Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley

by Jonathan Kruk

  Other communities, from the shores of the Hudson to Hollywood, contribute to the myriad manifestations of the galloping Hessian today. Thousands visit Sleepy Hollow for that authentic Halloween experience. Philipseburg Manor, a site managed by Historic Hudson Valley, bases its October weekends on The Legend. People come for the gory “Horseman’s Hollow” and the enchanting “Pumpkin Blaze” at Van Cortlandt Manor, and dramatic retellings of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are performed at the Old Dutch Church. A popular haunted hayride farther north in Ulster County uses the Headless Horseman name to help draw tens of thousands every autumn.

  Disney World features a Headless Horseman rider and storyteller, freely adapting The Legend in a pared-down version that gallops around the famed amusement site.

  Uncanny Tales Comics featured a Sleepy Hollow story in 1954 and introduced a Headless Horseman character in 1999, the same year the film Sleepy Hollow was released. The blockbuster by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp as investigator Ichabod Crane, grossed over $200 million.

  Earlier movies include a 1922 silent version starring Will Rogers as Ichabod, a 1948 Disney production with Bing Crosby and a 1980 film with Jeff Goldblum and Dick Butkus. Shelley Duval produced a short version, and Glenn Close narrates another for Rabbit Ears Radio. The 1944 horror film The Curse of the Cat People relies on the Headless Horseman to terrify a little girl.

  Headless Horseman characters appear in many computer games, including the highly popular World of Warcraft.

  An avant-garde band called the Headless Horseman offers an eclectic sound of Icelandic folk songs with a New York edge.

  Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, New York, share a local high school with the Headless Horseman as their mascot. Students reportedly dare one another to visit the Old Dutch Church Cemetery, where the Horseman occasionally rides around midnight.

  Valatie, New York, just outside of Kinderhook, salutes Jesse Merwin with an entire Ichabod Crane School District. Their mascot, rather like the one at Sleepy Hollow High, is a headless rider.

  Conner Prairie, Indiana, an interactive history park, follows the current model of shying away from a full Headless Horseman story, opting for “skeletons, witches and ghosts trying to warn you about the infamous Headless Horseman.”

  There’s a Sleepy Hollow in Illinois and California, plus a number of subdivisions too. Finally, there are Headless Horseman costumes for dogs.

  THE WHOLE PLACE STILL ABOUNDS WITH SPIRITS

  Today, Sleepy Hollow boasts a cornucopia of spirits. Thirty years ago, local high school students determined that ghosts continued to favor this drowsy, dreamy land. The tales they unearthed in the great oral tradition include dozens that Washington Irving could weave into his works. Here is a sampling of current spooks in Sleepy Hollow:

  • The Bronze Lady of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery sits in repose before a mausoleum. If someone sits in her lap, spits in her eye, kicks her shin, knocks on her tomb and looks in, nightmares will plague you for two weeks!

  • An assortment of apartment houses all situated in what once was Wiley’s Swamp is haunted by ghosts of deceased war veterans, murdered people and a Lady in Black.

  • Further, the golf course on the other side of the cemetery features an impish spirit, interfering with putts and stringing together streaks of curses.

  • The woods near the course hold a great hairy Bigfoot-like creature. He once reportedly twisted a pair of dropped hunting rifles around a tree.

  • And, of course, on dark nights, the galloping Hessian’s horse’s hooves may be heard beneath and nearby the current cemetery bridge. The Headless Horseman continues to tramp by the old one, though it no longer stands for us mortals.

  NO MORE NORTH TARRYTOWN

  Travel writers, on the web especially, lament the lack of ghost savvy among Sleepy Hollowers. Conducting informal surveys, few folks in restaurants or on the street right across from the famed Horseman crossing bridge could identify the galloping Hessian, let along poor Ichabod. A 2006 installation of a fantastic metal sculpture of Ichabod and the Horseman apparently draws blanks or “a picture of horse and buggy days” when locals were asked to answer, “What is this work of art?”

  In 1997, North Tarrytown’s Chamber of Commerce, reeling from the closure of a General Motors plant, spearheaded a movement to reestablish a connection to the region’s principal spirit. Recognizing the way Washington Irving put the Hudson Valley on the map in the early 1800s, the chamber convinced the village to change its name to Sleepy Hollow. The chamber succeeded, but many cling proudly to North Tarrytown, sporting bumper stickers showing they are its residents. Tourism, thanks to Historic Hudson Valley, a parade and continued fascination with the Headless Horseman, grows in Sleepy Hollow.

  DARK SHADOWS

  Once upon a time, Thom Wolke, a local impresario concert creator, decided to link together two highly popular local legends. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Dark Shadows share a common bond in Tarrytown. Washington Irving’s story, of course, is set in the village “where farmers have a tendency to tarry in the tavern.” The nearby estate of Lyndhurst served as a location for the 1960s television “spook-opera” series Dark Shadows. The Old House of Collinwood still garners attention from devoted fans. The possibilities of a “vampire meets Headless Horseman” extravaganza sent Wolke howling at the moon with fiendish joy.

  Road sign: Headless Horseman Xing, 2009. Photo by Todd Atteberry, www.thehistorytrekker.com.

