Sleepy Hollow: Washington Irving and the American Ghost

The churchyard at the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow in Tarrytown has been accumulating the dead since sixteen eighty-five. The church itself is one of the oldest surviving buildings in New York State, a fieldstone rectangle on a hillside above the Pocantico River, surrounded by graves whose Dutch and English inscriptions have been softening into the stone for three centuries. The setting is exactly what you would expect from a man who needed a haunted landscape.

Washington Irving was born in New York City in seventeen eighty-three and grew up hearing the folklore of the Dutch communities along the lower Hudson, stories of the supernatural that had arrived with the settlers and taken root in the particular quality of light and mist that the river valley produces in autumn. He transformed those materials into literature. 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' published in eighteen twenty, gave the American imagination its first indigenous ghost: the Headless Horseman, identified in the story as a Hessian mercenary decapitated at the Battle of White Plains in seventeen seventy-six. The American ghost story is grounded in the Revolutionary War.

Irving's estate, Sunnyside, is about a mile south of the Old Dutch Church, a romantic, ivy-covered cottage on the Hudson riverbank that he remodeled repeatedly over his life, adding a tower here, a Dutch stepped gable there, until it looked exactly as literary as he wanted it to look. He is buried in the churchyard at the Old Dutch Church, which is also where, by tradition, Ichabod Crane fled the Headless Horseman on his borrowed horse. The bridge over the Pocantico Creek, where Crane's pumpkin-induced panic reportedly climaxed, still exists in the vicinity.

Irving did something with this valley that is not fully measurable: he gave American literature a sense of place rooted in American soil, American folklore, and American history. Before 'Sleepy Hollow' and 'Rip Van Winkle,' American writers tended to look east for their archetypes. After Irving, the Hudson Valley was the landscape of the American imagination, and the ghost at the center of it rode a black horse toward a covered bridge in the dark.