Tag Archives: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Wish You Were Here’s 4th anniversary

In March 1999, I met Thomas Roche, who was editing nonfiction for Gothic.Net. I pitched him a column about visiting cemeteries: on vacation, with friends, with my parents, with tour guides. My initial list of proposed columns had 42 cemeteries from San Francisco’s historical columbarium to the artists’ graveyard Vysehrad in Prague.

I’d never written a column before. I had published a handful travel essays in Trips magazine and the Traveler’s Tales books. I’d edited the book Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries and three issues of Morbid Curiosity magazine. Tom had no indication that I could actually do what I was proposing. He gave me a chance anyway.

My first column appeared in April 1999. It was adapted from my introduction to Death’s Garden, which had gone out of print. It was part survey of cemeteries I’d visited, part manifesto about why it was important to visit graveyards and what they had to teach us.

For the next couple of years, I wrote each month about a cemetery I’d visited, roaming from Gettysburg to Hiroshima, from Northern Michigan’s Mackinaw Island to the Roman catacombs. Gothic.Net never put any limitations on what I wrote about — and the editorial staff were hugely encouraging. Often I’d get nice emails from them even before the essay had gone up online.

After I’d written the first dozen columns, I started to think about putting together a book. I began to travel to historically significant cemeteries just so I could write about them. My husband Mason and I arranged a tour of East Coast cemeteries, starting in Boston and driving to Providence, then on to Sleepy Hollow, Philadelphia, Gettysburg, and back to Brooklyn to see Green-Wood Cemetery. In all, we visited 14 cemeteries in 11 days. It was wonderful.

Then my younger brother died suddenly and I got pregnant at 39. Complications ensued.

It took a while for me to complete the book. I joined the Red Room Writers Society in October 2004, which gave me a place to escape to (the Archbishop’s Mansion) where I could write shoulder to shoulder with other writers. I finished a bunch of new essays, filled out the book, and named it Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel.

WishYouWereHere-cover-FINAL-600x900It took a while to find a home for it, but John Palisano published it in May 2013 through his Western Legends Press. Working with John was a dream: he let me choose the essays, arrange them how I liked. He made me a book trailer that I love.

When Black Dog & Leventhal approached me to write 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die, I asked John if I could have the rights to Wish You Were Here back. There were some errors I wanted to correct and I wanted to include an index. The updated version was published on July 21, 2017.

I have felt so lucky and supported as I created this book. It contains 35 of my graveyard travel essays and visits more than 50 cemeteries, churchyards, and gravesites across the globe. It explores the pioneer cemetery in Yosemite, the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Arlington, Pere Lachaise, Vysehrad, the Protestant Cemetery of Rome and the Catacomb of Saint Sebastian, and so much more.

It starts with me discovering my love for cemeteries when I visited Highgate for the first time in January 1991 and ends just before my daughter’s birth in 2003. There’s so much more I want to say about cemeteries–and so many more essays I’ve written. I’ve started to assemble a book that I’m calling Still Wish You Were Here: More Adventures in Cemetery Travel. I think it might be out early in 2023.

In the meantime, you can see where this all began in Wish You Were Here:  

Get the book:

On Amazon: https://amzn.to/3BsAlH9

On Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wish-you-were-here-loren-rhoads/1126830675

On Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/18236/9780963679468

Or direct from me, if you’d like it autographed: https://lorenrhoads.com/product/wish-you-were-here-adventures-in-cemetery-travel-autographed/

Weekly Photo Challenge: Spring

Letty Lent’s gravestone at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, NY

In the spring of 2002, about this time of year, I took one of the best vacations of my life.  My husband Mason and I flew into Boston and rented a car, then we proceeded to visit 17 cemeteries in the next 11 days.  It was heavenly.

Boston was humid and bright.  We rested in the Central Burying Ground in the afternoon, watching squirrels chase each other with sticks.  The next day, on our way out of town, we stopped by Forest Hills Cemetery, where the forsythia bloomed in thickets.  Spring was coming, but it was early yet.

The Aylsworth family monument

The Aylsworth family monument

From Boston we drove to Providence.  One of the hills in Swan Point Cemetery burned with bright yellow daffodils. In addition, Swan Point had the most magnificent flowering trees I’ve ever seen.  To this day, I’ve seen nothing to compare with this weeping cherry.

Some cemeteries we visited were fascinating, if not especially pretty.  Gettysburg’s Soldiers National Cemetery seemed too macho to trouble itself with celebrating the season and breaking out in flowers.

That was not the case in Sleepy Hollow.  The perfumed air chimed with the songs of birds.  The river chattered to itself nearby, surrounded by trees bursting with vivid green leaves.  Spring made everything glad to be alive, especially me.

While I grew up in Michigan, spring felt like something you earned.  After the long gray winter, you pined for spring.  You celebrated every warm day, even if there were still snowdrifts in the shadows of the hills.  Every narcissus shoot and tulip stalk was worthy of celebration.  Spring was glorious, ephemeral, juicy and sweet.

