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 place faith in the tale say it is the ghost of a skater who was drowned near the island. Skaters in the vicinity are now afraid to approach the island by night.”
—Nyack Evening Star, February 3, 1899
And that’s it. No name for the drowned skater, no description of the apparition, no follow-up reports. Did the ghost wear period-appropriate skating attire? Did his blades make any sound on the ice? Did he acknowledge the living or simply glide past on some spectral errand known only to the dead? We’ll never know. The ghostly skater of Iona Island appears exactly once in the historical record, then vanishes into the same frozen mists from which he presumably emerged.
A Place Between Worlds
If you’re going to haunt somewhere for eternity, Iona Island isn’t a bad choice. The place has always existed in the margins—caught in the tidal rhythms of a river that flows both ways, claimed and reclaimed by various owners with varying degrees of success.
Long before Dutch settlers arrived, the Lenni Lenape spent their summers fishing from its shores, calling the place Wa-na-ka-wagh-kin (roughly “good land”). In 1683, members of the Van Cortlandt family purchased the island, and for the next two centuries it passed through enough hands to make a title search a genealogist’s nightmare. The name we use today came about when Dr. E. W. Grant acquired the property in 1847 and, with admirable simplicity, kept telling people “I own an island” until the corruption stuck.
Dr. Grant had grand agricultural ambitions. He planted the island with a variety of grape he modestly dubbed the “Iona grape” and established orchards that would eventually supply the Union Army during the Civil War. But farming on a tidal island proved as unreliable as Dr. Grant’s grapes were mediocre, and by 1868 his creditors had foreclosed.
What rose from Grant’s failed vineyard was considerably more festive. A group of investors transformed the island into a summer resort, complete with a carousel, Ferris wheel, dance pavilion, and picnic grounds. Steamboats deposited thousands of pleasure-seekers from New York and New Jersey during the warmer months. When the West Shore Railroad cut across the island in 1882, the crowds only grew. At peak season, you couldn’t walk ten feet without stepping on someone’s picnic blanket.
But that was summer. Winter was something else entirely.
When the River Turned to Ice
In the late nineteenth century, before warmer winters and heavy ship traffic conspired to keep the Hudson perpetually liquid, the river regularly froze solid enough to walk upon—and skate upon, and even drive horse-drawn sleighs across. Ice skating on the Hudson was not merely a pastime but a passion, particularly in communities like Newburgh, where the Donaghue family achieved national fame for their speed and endurance on blades. In 1872, Timothy Donaghue Sr. and his companions skated the eighty-four miles from Newburgh to Albany in just five hours of running time, stopping only to navigate open ferry tracks and take their dinner.
The frozen river was thoroughfare, workplace, and playground all at once. Ice yacht races drew enormous crowds at Poughkeepsie. The natural ice trade employed ninety thousand people and twenty-five thousand horses in New York State alone. It was glorious.
It was also deadly.
Thin patches, sudden thaws, ferry tracks kept open for commerce—any of these could send an unwary skater plunging into the frigid depths. Most such tragedies were recorded, mourned, and eventually forgotten. But near Iona Island, it seems at least one victim refused to leave.
A Ghost of Few Words
Who was the ghostly skater? The Nyack Evening Star offers us nothing, and our own searches through contemporary newspapers have yielded no accounts of a drowning near Iona Island that might explain this particular haunting. Perhaps the drowning occurred before such incidents were routinely reported. Perhaps it was a visitor from the city whose death made news only in Manhattan, if anywhere.
What we do know is that multiple skaters saw something—enough that the story traveled from some anonymous “up-the-river exchange” to the Evening Star, enough that “skaters in the vicinity are now afraid to approach the island by night.” This wasn’t one person’s hallucination or a hoaxer’s prank. Several witnesses encountered something on that ice that filled them with sufficient dread to abandon perfectly good skating grounds once darkness fell.
Unlike the Piermont ghost, who terrified multiple villages for weeks before being unmasked as flesh-and-blood mischief, or the fiery phantoms of Mount Gulian, witnessed by four men including a policeman, the ghostly skater of Iona Island left barely a trace. One brief newspaper notice, a handful of unnamed witnesses, then silence. No follow-up stories, no investigations, no explanations, no closure.
Perhaps that’s fitting. Ghosts are supposed to fade, after all. And a skater on ice is already ephemeral—here one moment, gliding away the next, leaving nothing behind but the whisper of blades and a faint trace on the frozen surface that the next snowfall will erase entirely.
Know more about the ghostly skater of Iona Island? Have you encountered a specter on ice—or anywhere else in Sleepy Hollow Country? Drop us a line at ghost.editor@sleepyhollowcountry.com.
Jim Logan
By day, Jim Logan is superintendent of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a position that requires him to keep excellent company with the permanently quiet residents of one of America's most storied burial grounds. A fifth-generation Tarrytowner, Jim might reasonably expect this pedigree to lend him a certain air of historical gravitas—and in most towns, it would. But when your job regularly puts you in contact with families whose ancestors were already well-established here when the Dutch were still running things, five generations starts to feel like you just moved in. By night—and weekends, and probably lunch breaks—he's a historian with an unhealthy appetite for crumbling newspaper archives and forgotten local lore. After more than two decades of research, Jim has assembled a formidable collection of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown historical resources, which he mines for the stories that appear on Sleepy Hollow Country. If there's a ghost with a tale to tell, a legend with a plot hole, or a 19th-century scandal gathering dust in the archives, he'll find it.
