains, they strayed upon Teller’s Point, scrounging for food. A fellow known as Rifle Jake led a party of Patriots in apprehending the “long toothed” Germans. They decided to punish stealing soldiers by forcing them to eat all they had swiped. Bread, pie, cookies, cabbages and all went down the Hessians’ hatches at gunpoint. Just when the Germans felt they’d burst, they begged for mercy. Jake took them all as prisoners.

  One Hessian lingers to haunt Croton on Hudson. Schoolchildren over one hundred years ago began reporting a headless Hessian in uniform riding on Mount Airy Road. Others swear he strays as far away as Hanover Street, a road in Yorktown with a name left over from the days of King George. A few maintain it’s the ghost of one of the over-stuffed Germans from Crawbucky Beach, head tucked beneath his collar from embarrassment. Of course, he may simply have been the decapitated artilleryman seeking his head from Sleepy Hollow.

  Headless in Yonkers

  High above the rolling heights of Yonkers on Valentine Hill is Saint Joseph’s Seminary. Around the turn of the last century, many Poles and Italians migrated to that city on the Hudson. They needed one of those reminders from days gone past. A horrid specter with a bloody neck stump roved about the neighborhood, doubtlessly moving many to prayer. A Cow-Boy caught in the area by vengeful rebels may have taken the unfortunate thief ’s head, leaving him to haunt the newcomers to Yonkers.

  Jug o’ Rum!

  Again, this headless tale occurred in the late 1890s south of Fishkill, the big supply depot for the Americans during the Revolution. This tale, collected in the early 1960s by Nelson DeLanoy of the Putnam County Historical Society, recounts a local legend of a ghost pig connected to another thief who lost his head. Washington Irving frequently visited Cold Spring on Hudson, the destination of the one who became known as “Vinegar Pete” following this ghost encounter.

  Pete had gone courting a young woman in Fishkill. Heading home in a horse-drawn cart to Cold Spring late at night proves a harrowing trip when traversing the dreaded Dry Bridge near the old Haight House on Albany Post Road. The story of a soldier who lost his head in a fight with another over a stolen pig filled the air in those days when night fell. Pete found his head heavy as his heart, especially after his sweetheart scorned his marriage offer. Wending toward the bridge, Pete felt relieved when the headless soldier failed to show up to haunt. Then something grunted and leaped into Pete’s cart. He couldn’t see it, but the squeals and unearthly grunts let the poor fellow know that he had the soldier�
�s pilfered porker as a riding companion.

  The animal goblin struck fear in Pete and his horse. The latter mad dashed all the way down toward the 1867-built Baptist Church. Weird foxfire flashes accompanied them. Pete was bone jangled and trembling when words took shape.

  “Jug o’ rum! Jug o’ rum!” The spirit chanted until Pete pulled out the drink he carried to fortify himself from under the seat. Heaving it to send the ghost after the jug, Pete cried, “’Tis not! It’s vinegar!”

  Today’s Headless Horseman, 2011 watercolor ink. Ian Devaney.

  Perhaps it was the rum or the presence of the church, but there at the old Cold Spring Carmel turnpike the ghost pig vanished. Naturally when the tale got repeated, everyone soon said it all happened to Vinegar Pete. The Dry Bridge has been removed; the road straightened by the headless soldier’s ghost pig rides on.

  Farther north, and across the river near Sharon, rides still another ghost horseman. This spirit takes an extraordinary form. Apparently a horse with fiery hooves, head and eyes, its body is composed of the human rider. He rides bareback, of course, leaving burn marks on the ground and fear in hearts when he crosses paths. Headless Horsemen ride with some regularity in a few other locales in New York. Reports from Columbia County of a Headless Horseman come from few sources beyond Jesse Merwin’s charivari by Brom van Alstyne. A few headless Revolutionary ghosts stray in nearby New Jersey, but above all, the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow reigns as commander in chief.

  TODAY’S HORSEMAN