In San Francisco, spring can be subtle.  In a normal year, the hills green up with every rainstorm.  The trees bloom in waves: the cherries, then the plums, then the apples.  Often a hard rain knocks the petals to the sidewalks before the beauty peaks.  The magnolias open their spectacular flowers, followed by the rhododendrons, the flowers singe in the sunshine — and then the show is over for another year.  The hills turn brown, the fog rolls in, and summer is long and cold.

My East Coast trip gave me almost two weeks of nothing but graveyards in springtime in the company of my husband.  Every moment was piquant and delicious and I savored them like you do the season’s first strawberries, bursting with sweetness and spring.

Here’s the challenge that started me off: Spring.

WYWH_BannerAd

A Good Guide to the Cemeteries of New York

Permanent New Yorkers: A Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of New YorkPermanent New Yorkers: A Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of New York by Judi Culbertson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was the second of Culbertson and Randall’s “Permanent” series, exploring the permanent residents of Paris, California, Italy, and London. This one feels like it covers a vast amount of territory, from offering multiple tours of Green-Wood and Woodlawn to capsule suggestions of quick trips to the Hartsdale Canine Cemetery, Belmont Racetrack, and the Quaker Cemetery of Brooklyn.

Some of the choices are strange. There’s a scant paragraph about the New York Marble Cemetery, which holds the remnants of 40 cemeteries that were destroyed to make room for the City’s growth. It makes me wonder if the authors found the cemetery closed when they visited, as I did in June. Strawberry Fields in Central Park rates more description, even though the authors admit that John Lennon’s ashes aren’t buried there. The Hart’s Island Potter’s Field is included for the sake of completeness, I suppose, even though I’d be surprised if most tourists could or would want to try to visit it.

Which may be the split between the authors’ intention for this book and the way I want to use it. It’s not a guidebook, in that it doesn’t include cemetery addresses, opening hours, or suggestions for how to visit the cemeteries listed inside. It doesn’t include enough photographs of the graves or graveyards and spends page after page on biographies of people like Judy Garland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Malcolm X. Maybe it’s meant to be an armchair travel book.

My quest for the perfect New York City cemetery guide continues — but this was an excellent reference to read in the hotel room between cemetery explorations.

You can find used copies at Amazon here: Permanent New Yorkers: A Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of New York.

Click on the Book Review category in the blog’s right column to see all my cemetery book reviews.

Cemeteries of New York on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #11: General Grant National Monument

Cemetery of the Week #17: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Cemetery of the Week #33: The Old Dutch Burying Ground

Cemetery of the Week #41: Trinity Churchyard

Cemetery of the Week #53: Green-Wood Cemetery

Cemetery of the Week #65: the African Burial Ground

Cemetery of the Week #75: St. Paul’s Chapel churchyard

Cemetery of the Week #33: The Old Dutch Burying Ground

The Old Dutch Church

The Old Dutch Burying Ground
Albany Post Road (U.S. Route 9), one mile north of Tarrytown
Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591
Telephone: (914) 631-4497
Founded: Approximately 1640, two generations prior to 1685, when the church was built.
Size: 5 acres
Number of interments: approximately 1700
Open: The Burying Ground is open year-round. The Church is closed between Christmas Eve and June, when it reopens for tours.

“Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts…allege that the body of the trooper, having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of the battle in nightly quest of his head; and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.” — The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

An historic plaque in the Old Dutch Burying Ground describes the place as “one of America’s oldest cemeteries,” containing Dutch tenant farmers and their huisvrows (housewives? – it was undefined on the sign), Revolutionary War soldiers, and the characters of Washington Irving’s tale.

Many of the markers were made from rust-red sandstone instead of the gray slate used in the contemporaneous Massachusetts burial grounds. One of my favorite markers stood on the grave of James Barnerd. His epitaph indicated he’d been a sailor: “The Boisterous Winds and Neputns (sic) Waves have Tost me too and fro. By Gods decree you Plainly See I am Harbourd here Below”. I loved the carver’s creative spelling. Barnerd was 48 when he “departed this life” in 1768. Though discolored by exhaust from the street nearby, Barnerd’s sandstone marker was brightened by a cherub with sagging jowls. Above the cherub’s head floated something like a lotus blossom, probably a tongue of divine fire.

Red Sandstone marker in the Old Dutch Burying Ground

Some of the sandstone markers have flaked and slivered until none of their inscriptions remained. I wondered if the deceased’s next of kin would have seen that as appropriate: just as their loved ones dissolved into the ground, the stones that remembered them crumbled to dust. I don’t think these markers had been intended to carry names three centuries into the future. It is only since the American centennial in 1876 that all soldiers of the Revolution were lionized as patriots worth remembering, even if they had only been foot soldiers.

My husband Mason laughed at me for lingering over the Revolution-era graves. The Dutch settlers’ graves clung to the skirts of the church. Those were truly old. Even though the words were Dutch, the epitaphs ran to familiar patterns: “Hier Leyt Begraven…” or “Here lyes Buried.”

Frederick Philipse, the first lord of the nearby manor of Philipsburg, built the little church for his tenants in 1685. The bricks had been shipped from Holland, since the American brickworks weren’t yet up to the task. Writing in the 19th century, Irving called the building “The Old Dutch Church” and the name stuck. In his tale inspired by the names in the graveyard, the yellow stone and brick building had been whitewashed. The burial ground, probably dating back to 1640, preceded its church by two generations.

