Sleepy Hollow and the Headless Horseman

A literary legend rooted in a real, walkable village

Sleepy Hollow is a real village on the east bank of the Hudson in Westchester County, New York, just north of Tarrytown, where the Pocantico River comes down to the river. Frederick Philipse, whose manor was chartered in 1693, made his country seat here at the river's mouth, the Upper Mills, and with his own hands, it is said, he built the pulpit of the stone church beside it. The Old Dutch Church, begun around 1685, is the oldest standing church in New York State, and its graveyard is one of the oldest burying grounds in America.

Washington Irving knew the place as a teenager, sent up from Manhattan to escape a yellow fever epidemic, and soaked up its ghost stories. In 1820, in The Sketch Book, he published The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, set around 1790. Ichabod Crane, a gangly, superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut, courts the heiress Katrina Van Tassel against the swaggering Brom Bones. On his ride home alone after a harvest party, he meets a headless rider, said to be the ghost of a soldier who lost his head in the Revolutionary War, and races for a bridge the ghost is said to be unable to cross. The horseman hurls his head. Next morning Ichabod is gone, and beside his hat lies a smashed pumpkin.

Irving drew on old European tales of headless horsemen and wild huntsmen, but much of the story is local. Real members of the Van Tassel and Martling families lie in the Old Dutch Burying Ground, among them Catriena Ecker Van Tassel, whose name he borrowed for Katrina. There is a record of a nameless Hessian decapitated by a cannonball in the Battle of White Plains, and a tale that a headless body was buried in the area after it. Aqueduct workers told Irving they met headless apparitions walking home from the taverns at night.

The legend outlived the name for a while. The village incorporated in 1874 as North Tarrytown, became a factory town around a General Motors plant, and voted in 1996, the year the plant closed, to call itself Sleepy Hollow again. Its streets now include Legend Drive and Horseman Boulevard, and every autumn tens of thousands come for haunted hayrides, lantern-lit cemetery tours and pumpkins.

Irving himself is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which he helped found in 1849, beside the old burying ground. His third white marble headstone, its predecessors chipped away by souvenir hunters, is the most visited grave there. Visitors also love the cemetery's rustic bridge over the Pocantico ravine, though the cemetery's superintendent notes that it is a much later addition, not Irving's bridge.