American History Hit - Sleepy Hollow & the Haunted Hudson

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

On Halloween, Elizabeth Bradley tells Don about Washington Irving's famous story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, its headless horseman and the influence of European folklore on this famous American gothic tale. Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions. The dominant spirit, however, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannonball. in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War. And who is ever and an on, seen in the gloom of night? Well, it's that time again, time to become a little scared. Time when all that is autumn, the changed and fallen leaves, the picked apples, the mold cider, crates of pumpkins, so many pumpkins,

all of it ushers in the usual suspects of supreme Gothic horror, the witches, the mummies, the skeletons, Frankenstein's monsters, the ghosts and gobliners. the spiders in their webs, and most awesome of all, the infinite amounts of candy in our neighborhood stores. It's Halloween, and we kind of love it. Nearby our home where we live in the Hudson Valley of New York, there is a guy, every town has one, who I don't know, but he must plan his Halloween all year long. Suddenly, in early October, his front lawn is positively crammed with everything from murderous clowns to Beetlejuice, all larger than life, all underlit for spooky effect, and most

of it somehow moving animatronically. It's actually frightening a little bit and certainly dangerously distracting, these crowded creatures of the night screaming for attention. But one character stands still above it all, a little creepier and more Gothic than the rest, shoulders above the rest, in fact, the headless horseman. Could there be a creepier notion? A rider perched on his steed holding a lit jackal lantern? Is there a more perfect symbol of the loathom fear and the trembling? terror of Halloween, this haunting, taunting, taunting specter charging through our darkest fantasies on a devilish mission of trauma and torment. No, not in my opinion anyway. But I take comfort in the

fact that all of this is nothing more than a man-made confection carefully crafted to entertain. And in the case of he who is headless, specifically written by one man, a New Yorker through and through, who loomed very large in the literature of the day and who is still somehow occupying an oversized place on the shelf of all things Halloween. And here to tell us all about it is Dr. Elizabeth Bradley, vice president of programs and engagement at historic Hudson Valley. She is the author of Nickerbocker, the myth behind New York, and quite a few other things.

Dr. Bradley serves as a fellow of the New York Academy of History has been published in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, the Encyclopedia of New York. The New York Times, the list goes on. Dr. Bradley, welcome to American History Hit. How are you? I'm fine. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks so much.

The man we are speaking of is, of course, Washington Irving, who is a very local hero around these parts, right? He is. He is our one and only. And it's the reason for the name of many of our towns. Well, not only that, he was born on the day of George Washington's inauguration, thus named his namesake, Washington Irving, and actually met the man when he was six years old, right? That is the legend.

Speaking of legends, that's kind of one of the formative ones for the Irving mythology is that he was introduced to General Washington as a young man, as a very young man, as a child. And the story goes that his Scottish nursemaid held him up to the general and said, you know, ah, general, here's a Baron who's named after ye. And we don't actually know if this happened. We have a great picture of it that was done during Irving's lifetime. But it's a great myth, and it's a kind of thing that Irving himself just reveled in.

The legend of Sleepy Hollow is, well, it has to be, the most famous ghost story in the world, certainly in the country in the United States. What is Sleepy Hollow? What did those words even mean? Sleepy Hollow really has become a state of mind, and I think that would make Irving giggle because, first of all, the town name did not exist when he was alive. It's a very recent coinage. We used to be that North Terry town. But Sleepy Hollow in and of itself, as a state of mind, kind of embodies the Halloween's, spirit, this idea of the spooky, the haunted, the unknown, the possibilities inherent in all of those adjectives. But it is a place. I mean, geographically speaking.

It is a place. Yes. There's Tarrytown, New York. You can find that. You can go there. Yeah, exactly. And I have. I mean, I live in the general area of this.

And so there's Tarry Town, which is a, you know, some major town. And then north of Tarry Town, as you drive north on Route 9, I believe it is, there is an area called Sleepy Hollow. And it's kind of a neighborhood, sort of a suburb of Tarry Town. And I'm telling you, and I'm telling everyone who's listening, when you go there, you're actually sort of seized by a vibe. It can happen any time of the year, especially during Halloween, of course. But you definitely do sort of descend into this area. And then suddenly you're surrounded by greenery most of the year.

