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The Haunted Crossing at Ingall’s: Where Ten Night Watchmen Met Their Match
“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.”—White Plains Eastern State Journal, April 23, 1887 In the waning months of 1899, the Ontario and Western Railroad had a problem at Ingall’s crossing on its Northern Division near Middletown, New York. Not a problem with tracks or switches or timetables—those could be fixed. This was a problem of a decidedly more spectral nature. They couldn’t keep a night watchman at the post, no matter how desperately they tried. Nine men quit. Then the section boss himself threw in the…
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The Brutal Murder of Emma Brooks
“Brutally murdered for $300 that she carried on her person, Emma Brooks, an eccentric, unmarried woman, about 70 years of age, was found with her head almost severed from her body, lying in a pool of her own blood, in the front room of an old, secluded house in which she lived, two miles from Highland, on the road leading to New Paltz…” Kingston Daily Freeman, July 15, 1909 The summer of 1909 was marked by a crime so brutal it shocked all of Ulster County. On the evening of July 14th, in a ramshackle farmhouse perched along the New Paltz turnpike near Highland, 72-year-old Emma Brooks met a violent…
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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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Not Every Ghost Rides a Horse
When most people think of ghosts in Sleepy Hollow Country, their minds gallop straight to that most famous of specters—the Headless Horseman, eternally thundering through the darkness in pursuit of a hapless schoolmaster. And who can blame them? Washington Irving’s tale has cast such a long shadow over this region it is easy to forget the Hudson Valley was already thick with ghost stories long before Ichabod Crane ever set foot in a schoolhouse. The truth is, the Horseman may be the most famous phantom to haunt these hills but he’s far from alone. For every tale of hoofbeats on Old Sleepy Hollow Road, there are a dozen quieter hauntings…
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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 Ghost of Estherwood
Just a few miles south of Sleepy Hollow—where ghost stories practically grow on trees—you’ll find the Masters School, a private co-ed institution with a knack for blending academics and a dash of the supernatural. Its sprawling 96-acre campus in Dobbs Ferry, NY, is home to Estherwood, a 19th-century Gilded Age mansion built by James Jennings McComb for his second wife, Mary Esther Wood. And while Mary’s been gone for over a century, rumor has it she’s still hanging around, giving us the latest entry in our paranormal playlist: the ghost of Estherwood Mansion. J.J. McComb wasn’t just a man of wealth; he was a man of clever patents—specifically, a cotton-baling…
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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…
