Rockland County
Rockland County is home to a surprising abundance of legends, ghosts, witches and mythical beasts!
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When the Jersey Devil Crossed the State Line: The 1909 Spring Valley Bombat
This is the first in a planned series exploring Rockland County’s surprising abundance of mythical beasts and unexplained creatures. From colonial-era monsters to twentieth-century oddities, Sleepy Hollow Country extends its reach westward across the Hudson. Most people who know anything about the Jersey Devil assume the creature keeps to its ancestral stomping grounds in the New Jersey Pine Barrens—that vast, eerie stretch of scrubby pines and cedar swamps that has harbored the legend for more than two centuries. And most of the time, they’d be right. But in January 1909, something strange happened. The Jersey Devil—or whatever it was—went on tour. During the third week of that month, thousands of…
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The Ramapo Spook Rock & Indian Rock
Rockland County is so aptly named for its enormous relationship with the geological. From the cliffs of the Palisades to the South, to the Ramapo Mountains in the west, “…the county appears to have been well named, and it is not surprising that it was not looked on in favor as an agricultural region” as there are just a lot of rocks. But not just any old run-of-the-mill stones, there are two of particular interest in this region, protruding into modern-day from the past to remind us of the many things that were here before and that sometimes history and lore are forever entwined. Spook Rock The terminology of “spook…
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The Reckoning of the Piermont Ghost
“If ghosts were as plentiful in fact as they are in newspaper columns white-robed shapes and people who can be seen through would be almost as numerous as stray cats. It is astonishing what a quantity of ghost stories are in circulation among the journals of the country.” -White Plains Eastern State Journal, April 23, 1887 Five miles from Sleepy Hollow as the raven flies, or ten by highway, lies a stretch of road where the Piermont ghost had the time of its afterlife in March of 1887, terrorizing residents of the villages of Sparkill and Piermont. Unlike the shy specters hiding in attics, this ghost was the social butterfly…
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The Ghost of Grand View
“It was not long after that when towels were mysteriously removed from the bathroom and left in fantastic shapes in various parts of the house. Whenever all the occupants left the house, things were sure to be turned topsyturvy. Clocks stopped, trunks were unlocked, furniture displaced, but there was never any evidence that these things had been done for the purpose of plunder.” The New York Herald, August 27th, 1908. The Ghost of Grand View Arrives Something strange was happening in the Blauvelt house in the summer of 1908. It began when Mrs. Blauvelt came home to find what appeared to her to be an elderly man sitting on her…
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The Witch of West Nyack
“This neighborhood has the doubtful honor of having been the scene of the last trial for witchcraft held in New York State, possibly the last among a so-called civilized people.” -The History of Rockland County, by Frank Bertangue Green Think of witches and Salem, Massachusetts comes to mind. But Sleepy Hollow Country has its own witch trials, including the case of Jane Kanniff, whose 1816 ordeal in West Nyack marked the last witch trial in New York State—six miles from Sleepy Hollow as the raven flies.. Jane Kanniff—though some sources call her Hannah, and local Dutch farmers reportedly referred to her as ‘Naut’ Kanniff, a salutation of unknown meaning—was, like…
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The Ghostly Skater of Iona Island
In the winter of 1899, something peculiar was gliding across the frozen Hudson near Iona Island. According to the Nyack Evening Star of February 3, 1899, it wasn’t just the usual crowd of enthusiastic skaters—it was a ghost. On skates. And people were terrified enough to abandon their favorite skating grounds after dark. The entire account, published under the modest headline “Tale of a Ghost,” consists of exactly three sentences: “An up-the-river exchange tells of an alleged ghost which has been seen about Iona Island, at the upper part of this county. It is said that this ghost is on skates, and several skaters have claimed to have seen him. Those who…