And it has a feeling of a mood. You know what I'm talking about, right? I do. I do. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that there are two cemeteries there. There's the churchyard at the old Dutch church. and there is Slevi Hollow Cemetery, which is where Irving himself is buried. So a lot of the real estate that you might drive by is real estate that is inhabited

exclusively by those who have passed to the Great Beyond. And so there is a, I think there's an inherent spookiness even just in that. And he was writing with full knowledge of this. When Washington Irving really hits his stride as a writer, it's sort of early 1820s and that time frame we're in. By this time, New York has become quite a city. We're just around the corner from the Erie Canal and all that, so it's not as booming as it gets to, but it's definitely happening. And what's becoming throughout America, really, is the selling of America, the understanding, you know, the place has been around for a while.

And now the legends have become sort of the stuff of pulp fiction and so forth. And he aligns with that. What's really happening is that the magazine industry and the newspaper industry are beginning to explode. And people are buying these pennies, what do they call the penny? Penny dreadfuls. Yeah. Well, that whole thing is beginning by way of England, you know, the publishing industry and so forth. Yes. So Washington Irving sees this coming down the line. He has previously been a member of the merchant class. His family were merchants and traders. Am I right? Yes, that's right. But he himself trained as a lawyer, only to discover that really wasn't his passion, as I think many lawyers discover.

I relate to Washington Irving because he was the youngest of a large family, as am I. Yes. And when you grow up as the youngest in a large family, you have to entertain. You have to be attuned to what your audience wants because you're constantly trying to appeal to your older siblings. It happens every time you walk into a room, never mind at the dinner table. So this guy, Washington Irving, had 11 brothers and sisters, most of whom lived into their adulthood. And it was a pretty close family, it seems. And he begins to work in the family business, which is shipping and trading and so forth. Takes him to England.

He begins to work in England. before he begins writing. That's correct. At that point, the family business hits the rocks. Things go wrong and there is a bankruptcy. And that's really what triggers him to start thinking about an alternative course. This other thing that he was dreaming of, which was storytelling, really, and becoming a writer. I suppose he'd done a lot of it earlier on in his own time, but he becomes a professional.

And he hits it pretty big early on by writing these serialized versions, which is indeed the legend of Sleepy Hollow is part of a compilation of stories, short stories essentially, but they weren't really called that back in those days. That's right. It's part of the sketchbook of Jeffrey Crayon, Jent, short for gentleman, which was the title of the compendium when it finally was released as a collection. And there are many additions to this collection, and each edition adds another couple of stories to it. It's, I guess, what, the sixth one that ends up having the Legend of Sleepy Hollow in it. There's only two of them to actually take place in the United States. And The Legend of Sleeping Hollow is one of those stories.

And Rip and Winkle is the other. Exactly. Anyone who doesn't know, you know, my wife and I move back to New York on my part because I missed so much of the culture of the place. And I always was worried, I was a New Yorker, a Manhattan guy all the way back. And I would look up the river, you know, as I crossed the George Washington Bridge going in and out of town and think, what was up there? You know, even today, especially New Yorkers, you can live in New York.

never leave the place. New York City I'm talking about. Never mind in the early 19th century, these lands above New York were the frontier were mysterious, were full of everything from, you know, Native American tribes to goblins and witches and so forth. I mean, the cat skills beyond the Hudson Valley were even more mysterious. Folklore was a normal part of life in this part of the country. It's absolutely true. And I think this is something that fascinated Irving from a very early age. You know, he first came. came to, we now called the Sleepy Hollow region as a very young man actually escaping an epidemic of yellow fever, came to stay with his friend James Kirk Paulding and his family. They would

become writers together on a literary journal known as Salma Gundy when he was just a little younger than he was when he published the legend. But that was where he first discovered kind of the Dutch culture that was really deeply rooted in this region. And as someone of Scotch Irish heritage, this was new to him and truly fascinating. He also first heard some of the Native American mythology that you refer to these indigenous founding stories. He also was exposed to some of the ghost stories and some of the post-revolutionary history that while we think of as being quite ancient, was very much in the recent rearview mirror for the residents of this area.

John Andre had just been captured on his spying mission for Benedict Arnold, and his was one of the ghosts that loomed large in this area. when Irving arrived as a young man. And he folded all of this imagery, the stories of Dutch wives by the fireside, the tales of indigenous heroes and ghosts, the accounts of sightings in the churchyard, and of course this goblin trooper, the headless horseman, these all grew out of the stories he heard as a young man and his own imaginings. The legend of Sleepy Hollow, I mean, most people know it from the 1999 movie made by Tim Burton these days, most people know it. Right.

