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She remembered feeling butterflies as they dipped down the hills and rose with the swells, and then shock as she recognized the Dutch Church from one of books in her collection of illustrated adaptations of the story (she only had six at the time, but it was up to forty-eight by the time she sold them all after her divorce).

He was terrifying but pitiable, and she fell in love with his story immediately. He struck her as frighteningly tragic – an anonymous ghost trapped in limbo after being killed in another country’s war. He was a strange villain: determined but mindless, dauntless but indiscriminate. It was funny, sweet, and scary – and brooding there, folded up in its dark heart was the figure of the Headless Horseman clattering down the woodland road in his billowing scarlet cape, saber flashing overhead. She remembered watching the cartoon with Bing Crosby narrating a tale that uneasily tempered humor with terror, and cocksure romance with crippling rejection. They’d driven from Youngstown, Ohio through Pennsylvania and across the Tappan Zee Bridge in a single day (with only two bathroom stops) in search of the site where her favorite story took place. It was a vacation with her late father during one of his custodial weekends. Even at the time Irving penned the story this bridge had been abandoned to decay for over twenty years, and although some amateur historians have tried to locate the stone foundations, no serious inquiry has ever been mounted.įor a moment she remembered the first time that she’d driven up this road – almost twenty years ago. The first turn in the S happens at the intersection of New Broadway and Crane Avenue, and it was around here – straight out from Crane Avenue, and 100-some yards upriver from the modern bridge – that the original span is theorized to have crossed the Pocantico. The change happens at the fork between Route 9 and New Broadway Street by turning right at New Broadway, you can follow the path of the colonial-era road which made a sideways S-shape: curving up to the river and crossing it a few hundred yards east of the church, running west along the river’s natural curve, and sweeping northward towards Albany, passing the front of the church, and continuing to run in step with modern Route 9. At some point before the 19th century, the original Albany Post Road was straightened into modern Route 9, preventing the route of the chase from being followed precisely – but it can be replicated. Even in a car you can feel gravity pulling you faster as you wind toward the Pocantico River. Suddenly, the road descends here and plunges towards the Old Dutch Church several hundred yards off in Sleepy Hollow.

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Many others enter it laughing and carefree but leave it with clenched eyebrows and a stony resolution never to go there again – chased out by whatever they heard rustling in the bushes of their subconscious.ĭriving beyond Patriot’s Park, she made a couple of ascending turns before she reached the summit of a rising ground adjacent to Sleepy Hollow High School – the approximate spot where the two riders first caught a clear look at each other in the moonlight, free of the vines and brambles of Wiley’s Swamp. For this reason some people return there frequently as if they had found the key to a forgotten garden where dying men can refresh their spirits. Of course, not everyone wants broken bones to be set back, and some people resent the handyman's meddling. It also has the uncanny power to reunite a lonely hiker with some long-lost region his soul in the sudden span of a moment, repairing broken souls like a kindly handyman who runs his hands through his beard as he discerns the way to set things right. Centuries after the local legends of the Headless Horseman or the Wailing Woman in White were first murmured around a snapping fire, Sleepy Hollow is still something of a twilight territory plagued by unsettling sights: odd lights flame in its night skies, hulking shades prowl its woods, and slimy serpents churn in its rivers and lakes. Although some hikers flock to it as a sublime or even romantic spot, many find it oddly gloomy to others it is entirely off-putting and alien.

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