  In the early 1990s, Wolke secured the Old Dutch Church for a complete unabridged reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by aging Canadian actor Jonathan Frid. He portrayed the Dark Shadows vampire Barnabus Collins in the late ’60s. The concert sold out. He gave a chillingly dramatic reading of The Legend.

  One final surprise shocked the audience when a braying horse, complete with a headless rider, galloped right up to the church window, leering. Frid lost his cool and shrieked like a ghost!

  THE GOOD SPIRIT

  The Legend, along with the equally enchanting story Rip Van Winkle, continues to enchant all as films, books, plays, ballets, operas, videos and games. One unusual source on the storyteller’s perspective comes from the mother of one of Washington Irving’s crushes. Mrs. Amelia Foster wrote about the author to a friend: “He looks upon life as a picture, but to catch its beauties, its lights—not its defects and shadows.”

  Washington Irving wrote in vivid pictures of Sleepy Hollow’s spirit stories. Today the enduring shadow and beauty found in the Headless Horseman give the author’s ghost a laugh, leading us to suspect he knows more about the matter than he chose to tell.

  Irving, writing in 1843 about his homestead of Sunnyside, said, “I really believe that when I die I shall haunt it: but it will be as a good spirit, that no one needs be afraid of.”

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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  Clyne, Patricia Edwards. Hudson Valley Faces and Places. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., 2005.

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roine?” Tarrytown Daily News, March 28, 1975.

  Duboc, Jesse. In the Days of Ichabod. Ann Arbor, MI: Edward Brothers, 1939.

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  Funk, Elisabeth Paling. “Washington Irving and His Dutch-American Heritage.” Unpublished manuscript, private collection.

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  Hargreaves, Reginald, and Lewis Melville. Great German Short Stories. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1929

  Hatch, Robert McConnell. Major John Andre: A Gallant in Spy’s Clothing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986.

  Hellman, George S. Washington Irving, Esquire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925.

  Hoffman, Daniel G. “Irving’s Use of American Folklore in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” PMLA 68 (June 1953).

  Hufeland, Otto. Westchester County during the American Revolution, 1775–1783. Harrison, NY: Harbor Hill Books, 1982.

  Hunt, Freeman. Letters about the Hudson River and Its Vicinity. New York: Freeman Hunt Publishing, 1837.

  Hutchinson, Lucille, and Theodore Hutchinson. The Centennial History of North Tarrytown. N.p.: Historical Society of the Tarrytowns Serving Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, 1975.

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  Kingston, Cecelia, ed. Folklore of the Tarrytowns. Unpublished manuscript, 1979. Historical Society of the Tarrytowns Serving Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown.

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  RELEVANT WEBSITES

  Columbia County Historical Society, www.cchsny.org.

  Friends of the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground, www.olddutchburyingground.org/sleepy_country.html.

  Highland Studio, www.thehighlandstudio.com.

  Historic Hudson Valley, www.hudsonvalley.org.

  Infanterie Regiment von Donop, www.vondonop.org.

  “Livingston-Svirsky Archive (LiSA).” Alice Curtis Desmond & Hamilton Fish Library. dfl.highlands.com/lisa.html.

  Love’s Guide to the Church Bells of the City of London, london.lovesguide.com.

  Military and Historical Image Bank, www.historicalimagebank.com.

  MuseumsUSA.org, “The Historical Society, Inc. Serving Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, Tarrytown NY,” www.museumsusa.org/museums/info/1154921.

  Putnam County Historical Society and Foundry School Museum, www.pchs-fsm.org.

  Rich Bala, Folk Balladeer, www.richbala.com.

  Sleepy Hollow Chamber of Commerce, www.sleepyhollowchamber.com.

  Todd Atteberry.com, www.thehistorytrekker.com.

  U.S. History.org, http://www.ushistory.org.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in El Paso, Texas, but raised in Westchester County, New York, Jonathan Kruk grew up on tall tales and daydreams. He toured the country in a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, watered Henry Kissinger’s office plants and regaled his rambunctious brothers with bedtime “boojzhak” tales.

  Jonathan made storytelling his full-time career in 1989. Every year, he performs for thousands of children at hundreds of schools, libraries and historic sites in the Hudson Valley and metropolitan New York. He engages children with finger fables and fairy-tale theater and as a medieval troubadour. Every October, Kruk’s performances of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for Historic Hudson Valley sell out. An Early Stages teaching artist, Kruk brings stories of colonial and Revolutionary times to New York City schoolchildren. He performs traditional stories and songs with Rich Bala as the Hudson River Ramblers.

  His recordings of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Rainbow Dragon, Barkface & Rootnose, Halloween Tales, Revolution on the River and Once Upon the Hudson have won Parent’s Choice awards and NAPPA honors. He was selected in 2008 as Best Storyteller in the Hudson Valley. The National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution presented Kruk with the Citizenship Medal. He is also an Eagle Scout.

  Jonathan’s Sleepy Hollow work has been featured on the Travel and History Channels. He’s performed at Pete Seegers’s Clearwater Festival, New York’s Quadricentenial, the New-York Historical Society and for thirty Magic Tours in Tales of Elfin Lands at Pound Ridge Reservation.

  Jonathan lives in a cottage in the Hudson Highlands with his wife, actress and filmmaker Andrea Sadler. For more information, go to his website, www.jonathankruk.com.

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