Which is a great movie, incidentally. I hadn't watched until this morning preparing for this interview. I quickly ran to the online sources and found it. And it's quite fascinating because they've completely switched around the plot. You know, completely expanded the plot. Yes. And Iqabod Crane is an entirely different character, really, than how he's portrayed. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow written by Washington Irving is a classic sort of satire,

comic version of events, very much in the style of what Irving is. wrote in, but many people were writing in that style, too, back in those days. That's right. Although Irving really is considered America's first professional writer, the first person to earn a living by his pen. But he was looking to all kinds of English examples, including Addison and Steele and others, and thinking about the ways in which books like Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern were playing with the genre. And we would see this, of course, in writers who come after Irving, such as Hawthor, Melville, and Poe, who are seizing upon some of the tropes of his writing and the ways in which he formulates an imaginary made-up

narrator, of course, in the person of Dietrich Knickerbocker, who he had first revealed to the public in his 1809 history of New York, which is a book that he announced with a publicity hoax, something that we would find, you know, on John Stewart or John Oliver today, he announced in a missing, wanted persons ad that Mr. Nickerbocker had vanished, leaving only his manuscript behind, and that was the introduction of Knickerbocker's history of New York to the world. So Nickerbocker, the narrator, was trotted back out for these two Dutch stories, which, as you mentioned, kind of bookend, this collection, the sketchbook of Jeffrey Crayon, which is otherwise set primarily in England and throughout Europe.

And they helped to give this aura of authenticity to two stories that, while rooted in other aspects of folklore, are really from the imagination of Washington Irving himself. They're not the truth. Iqabod Crane is a schoolteacher who comes from Connecticut and transports himself over to the Hudson Valley. Right then and there, you have one of the thematic cruxes of this story because you have an outsider coming into another place. That's right. Tell me about the different identity between a Yankee and what would you call it, a New Yorker, I guess, a Knickerbocker. A New Yorker, yes, a Knickerbocker, exactly.

Well, I think that really is, as you point out, the most interesting part of the stories that, Iqabad Crane is coming in very much as a different type. He is literally a Connecticut Yankee, and he has a very different set of values. Even his idea of storytelling and mythology is different. He comes clutching a book of Cotton Mathers tales of witchcraft in New England, and he's really quite obsessed with it. All of the stories that he learns of the region he's in, the Dutch folklore is new to him, and he's very susceptible to be terrified by it because it is so very foreign. But for the Dutch people who live in the Terrytown region, he's really considered to be quite the threat. He sets his cap for the local heiress, Katrina Van Tassel, and for her fortune, which he really anticipates, as he says, turning into cash,

or I should say, as Irving says, and setting out for what they call, you know, the Great Beyond, but which is really the Western Reserve, as we would come to know it. And this was certainly something that New Englanders were doing. They had come over on the Mayflower or after, and they were looking to places like Ohio and Illinois to make their mark. But in this Dutch community, which was, as Irving said, really vegetating very happily, and that's his word, they had no intention of changing or of letting an outsider really run amok. I'll be back with more from Elizabeth Bradley after this short break. It is a nice little cross-section of the United States of America at that time because you have the sort of leftover culture of the Dutch, which really made New York. I mean, they were the first settlers here.

But even beyond there, the society of New York is made by the Dutch, through these great plantations, essentially, these huge estates that were created up and down the Hudson River. The Hudson Valley really was defined by these. And even today, the names come through, the Rensler, you know, all the way down the way, you get all those old Dutch names are coming through. That had a very distinct quality. Obviously, it had time to marinate as a society. So did the Yankee culture up there. you know, certainly informed by the Puritans in Boston. And all that comes clashing together in this story on a certain level.

It's essentially a courtship story. He sees the girl of his dreams. He sees a life of his dreams. This is, remember, a sort of... More importantly, yes. A lanky, lackluster sort of school guy, a schoolteacher who sees a fast track to a better life. Unfortunately, there's an antagonist in this story. The name escapes me Brombones.