Many of the graves had little metal signs poked into their dirt. I expected those would mark the graves of Ichabod Crane and the others, but that turned out not to be the case. The signs had been placed by the Tarrytown DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution — descendants of Revolutionary soldiers), the modern-day Friends of the Cemetery, and by the Grand Army of the Republic (survivors of the Civil War), whose markers must have been nearly 100 years old themselves. The last Civil War veteran is long in his grave himself.

We searched and searched the sandstone tablets. Mason found the Crane family graves, but none of them named Ichabod. Eventually, I located Catriena Van Tessel, who died November 10, 1706. Although the rest of her epitaph was in Dutch, nothing seemed to connect her to Irving’s story.

At the time of my visit, the Friends of the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground offered tours on weekends from May to October. This may no longer be the case, since the tours aren’t mentioned on their web site (link below). You can however rent an iPad tour from the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns, which continues to hold Sunday services and organ concerts in the Old Dutch Church. That link is also below.

“To look upon its grass-grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace.” — Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Useful links:

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery wraps around the Old Dutch Burying Ground.

Friends of the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground

Rent the iPad tour from the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns

Stories about those buried in the Old Dutch Burying Ground

Photos of the gravestones

GPS information from CemeteryRegistry.us

Cemetery of the Week #17: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Letty Lent’s gravestone

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
540 North Broadway
Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591
Telephone: (914) 631-0081
info@sleepyhollowcemetery.org
Founded: 1849 as Tarrytown Cemetery
Size: 90 acres
Number of interments: 45,000
Open: Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

The village of Sleepy Hollow celebrates its famed Headless Horseman on its police cars and with banners on every lamppost. According to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the Horseman haunted the Old Dutch Burying Ground, which dates to the 17th century. That graveyard will be the subject of another Cemetery of the Week column. Today I want to talk about the newer Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which wraps around the Old Dutch Burying Ground.

This weekend, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is offering tours on Sunday, May 29, and on Monday, May 30 (Memorial Day), both at 2 p.m. The tour costs $19.99 per person and advance reservations required. Here’s the link.

For braver souls, there’s also an evening lantern tour on Sunday, May 29, from 8 p.m. until 10. That costs $24.99. Additional tour dates and more information are listed at http://sleepyhollowcemetery.org/news-events/.

They also offer occasional photography workshops in the cemetery.

If you’re interested in doing a short self-guided tour, the cemetery offers free legal-sized maps featuring eight major figures buried there, including Washington Irving, Andrew Carnegie, Walter Chrysler, and Elizabeth Arden. You can get a copy from the cemetery office or from the literature box at the cemetery’s south gate, adjacent to the Old Dutch Church. They also sell a larger full-color map highlighting more than 50 features of the cemetery. Those maps are available for purchase at the Philipsburg Manor museum shop, across the street from the cemetery’s south gate.

*

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a lush, gorgeous “rural” cemetery in the fashion of London’s Highgate and Brooklyn’s Greenwood. It is a wonderful place to wander on a spring day.

Walking up the hill from the parking lot between the Old Dutch Church and the Pocantico River, you’ll find the author of the Legend responsible for Sleepy Hollow’s renown. Just shy of the crest of the hill, Washington Irving rests inside a simple iron gate emblazoned with his family name. A plain marble tablet, streaked green with lichen, marks his grave. According to a bronze plaque placed in 1972 by remaining members of the Irving family, the “graveplot” is now a national historic landmark. When I visited, the American Legion had placed an American flag on Irving’s grave to pick it out from all the others, which I appreciated, since the plot’s gate was locked. Irving served in the New York Militia in the War of 1812, but never saw action. Bluebells brighten the grass between the graves.

I found the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery incredibly peaceful. The traffic’s quiet hiss on Route 9 counter-pointed the singing birds. Although I couldn’t see them from the churchyard, lilacs perfumed the air.

I saw no indication that the headless horseman writhed restlessly beneath the sod. In fact, life seemed to be in full force, from spiders winding strands across the ancient stones to squirrels chasing each other up and down the stolid elms. Violets flecked the grass, visited by humming bees. Somewhere near the Pocantico River, a woodpecker knocked on a tree.

While Sleepy Hollow Cemetery holds its share of famous or notable historic figures, the historic unknowns captivated me more. Snowy white flowers adorned a bush growing atop the grave of Letty Lent, the thirteen-year-old wife of “Capt.” Isaac Lent. Born on Christmas Eve 1806, the poor girl had already been married by August 1819, when she passed away. I wondered if she’d spoken her vows in the nearby church.

The cemetery has featured in several notable films and videos. Several outdoor scenes from the 1970 movie House of Dark Shadows (spun off from the hit 1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows) were filmed at the cemetery’s receiving vault. I’d link to the trailer, but the cheese factor is too high.

In January 1989, the Ramones were buried—alive—in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery for their Pet Sematary video. None of the deceased Ramones are buried there now.

Useful links:

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery homepage

GPS information from CemeteryRegistry.us

My review of Permanent New Yorkers