Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley

by Jonathan Kruk

  When the ancient fiddler struck his bow, the schoolmaster bounced onto the dance floor. Every part of his lanky frame moving, he jittered and figured liked St. Vitus, the patron of the dance! Why this jumping with joy? Why, his partner was the desired Katrina van Tassel. The entire party watched, clapped and urged on Ichabod, while the great Brom Bones sulked. He was one of those men who believed dancing unmanly.

  When the tune ended, Brom set his plan to work. He flattered and cajoled the veterans into polishing up their old Revolutionary War stories. Tales of sword and cannon inevitably led to stories of Sleepy Hollow’s spirits. Talk turned to Farmer Brouwer. Right after he claimed, “I am a heretical disbeliever in ghosts!” the galloping Hessian bashed his brains. Brom followed with a frightful tale of his remarkable race with the Headless Horseman. Ichabod gasped when learning “the goblin rider vanished in a flash of fire.” He cannot cross the bridge by the Old Dutch Church graveyard.

  “Good night to all!” Baltus broke up revelry, and all merrily rode home. Ichabod approached Katrina like Romeo but soon returned to Gunpowder crestfallen. The coquette had led him on only to send him away.

  The night along the Hudson looked as lonely as the rejected Master Crane. The forlorn schoolmaster felt the crickets and owls turn into spooks and spirits. Riding in fits and starts on the cantankerous horse, soon every blazed branch and forest creaking became an uncouth ghoul or the White Lady’s ghost. Near the haunts of Wiley’s swamp, Andre’s Capture Tree spooked Ichabod. He then heard the “plashy tramp of another traveler.”

  “Who are you?” he stammered, but received no reply. “Who are you?”

  On mounting a rising ground—which brought the figure of his fellow traveler 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 increased on observing that the head rested on the pommel of his saddle.

  A race against terror took off. “If I can just make it to that bridge!” thought the schoolmaster. “The headless horseman cannot cross!” Ichabod squeezed Gunpowder so hard he broke off the saddle and almost popped out the horse’s one good eye. Ichabod reached the church bridge first. He turned to assure himself of the ghost’s fiery disappearance. Alas! He caught the goblin in the very act of hurling his ghastly head. A shattering encounter with Crane’s cranium ended the night’s haunting.

  The next morning, Hans van Ripper, Gunpowder’s owner, found his horse grazing. But where was that scarecrow of a schoolmaster?

  The schoolchildren had a holiday. The Dutch folk made a startling find beneath the bridge. There, scattered on the banks of the Pocantico, they spied the remains of their poor pedagogue. A hat, a piece of poetry to Katrina and, some cried, “Looky! ’Tis Crane’s brains!” A few scoffed, “’Tis but pumpkin mash.” No matter—Ichabod never again was seen in Sleepy Hollow.

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

  Ah now, some claimed, “Crane had gone to the city and suffered a fate worse than being chased by a headless ghost; he had became a lawyer!” Brom, of course, married Katrina and always gave a knowing laugh whenever someone mentioned the pumpkin part of this tale.

  The wise Dutch farm wives, who know these matters best, insist “the galloping Hessian spirited Ichabod to his grave that night.” And in the cove where his old schoolhouse once stood, you still hear the ghostly singing of Ichabod Crane.

  Chapter 1

  BY THE NAME WASHINGTON IRVING

  On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of 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 before him on the pommel of his saddle!…Now 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 in his stirrups, in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but it was too late.

  —The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 6th ed. New York and London: C.S. Van Winkle and John Murray, 1820

  THE HORSEMAN’S APPEAL

  Headless horsemen, from the Green Knight riding off head in hand after being decapitated by Sir Gawain to the wild skullduggery in Tim Burton’s film Sleepy Hollow, have long thrilled us. Imbedded in our universal subconscious, he evokes primal fear and fascination. The favorite horseman is Washington Irving’s “galloping Hessian of Sleepy Hollow.”