Brom bones. Oh, good. There I got it. the best name in American literature, I think arguably. It's a great one. And he's described as a roistering roused about. He's meant to kind of be your classic, almost like out of an 80s movie, your classic captain of the football team slash school bully, although he's not in school in this story. And he really understands the threat that Iqabod poses to his culture, but more specifically to Katrina, who he anticipates marrying himself. And so,

So he's the driving force behind a lot of what we would consider the supernatural action in this story. But Irving is smart enough to leave the details ambiguous enough so that we end up where we are today with the headless horsemen really dominating kind of the culture of the county. He's arantipal, old bones. A rantipal. That's another R word he uses. I didn't even know that word before I read this story. There are several of these words in here that send you to the dictionary and you realize, oh, my goodness, the language has changed. It's diminished a bit from those days when all you had was language. And that's what's so important to realize is this was entertainment on the scale of or on the level of television almost.

You know, what would in the future be that which would entertain us from a day-to-day basis, sort of a vernacular type of entertainment, was done through obviously writing and through this kind of serialized version of writing. I mean, the great novels were being written, for sure, over in Europe. But there also was this kind of entertainment. and he was happily coursing through that vein. After you approach the story of Legend of Sleepy Hollow, certainly with expectations of being frightened, but you're actually laughing through a lot of it. That's true, yes.

The supernatural aspect of it, that which is then capitalized by later generations on, is actually sort of snuck in the back door. Where does the headless horseman fit into this story? Well, the headless horseman is meant to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, so it's a mercenary soldier from the Revolutionary War, war, fighting for the British, who was buried in the churchyard at what we now call the old Dutch Churchill, that wouldn't have been so very old at the time of the story, and who goes searching

apparently a knightly quest of his missing head, his head having been blown off by a cannonball during a battle. And what's important, I think, to remember about this, is that this history was not ancient history for the characters in Irving's story. The Revolutionary War would have been a very recent vintage, as I mentioned, John Andre, but also this area was. a kind of no man's zone or demilitarized zone for the two sides. It was a bit of everything, and it had been occupied at various times. So there was some real trauma and real drama that the people of this region would have lived through. And therefore, a ghost like the ghost of a Hessian trooper was really just the right ghost for them, just the right spirit to haunt them.

And it is said that it is this Hessian trooper, the Headless Horseman, who is stalking Iqabye. I like to think it's because he's an outsider. He's not from the region. So it kind of fits that he would be run out of town by a very local ghost. Just like Tim Burton takes this thing in a different direction, so was Irving taking what was essentially a German or you mentioned this, certainly a European folklore, an old story that was told in many different ways over there. Have they actually traced it to that origin, the roots? There is a poem that was translated by Sir Walter. Scott from the German, which is called the Wild Grave, which is a story of a kind of devilish hunt, where a young man who is hunting and ignores the Sabbath, it doesn't go to church, etc., etc.,

is cursed by being forced to be hunted through all eternity by the devil and his hounds. So it's kind of one of these hounds of hell stories. Because we know that Irving considered Sir Walter Scott to be a mentor, and Sir Walter Scott made introductions to him to other literary lights in Europe, It's safe to assume that Irving was familiar with Scott's translation at the very least and might have looked to that for a little bit of his inspiration. But really so much of the setting of the story is very, very clearly the Hudson Valley and very clearly the region in which he'd spent some time as a young man. It's so Gothic. That's what we're talking about.

It's so Gothic. It's wonderfully Gothic, yes. But why? What is Gothic and why is this in that category? Gothic literature, oftentimes people will think immediately of Edgar Allan Poe. But of course, as an American writer, he was late to this scene, and Gothic literature really began in England about a century before with writers like Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe. And even a little bit of Jane Austen, if you've ever read North Anger Abbey, it's kind of a spoof of the Gothic literature tradition. It was a literature that focused heavily on the macabre and the melodramatic.

There's a lot of gore. There often was a lot of Roman Catholic imagery because these were being written in primarily Anglo. Protestant countries, and a lot of heavy emphasis on supernatural elements that really spoke to visitors from beyond the grave. But sometimes they were downright ridiculous. You know, giant helmets falling out of the sky, statues of bloody noses, you know, a lot of elements that we would kind of better associate with B movies today, but which were extremely popular in England and then in America as well. I like the fact that Gothic literature comes on the heels of, boy, I'm reaching back to my 101 in college for this, but Gothic literature comes on the

