Sorry if this question was asked before, is Sleepy Hollow a real town in up state NY? Also was Icabod (Sp?) Crane a real person or just a character made up for Washington Irvings story? Thanks
Google makes one appear smarter than they truly are in reality.
Taking a moment to search Google tells me that there are many headless horseman stories and it appears Washington Irving simply used a common legend with a real place and spun an engaging ghost story with those elements.
Yes Virginia, there really is a Sleepy Hollow, NY.
Sleepy Hollow, NY is indeed a real place, and has been real since those days of yore otherwise known as 1996. Before that, it was a real place called the Village of North Tarrytown. Many of the sites in the fictionalized Sleepy Hollow are located in North Tarrytown-now-called-Sleepy Hollow, and a few in the Village of Tarrytown as well. Irving himself lived in Tarrytown. The name Sleepy Hollow had been used for that general region for some time – for example, the two villages shared a combined school system named the Sleepy Hollow School District.
Both villages are very nice little places to visit – there are a lot of Irving-related places to see as well as many other historic sites from Dutch colonial days and also the American Revolution era.
Oh, Sleepy Hollow is located in Westchester County, it’s about an hour north of Manhattan, in the Hudson River Valley. So it’s in upstate New York, but just barely.
More info at the Sleepy Hollow Chamber of Commerce.
thanks alot 
i think i might visit there sometime
What’s up Grapist!
You know who you are. 
Been to Sleepy Hollow and roamed around the graveyard where many of the names from Irving’s stories appear. In fact my wife descends from a Katrina van Tassel of those parts (Irving used local names, but the characters weren’t intended to represent the real people).
Of course, historians in Kinderhook claim that the characters of Sleepy Hollow are based on residents of Kinderhook. Supposedly, Katrina Van Tassel was a daughter of the Van Allen family; Brom Bones was a Van Alstyne; Ichabod Crane was local schoolteacher Jesse Merwin.
Merwin’s schoolhouse is currently kept up by the Columbia County historical society, and the Valatie school district I attended is called Ichabod Crane Central School.
Similar tales which may have inspired Washington Irving include Robert Burns’s poem Tam O’Shanter, and Bürger’s poem Der wilde Jäger (The Wild Huntsman), which was available in an English translation by Sir Walter Scott.
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bibliophage
moderator GQ
That’s what I’ve read, too, racinchikki. According to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the American Presidents, IIRC, there was some story about Martin Van Buren (who was from Old Kinderhook), and the author said Kinderhook was the original setting for Sleepy Hallow.
where exactly is Kinderhook, in Newyork as well?
Kinderhook is really and truly in Upstate New York. It’s on the Hudson River about two hours north of New York City and an hour from the state capitol in Albany.
(BTW, Orange Skinner, they go on and on about Martin Van Buren - I’ve been to his house, which is now located in the town of Stuyvesant after redistricting in the past century - and his campaign slogan being about Old Kinderhook, but I don’t understand the distinction, if any, between Old Kinderhook and just plain Kinderhook. There’s only the one, and it’s a very small town. End of hijack.)