  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was an instant hit when it first appeared in 1819. The Headless Horseman even makes a crowd-pleasing run at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Recognized as the first major work by an American writer, The Legend is required reading at schools and universities. Everyone seems to both know and love the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

  In 1996, when General Motors closed down its North Tarrytown plant, the community looked for another way to bring in new business. Residents drew upon The Legend, renaming their hamlet Sleepy Hollow. A nearby village, once known as Dearman, had already taken the author’s name, Irvington, in the nineteenth century.

  Why do we love Irving’s horseman? Russell Hubbard, a longtime historical interpreter at Washington Irving’s homestead, Sunnyside, in Tarrytown, New York, gives a concise answer: “The scary chase appeals to our inner being. We all want a good fright!”

  Irving taps into our inner Ichabod, dashing away from doom. He leaves with us the Headless Horseman ever riding as “the dominant spirit…that haunts this enchanted region” (TLSH, 5) of our imagination. We really want to know, where does he come from and why does he ride?

  One definitive answer comes from “the most authentic historians of those parts” (TLSH, 5): Charlie Duda, another longtime Sunnyside interpreter and Hubbard’s mentor. Charlie said he’d read everything on and by Irving. Speaking with an authoritative New York accent, he honed his knowledge on the subject of the Headless Horseman by addressing the public. When asked where Irving got The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, he would reply in characteristic form with the following bit of lore.

  BELLS BECKON

  One Sunday morning in 1818, when the fabled fog of the river Thames threatened to stop the day from breaking, two brothers hear the old bell of St. Martyr’s Church tolling. The younger tarries, as the older presses on into the mist over London Bridge. He calls back, warning they’ll be late for church.

  The younger one is lost in the fog. He calls, telling his brother to look for a shape in the mist. The older one agrees to play along, saying, “All right! I see a horse and rider, only the rider needs a head!”

  The younger one agrees and asks if it reminds him of the kind of stories they used to hear around the Hudson Valley. “Yes indeed, brother!” answers the elder. “What about the St. Martyr’s bell tolling for us now? Let us go!”

  Washington Irving, circa 1820, oil on canvas. By Charles Robert Leslie, Historic Hudson Valley (ss.87.6 a-b).

  The younger, still studying those mists, replies, “Another bell calls for me. It rings, Si Deus Pro Nobis, Quis Contra Nos (If God is for us, who can be against us). Do you recall the church with that inscribed on it?”

  “Of course! It’s on the bell of Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow! Washington! Are you homesick brother?”

  “I’m reminded of a horseman who rode all along the Hudson. Forgive me brother, but I’m going to leave you to pray, while I go to write.”

  So the older one goes on to church, and the younger one goes on to write The Legend of Sleepy Hollow! Who were the brothers? Why, Peter and Washington Irving!

  WASHINGTON IRVING

  Pressing for proof of his account, Charlie followed Washington Irving’s example, giving a delightfully indirect answer. The Legend came from a Dutch New Yorker, t
hat old shabby gentleman who told it to Diedrich Knickerbocker, who left it in papers found by Geoffrey Crayon, the pseudonym used by Washington Irving. Charlie declared his account of Irving’s inspiration for The Legend came from “all the biographers, who got their material from Irving’s letters.” Charlie Duda then interpreted the sources for us with the church bell story.

  Distinguished biographers like Andrew Burstein and Stanley Williams generally agree with Charlie. Something in London’s mists brought on homesickness and nostalgia for Sleepy Hollow, moving Irving to write The Legend. They go on to detail other sources Irving found inspiring in German and Scottish lore. Irving scholar Elisabeth Paling Funk postulates that Dutch American traditions shaped Irving’s tale. Clearly the ride of the Headless Horseman began when something in the Sleepy Hollow air moved this New York City–raised author.

