Battling the Headless Horseman

Today Erin and I drove up just across the New York border and had fun visiting a historic site. The early American author Washington Irving wrote a story that many are familiar with, though for me it was relatively recently that I actually read the original, unabridged version (worth a quick read, if you're interested). The first exposure I remember to the story "The Legend of Sleep Hollow" was a Disney cartoon from who knows how long ago. There is also frequent mention of the infamous headless horseman from the story around Halloween.

What I didn't know about the story until a few years ago is that though it's of course a fictional story, it's based in a very real town, and actually includes some characters named after some real people from that town.

Taking the Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River some ten miles north of New York City will put you almost directly into a small town called Tarrytown, two miles north is an even smaller town, originally called North Tarrytown, but due to the small amount of tourism the book brought to the town, they officially changed the name to Sleep Hollow, NY.

There honestly isn't a whole lot to see there; visiting the official tourism website of the area lists four potential sites to visit. One is just the old mansion that some of the Rockefellers once lived in, not really our cup of (herbal) tea. The next three places on the list we thought warranted a quick stop on our trip.

Our first stop was an old mill that has been restored to it's colonial glory; there are people dressed in period clothing, a working grist mill, and a seriously overpriced tour ($23 per person to walk through an old building, I think not)... so we just swung by for some quick pictures outside.



(Thanks goes to our sweet Photoshop skills in getting us both into pictures together... when it's just the two of us, it's a little hard to get these shots without fudging them a little.)

Our next stop was a lighthouse. Pretty cool idea and only $5 per car to get into the park... It even had this fun welcome sign to get us excited for the lighthouse...



And then we got into the park... and couldn't find the lighthouse. Kinda easy to find a lighthouse, normally. I'm not sure, but it might have been a pile of dirt that was hiding it from our view, but finally we were able to find the smallest lighthouse either of us had ever seen... it was so small and cute, Erin couldn't help but squish it...



Our last stop was the most exciting, the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, resting place of Washington Irving himself as well as a couple of the characters from the story; also a large part of the story itself. The path that the headless horseman chases Ichabod Crane down runs alongside the graveyard.



The love interest of the story is a girl named Katrina VanTassell, a character based on a girl that actually lived in North Tarrytown. On my first visit a few years ago, I was able to find the headstone but unfortunately no such luck this time... in my defense some headstones date back to the 1600s, there are Revolutionary War soldiers and Civil War soldiers buried there and many more, so there's a lot to look through. Luckily Washington Irving's site is clearly marked on the paths and on the map, so we got to stop there.



We also stopped briefly to see the famous bridge that the headless horseman crossed in the story. It was a very cool trip.



Then after we were done in Sleepy Hollow, we headed back towards Jersey but we couldn't have come all this way without stopping at the Palisades Mall... 4 floors of shopping goodness. Of course, we currently have a one two track mind and ended up only eating food and picking up a half-ton of fabric with which Erin will be making the bedding and curtains for the baby's room. We'll post pictures of it all when she's done, but it's gonna be pretty dang cute. :-)

Labels: baby, Erin, pictures, trips

posted by Brett at 7:31 PM