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The real Sleepy Hollow: the places and people behind the legend

Washington Irving's life, the real Old Dutch Church, burying ground, bridge site and Sunnyside, the people his names may come from, and Ichabod's open ending.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a ghost story, but the valley in it is real. You can still stand in the churchyard, cross the stream, and visit the grave of the man who wrote it. Here is what is history, what is local tradition, and what Washington Irving simply made up.

The man who wrote it

Washington Irving was born in New York City on 3 April 1783 and was named after George Washington. In 1798 a yellow fever outbreak sent the teenage Irving up the Hudson to stay with a friend in Tarrytown. He spent less than a year in the river towns, but the old Dutch valley and its stories stayed with him.

In 1815 he sailed to England for the family business. There, writing as "Geoffrey Crayon", he published The Sketch Book in installments in 1819 and 1820. It held 34 essays and stories, including Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The book made him one of the first American writers to win real acclaim in Europe. He later served as the American minister to Spain (1842 to 1846), and he died at his home, Sunnyside, on 28 November 1859.

The real places

Sleepy Hollow itself. In Irving's day there was no village called Sleepy Hollow. The name belonged to the valley of the lower Pocantico River, a little north of Tarrytown. The village there was called North Tarrytown until December 1996, when, after the local General Motors plant closed, residents voted 1,304 to 710 to rename it Sleepy Hollow. Local historians still debate which hollow Irving meant, and one historian at Historic Hudson Valley has suggested that much of the landscape was Irving's own invention.

The Old Dutch Church. The stone church where the Horseman is said to rest was built for Frederick Philipse, lord of Philipsburg Manor, probably between 1685 (the date on its bell) and 1697. It is the oldest standing church in New York State. George Washington's army stopped there in July 1781.

The burying ground. Beside the church lies the small Old Dutch Burying Ground, one of the oldest in America and closed to new burials. It holds many Revolutionary War veterans, including a soldier said to have taken part in the 1780 capture of the British spy Major John André. That capture appears in Irving's story too: Ichabod rides past "the great tree where the unfortunate Major André was taken."

The bridge. Irving describes a wooden bridge "over a deep black part of the stream, not far from the church." That bridge is long gone. Today Route 9 crosses the Pocantico near the church on a concrete and masonry arch built in 1912, and a state marker there calls it the site of the original bridge. Some local historians think the real crossing stood a little way upstream.

Sunnyside. In 1835 Irving bought a neglected cottage on the Hudson a few miles south of Sleepy Hollow and rebuilt it into a gabled, vine-covered home he named Sunnyside. It stands today in Irvington and is run by Historic Hudson Valley, which opens it for tours from spring through December.

Irving's grave. Irving is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which opened in 1849 next to the Old Dutch Church. He lies in a plain family plot.

The real people behind the names

Some of the names in the story seem to come from real people, though Irving never explained his choices. These links are traditions and good guesses, not proven facts.

Why a Hessian?

Irving's ghost is a soldier from the Revolution:

the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War

"Hessians" were German soldiers rented to Britain by their princes. Most came from Hesse-Cassel and Hesse-Hanau, so Americans called them all Hessians. More than 30,000 served, about a quarter of the British army, and Americans resented them as hired foreign troops; the Declaration of Independence complains of them. The country around Tarrytown was disputed ground between the two armies. A headless Hessian riding back to a Dutch churchyard was exactly the kind of ghost such a place would remember. There is no record of a real headless Hessian, and Irving never claimed one.

So what happened to Ichabod?

Irving never says. The morning after the ride, the villagers find the saddle trampled in the road, Ichabod's hat by the brook, and "close beside it a shattered pumpkin." No body is found. The old wives say the Galloping Hessian carried him off. Then Irving adds two more clues: Brom Bones, who soon marries Katrina, laughs whenever the pumpkin is mentioned, and a farmer later reports that Ichabod is alive, a lawyer and a judge in a distant part of the country.

Irving even ends with a postscript in which the storyteller is asked what the tale was meant to prove. His final answer is a wink:

"Faith, sir," replied the story-teller, "as to that matter, I don't believe one-half of it myself."

Our ending-explained video weighs the case for the Hessian, for Brom, and for a schoolmaster who simply ran. Irving built it so that every answer fits and none can be proved.

Sources

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