  Born on April 4, 1783, during the British army occupation of Manhattan Island, Washington Irving came into the world just a couple weeks before General Washington assembled his troops on the Hudson to announce the formal end of the American War of Independence. The voices of Revolution—crying for liberty, calling for the pursuit of happiness—rang deep into the sensitive Washington Irving. A lifelong voracious reader, no doubt he read all he could on the struggle to create a new nation. Later he went on to write an exhaustive biography on his namesake, George Washington. An account given by his nursemaid, Lizzie, foreshadows the coming of America’s first great writer.

  A BAIRN NAMED WASHINGTON

  The Irving family’s Scottish nursemaid spied the gentleman crossing Broadway from almost a block away. New York’s wealthy merchants strove to stand out, garbed in gaudy colored frocks. George Washington, however, wore one of an understated elegant brown. A half a head above the street crowd, his calm, placid demeanor distinguished him further. He slipped into a shop. Lizzie took little Washington’s hand and marched him straight in after the former general. The six-year-old tugged and tried to wiggle away. When he put his eyes upon the tall man, the little boy went still and solemn. Lizzie curtsied to the gentleman.

  “Please pardon me your Excellency, but here’s a bairn—was named after you.”

  The tall man looked upon the boy and gave a smile. Lizzie put her words into the boy’s ear. “Washington, give a proper greeting, like you’ve been taught. Go on, say your name clear.”

  Little Washington Irving, awestruck, could not speak. The father of our country understood. Gently he placed his hand on the boy’s head. The two smiled, perhaps giving each other blessings.

  Lizzie, a good storyteller of a nursemaid, made sure the blessing became part of the Irving family lore. It shows a possible influence on young Washington, leading him to not only write about his namesake but to have an affinity for the history of American Revolution.

  This incident would have occurred around the time of Washington’s inauguration in New York City. Home to thirty-three thousand in 1790, Manhattan had long been the New World’s most diverse city. The French Jesuit Isaac Jogues wrote in 1646: “On the island of Manhate, and in its environs, there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages.”

  Later, almost ninety years after the English transformed New Netherlands into New York, acclaimed Swedish traveler Pehr Kalm observed that the land between Manhattan and Albany was Dutch dominated. Dutch Reform churchgoers cried “nooit!” when their ministers started preaching in English in the early 1800s. Dutch ways endured late into the nineteenth century, with Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt reporting the use of Dutch phrases around their homes while growing up in the Hudson Valley.

  Truly, Washington Irving, with a doting nursemaid, the pampered and protected youngest and eighth child of a Scot Presbyterian father and an Episcopal mother, grew up in a diverse but Dutch world. Slipping off to explore the lower Hudson Valley, young Irving would sneak out for a night on the town after his father finished family prayers at nine. He’d meet up with his best comrades at Gouverneur Kemble’s Cockloft Hall across the river in New Jersey. They called themselves the “Lads of Kilkenny.” They gathered for evenings of revelry, pranks and satirical poem making. Young men with the names Brevoort, Kirke-Paulding and Swartout brought Dutch ways and words to Washington Irving.

  TIPPING LEATHERHEADS

  Irving, in The Legend, carefully crafts a rival to chase Ichabod away from the bounteous beautiful Katrina van Tassel. The double-jointed Abraham van Brunt was known as Brom Bones and famed for his pranks. Apparently, Brom’s best work took form when he disguised himself as the galloping ghost to drive and even drag off the interloping schoolmaster.

  Those Lads of Kilkenny practiced an early version of this prank on the poor night watchmen of late eighteenth-century New York. Working at night as a guard at various corners in New York City had its benefits. A man could labor by day in a shop, at a trade or on the waterfront; by night he could get paid to don a watchman’s leather cap and settle into the narrow little guard booth. There was just enough room to lean and doze. If luck kept crime away, the watchman only had to wake up to shout out the hour and that all is well. You’d collect a pretty penny in pay for all your slumbers.

