October – a month where the air turns colder, the light more golden, the trees glowing and fiery- spooky season begins, and the veil between this world and the next seems just a bit thinner. My thoughts turn to ghost stories and local Hudson Valley folklore.

In another lifetime before earning my nursing degree, I worked at the historic site Sunnyside – the Tarrytown, NY home of Washington Irving. Irving was a 19th-century author whose most recognizable work these days are the short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. As it happens, Sleepy Hollow is an actual village just seven miles down the Hudson from where I live.

I worked at Sunnyside for several years – a bucolic little property on the banks of the Hudson River with a sweet little house that Washington Irving affectionately referred to as “the cottage”. He lived there with his brother and two nieces. Those of us who worked at Sunnyside affectionately referred to him as “Uncle Wash” just as his nieces once did.

Part of my job was to take visitors around the grounds and through the cottage, sharing stories of Irving’s life, his family and his time there in the 1850’s. I even dressed the part! If you worked at Sunnyside and took people on a tour of the house and grounds, you did it in costume. The photo I’ve included is of me wearing a dress styled after what an upper-class lady may have worn in 1850.

In October, Sunnyside and the surrounding river towns come alive with the spirit of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

As a teenager, Washington Irving spent time in the Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow area – rambling around the countryside, meeting locals and listening to tales steeped in old Dutch colonial traditions and ghost stories about haunts and specters that inhabited the area. One of the tales Irving learned of spoke of a Hessian soldier who had his head blown off by a cannon during the Revolutionary War. It was said the decapitated soldier haunted woods by the Pocantico River, riding headless in search of his lost head… and maybe a bit of revenge!

The young Washington Irving fell in love with these sleepy little country villages and their ties to the old Dutch colonial ways. He borrowed the names of places and people who lived in these villages and wove them into his story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Katrina Van Tassel, Ichabod Crane’s love interest in the story, was based on a real woman who once lived in Sleepy Hollow. Her gravestone, engraved in Dutch, can still be seen in the churchyard surrounding the Old Dutch Church. Her name was Catriena Ecker Van Tassel – born November 10, 1736, and died January 10, 1793

Irving didn’t pen his famous tale while living at Sunnyside but rather while living in England in 1819-1820. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was one of several stories included in a collection titled The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – a pseudonym of Irving’s.

October is the busiest and most popular month of the year in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow – thanks to the popularity of Irving’s spooky tale. Every October, this little stretch along the Hudson comes alive with an old story waking up again. Visitors being drawn in by legends, Halloween vibes and to wander the old Dutch Church burial grounds and see the site of where the original bridge stood over the Pocantico – where Ichabod took his last fateful ride.

The Pocantico River is now more like a creek but still meanders through the woods where Ichabod Crane’s frightening ride on his old nag of a horse Gunpowder is said to have taken place – being pursued and hunted down by the Headless Horseman – right around the grounds of the Old Dutch Church. No one really knows what happened to Ichabod Crane that chilly autumn night…but he was never seen or heard from again.

On cold, quiet, moonlit October nights some say if you listen closely, you can still hear hoof beats off in the distance echoing through the woods around the Pocantico River.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like my brief history of Halloween – Click Here to check it out!

And my photo galleries. Click here for Autumn and here for Reflections.