heels of the age of enlightenment. And so that, which indeed was everything to do with the United States, these enlightened ideals that we were no longer being run by religion. You know, we were thinking in a different way. Scientific theory was coming into play and industrial revolution was beginning. All these things were separating man from that traditional sort of one-track thinking. And the enlightenment ideals were in full flower, certainly, through. the 18th century. Now you come into the 19th century, into the early 1800s, and this new kind of romanticism, age of it, romanticism, begins to sort of reacquaint man with nature, to take him back to his more spiritual self, sort of pastoral self, if you will. And Gothic literature is,

like you say, the B version of that almost, that which was Wordsworth and all the rest, is sort of tracking off into this Gothic world, which eventually becomes pulp, I don't want to call him pulp, Washington Irving is way higher than cold. It's that kind of mass entertainment, if you know what I'm saying. Yes, absolutely. But I think also Gothic literature could be seen as a response to the age of enlightenment, saying there are still things that are inexplicable that can't necessarily be explained, certainly by science and it's in what we would consider to be its infancy,

but also by just human beings. How do you understand inexplicable natural events or people's deaths? You know, what does an afterlife look like if it looks like anything? I think these were always questions people were asking, and they were positing very different answers throughout the ages. And some of them were just unintentionally quite hilarious. And in fact, you see if you look at the Tim Burton version of the legend that while he has included some pretty terrifying new details that are not in the story, there's more beheadings than you might find of the court of Henry VIII. But you also find a real devotion to some of these details that Irving used. to describe, for example, Iqabad's walk.

So the various things that he hears and sees as he's making his fateful walk when he first sees the horseman in the gloom, those are all straight from Irving's original because he was also extremely good at conjuring up that atmosphere where potentially nothing's happening, potentially this is a hoax, but it could also be a genuine haunting. On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow traveler in relief against the sky,

gigantic in height and muffled in a cloak, Iqabad was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless. But his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on his saddle. His terror rose to desperation. He reigned a shower of kicks and blows upon his horse, hoping by a sudden movement to give his companion the slip.

Away they dashed. through thick and thin. Stones flying, sparks flashing at every bound. Iqabod's flimsy garments fluttered in the air as he stretched his long, lank, body away over his horse's head in the eagerness of flight. It's interesting. I mean, America goes through all kinds of spasms as a nation. We're certainly going through one now. And so this goes for other cultures as well. We're not alone in this. These movements of literature and even broader sort of social movements kind of take the sting out of these times. I mean, in a way, you can look at traumatic times,

such as the Civil War, for example, and find 50 years later movements to sort of soften that blow for better or worse. But it's what we do as a nation that we begin to sort of transform the trauma of a past generation or two into another form of itself. And maybe you use it for Gothic entertainments. Who knows?

I mean, that kind of cycle is constantly going through in this country. certainly it's in literature, but in general media. I think that's right, and I think that's part of why Irving, and particularly Irving's most famous ghosts, the Headless Horseman, continue to appeal today. And I've said often that really every generation gets a new iteration of the Headless Horseman, but I think it's even less time that has to pass than that,

because you see new and different versions of the Headless Horseman all the time, whether it's the Fox TV show or it's in song lyrics and in Lego and Zon Scooby-Doo and Murder, she wrote, we're all making up our own version of the Headless Horseman because that story never ceases to appeal. Sure. It's a fun arena, kind of a safe zone for everybody to sort of confront their greatest fears and call them out and not be frightened by them anymore. They are what they are. They're fantasies for the most part. But yeah, my former employer, I worked for the Travel Channel, that's all they do, are ghost stories. So there's still a very, very relevant world for this, certainly in the commercial aspect of it all. Let's talk some more about Washington Irving as a man.

I was surprised one time. I took my wife for a dinner on our anniversary at the Alhambra. Oh, very nice. Lucky you. The Spanish castle in Granada, Spain. I mean, this thing blows your socks off. You can't believe how beautiful it's been preserved. Yeah, it's where Ferdinand and Isabella sort of commissioned Christopher Columbus to go to the new world.

