Westchester County
Westchester County is the beating heart of Sleepy Hollow Country.
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Unicorns in the Thickets: Van der Donck’s Dubious Account
Adriaen van der Donck’s 1653 book on New Netherland stands as one of the most important sources we have for understanding the Dutch colonial period in what would become Westchester County. A lawyer by training and the first patroon of what is now Yonkers, Van der Donck was no idle dreamer. His descriptions of the region’s geography, its native inhabitants, and its wildlife are generally accurate, well-observed, and still consulted by historians today. Which makes it all the more curious that buried in his otherwise reliable account is a passage about unicorns. The Unicorn Account “I have been frequently told by the Mohawk Indians,” Van der Donck wrote in Description…
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A Ghost of a Castle: The Haunting of Miss Mason’s School
High atop the ridge to the east of the village of Tarrytown, sat the dramatic Castle Ericstan. Today it is lost from the landscape, but once it had been a proud if not foreboding figure looming over the town from it’s perch. In about 1855, Merchant John J. Herrick commissioned the famous 19th century architect Alexander Jackson Davis to build him a grand residence in a region burgeoning with wealthy secondary country houses. Davis had already designed and completed Paulding Manor (what is now Lyndhurst) not far down the road, and was known for his striking architectural vision in the gothic revival style. Herrick was a respected businessman and he…
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The Balancing Boulder of North Salem
If you’ve spent time on this webspace, you’ll see that we have a penchant for the intriguing and geological. We just can’t get enough of mystical, mythical, and mysterious rocks and boulders, and there seems to be no shortage of them in Sleepy Hollow Country! This particular one is short and sweet, but definitely worth mentioning and adding to your rock road trip list. North Salem is situated at the farthest edge of Westchester County and is the home of this particular balancing boulder, which has become a mascot of sorts for the community. Tucked just off the side of the road, in a grassy patch adjacent to a charming…
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The Nefarious Black Horse Tavern
“My way led through a lovely country, rich in charming scenery, and affording far-off glimpses of lordly river and frowning mountains. A picturesque point on the road, going north from Sing Sing, is just before the old tavern is reached…Here the thoroughfare takes a sweep of almost half a circle and crosses the stream over a bridge of rustic character. Black Horse Tavern is a two-story wooden structure, sadly the worse for wear…” Rambles in Colonial Byways, by Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1901. Don’t let this romantic description of the scene deceive you. While the region of Croton is truthfully a beautiful part of Sleepy Hollow Country, the aptly named Black…
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The Devil’s Footprints
Sleepy Hollow Country is steeped in folklore, but few tales are as peculiar as the story of the devil’s footprints in the village of Croton-on-Hudson. We stumbled across this geological phenomenon while sifting through newspaper archives for information on the Black Horse Tavern, a notorious Revolutionary War era public house on the bank of the Croton River. Below the headline “The Devil’s Footprints” ran the lede “Mysterious footprints in the solid rock on the east and west banks of the Hudson at Croton have puzzled the scientists, who believe them to have been made by a primeval man before the Stone Age.” We thought we had a pretty good handle…
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The Bewitched Mill of Sing Sing
The tale of the bewitched mill of Sing Sing comes to us down a winding path—from ancient campfires at the now-vanished shad fishing camp at Crawbucky Point, through newspaper archives, to a battered 1922 pamphlet in the Westchester County Historical Society. It’s the kind of story that reveals as much about how folklore travels as it does about witches and mills. First, a quick note on names: the village we now call Ossining was known as Sing Sing until 1901, when locals, weary of being associated with the infamous prison, opted for a different anglicization of the Mohegan ‘Sint Sinck.’ In our tale, Sing Sing refers to the village, not…
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The Passionate Phantasms of Croton-on-Hudson
The following story is a particular treat for Sleepy Hollow Country. This decades-spanning tale features some incredible facts: a charming adventurer, a renowned opera singer, tragic deaths, no less than four possible ghostly “phantasms”, two separate seances, and a famed ghost hunter; all wrapped up somewhat neatly in a beautiful and unassuming stone mansion located in the quaint community of Croton-on-Hudson. Clifford Burke Harmon Clifford B. Harmon is just the character for a ghost story. Larger-than-life, this entrepreneur, developer, and dashing Edwardian Era wild child deserves a more thorough exploration all to himself. Still, for the sake of brevity, we will hit the best points. Harmon was born in Ohio…
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The Ghost of Sybil Harris King
The ghost of Sybil Harris King is reputed to linger around her former mansion which today is part of the Tarrytown House Estate. This corporate retreat center and event venue, located in Tarrytown, New York, has a rich history that dates back to the 19th century. The property is the combination of three Gilded Age estates owned by wealthy families who were drawn to the Hudson River Valley for its scenic beauty and proximity to New York City. It is situated on East Sunnyside Lane, just off South Broadway and not far from Washington Irving’s home, Sunnyside. Of the three original mansions, two remain standing: Uplands of broker James S.…
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Tarrytown Boat Works
Tarrytown Boat Works was part of a vibrant Hudson River working waterfront during the early years of the 20th century. It was one of at least three boat builders on the Tarrytown waterfront over the years, including local powerhouses John O. Brown and Julius Petersen. While traces of any local boat builders are hard to find 100 years later, we dug deep into the archives to piece together this brief history of Tarrytown Boat Works. Sadly, we have not been able to track down any surviving watercraft from this shop. What we know for sure is that the business was incorporated in 1910. The annual report from the New York…
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Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery doesn’t just hold the dead—it holds the stories that made Sleepy Hollow Country what it is. Perched on ninety rolling acres in the heart of the Hudson Valley, this burial ground has been accumulating legends, titans of industry, and literary ghosts since 1849. It’s the kind of place where you can visit Washington Irving in the morning, pay your respects to a Rockefeller by noon, and walk past enough American history to fill a semester-long course, all while autumn leaves crunch underfoot and the Pocantico River winds through the hills. The cemetery’s connection to Irving’s famous tale is more than literary tourism. This is where the author…