  What could make for a better target for the Lads of Kilkenny? One night, after family prayers, Washington slinked out his window under the gable. Dashing by the Dutch Church toward John Street, he met up with his fellow Lads. What did Lady Fortune drop in their laps? A leatherhead was already nodding off on his watch! The Lads lifted a rope from a horse post. They secured it around the sleepy sentry’s booth. Letting forth a conquering hoot, they yanked, toppling the little guard’s station.

  Clattering over the cobblestone street, the Lads dragged the Old Charlie, his howling protests fueling their spirited laughter. When they’d had enough of their prank and came into view of another watchman, they dropped the rope, turned a corner and caught their breath after the sidesplitting fun. They, like Brom Bones at the end of The Legend, “gave a hearty laugh” (TLSH, 72) when hearing about their prank.

  Road to Sleepy Hollow, 2008. Photo by Todd Atteberry, www.thehistorytrekker.com.

  RAMBLES AND READINGS, CUSTOMS AND HEARTACHE

  When in his teens, Washington also traveled on a sloop with a Dutch-speaking skipper and an African American crew. Irving’s first excursions into the Hudson Highlands cast a spell. He wrote, “What a time of intense delight was that first sail through the Highlands. How solemn and thrilling the scene as we anchored at night at the foot of those mountains, clothed with overhanging forests; and every thing grew dark and mysterious.”

  There young Irving hunted for squirrels but found folklore. He drank in the local tales, landscapes and characters. Gathering stories from Dutch farm wives, Irish laborers and a knowing “African sage,” he later bundled them all into his fabulous storyteller, Diedrich Knickerbocker. This venerable pipe-smoking, wine-swilling itinerant bard spun yarns of river spirits, forlorn witches, wailing ghosts and the galloping Hessian to Irving’s equally fictitious but just as distinguished “sketch” writer, Geoffrey Crayon, gentleman. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, however, along with his other famed work, Rip Van Winkle, took root in German lore.

  Always an avid reader, Irving devoured the German folk and fairy tales collected in the early 1800s by the Brothers Grimm and Johann Otmar. He turned the tale of Peter Klaus the Goatherd into Rip Van Winkle. Gottfried Augustus Burger’s epic poem, Der Wilde Jager, also based in German lore, and the Wild Huntsmen, the version written by Irving’s friend Sir Walter Scott, formed Irving’s Headless Horseman.

  Irving carefully crafted together story elements from diverse sources. He wove German folklore into his own experiences of the Dutch on the Hudson. He also borrowed a few ghostly plot devices from Robert Burns’s Tam O’Shanter. Further, while living in Great Britain, his nostalgia fueled his desire to write about home. Add Irving’s own melancholia over love and death to his uniquely American characters, a
nd the “galloping Hessian” began his Sleepy Hollow run from his head to paper in 1818.

  Lady Fortune tormented Washington Irving before granting success to his Sketch Book. Studying law under the esteemed Ogden Hoffman, Washington Irving found “an insuperable repugnance” for his chosen profession. Why practice the law when he had become the talk of the town writing humorous sendups of “Yorkers” in his magazine Salmagundi? Then, just as his writing led to a triumph in 1809 with the publication of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New-York, his satire of Dutch colonial days, death came calling: his sister, Nancy, and father, William, passed away within a few months of each other.

  The Grim Reaper was just beginning to cast his shadow over the promising young author. He noted how a young lady, “timid, shy, silent,” swept up his heart. Matilda Hoffman, his boss’s daughter, was in her early teens when she first sparked Irving’s interest while he tutored her in drawing and poetry. She showed, Irving wrote in a letter, “mantling modesty,” which was beginning to peel away, revealing something sublime.

  When A History started selling, Matilda fell ill with “consumption,” otherwise known as tuberculosis. Washington served as her enduring nurse. She “grew beautiful and more angelical” as the disease progressed, he tenderly declared. She died just before her eighteenth birthday.

  Matilda never left Washington’s heart. He cherished her Bible, prayer book and memory as lifelong keepsakes. The theme of unattainable love occurs in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with Ichabod Crane longing for Katrina van Tassel and “her vast expectations” (TLSH, 6).