It's, you know, it was the seat of power of the superpower of the day. And to my surprise, I walk, I think it was right out of that room where Christopher Columbus was, into another small room and it's set over the door, kind of written in sort of a quaint script, Washington Irving's office. What the heck was Washington Irving doing here? I just didn't know. But in fact, he had a hugely international life. He did. He did. Indeed. He was asked by President Tyler, I believe, to serve as what we would now consider an ambassador, although that was not his title to Spain. And he was enchanted, really, I think, overtaken by fascination for the history.

of Spain. He wrote extensively about it and about the Alhambra in particular, which with all of its romantic and potentially ghostly associations, I think, really spoke to his imagination. And in a way, like the region that the Hudson Valley region, had that kind of combination of storied history and wildness that he was looking for. And he wrote all about it. I mean, he wrote all kinds of different things. It wasn't just ghost stories. He also wrote about, you know, sort of tourist accounts of how to enjoy Spain and so forth. He was one of those rare Americans in the early 19th century who went away in order to come back. You know, he was sort of an expatriate for a lot of his life.

But when he comes back, he sees a new purpose for America in the greater world. I think that's absolutely right. And he was also very conscious of what it meant to be an American. You remember, as you said, at the beginning of our conversation, this was someone who was born at the end of the Revolutionary War. And so he is uniquely of the New Nation period, which is something I think we all give short. trift to in our American history education. But it's also means that he is coming of age in a time

when Americans are trying to define what it means to be American, what it means to be cultured or to have a culture that you might want to export. And he's really the first ambassador of that, more than anything else, of the idea of an American culture that is worthy of exportation, that is worthy of international consideration. I would add also that his stay in Spain helped to finance further work on Sunnyside, Washington Irving's home, which is one of our properties in Terrytown in the Hudson Valley. And as somebody who earned a living by his pen, he was constantly looking for gigs. It's important to know that that's something he has in common with writers the world over today. There were never quite enough resources and he was always

constantly writing. And as you mentioned, his writings were incredibly varied and he wrote on all different kinds of subjects. And part of that was for financial reasons, a little bit like Dickens, with whom he had a passing acquaintance, although it certainly soured. So if you come to Sunnyside, you'll see the fruit of all of that literary labor. Is that open year-round, Sunnyside? Sunnyside is open from about May through mid-November. So we generally follow the seasons when it's the most pleasant to be on the banks of the Hudson River. That's when you'll find us there. And certainly this time of year, it's just spectacular. Talk about book-ending his life. In 1859, I'm just looking at a chronology here, Washington Irving publishes a five-volume biography of who?

George Washington. Yes. I mean, talk about bringing it full circle. Absolutely. And I think it's so interesting because I meet very few people who have heard that he did this kind of writing with biographies and in fact these massive biographies, let alone fewer people who have actually attempted to read them. They're of that kind of style of biography that isn't really in fashion anymore. They're more hagiographic. But they're so detailed.

And again, this is somebody who's attempting to write American history into existence. I mean, history is being made, but there are a few people writing it down. And Irving was one of the first to understand that that was just as worthy a task. He's one of the building blocks of America. I mean, there's a lot of them in the 19th century. And when you start tracking back to these guys, Edgar Allan Poe, of course, top of the list, you realize how hard people were working to make this culture. into something reminiscent, I guess, or reflective of its European, Eurocentric background,

which would then start to incorporate other influences from African Asia, et cetera. It was individuals like Washington Irving who really made America interesting, who began to show its different colors. I think that's such a cool way of putting it. What makes me a little bit sad is that folks like Poe, Hawthor, and Melville, I mentioned before often get more attention in the canon these days, and they're the ones that you're apt to be introduced to in high school and then read again as you get older. Irving is often left out. I think it partly has to do with the fact that his language can be a little flower.

You mentioned yourself when you mentioned rantapole there. It can be a little bit over the top, and it sometimes takes him a while to get to his points. But there's a lot that you're missing if you don't encounter Irving. And there's a lot of great satire there and biting humor and just some gorgeous, gorgeous imagery. I can't recommend more highly the one-two punch of reading Legend of Sleepy Hollow in the original text and then watching the movie that Tim Burton Mace. I mean, it's a perfect way to celebrate Halloween and certainly to introduce your kids to where all this began. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. This is fascinating stuff. Thank you. This is so fun. Sunnyside is there in Tarrytown.

Is that better to say? That's right. It's right on the border with Irvington, appropriately enough. Which will bring you into one of the most interesting areas of the world, in my opinion, let alone New York. the vast expanse of the Hudson River right there. It's right on the banks of that. And the whole region of certainly that part of the Hudson Valley, but stretches all the way to Albany, are some of the most interesting places you'll ever see. And we will feature many of them on this podcast. I promise you that. Thank you, Elizabeth. We'll meet again. Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.