Sleepy Hollow

Sleepy Hollow, New York, takes its modern name from Washington Irving's 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," in which schoolteacher Ichabod Crane is pursued through the woods on a Halloween night by the Headless Horseman, said to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier decapitated by a cannonball during the American Revolutionary War and searching for his missing head. Irving, who lived nearby and is buried in the village's Old Dutch Burying Ground — itself a setting in the story — drew on genuinely older local Dutch-American folklore about a headless horseman haunting the area, which he wove into a literary tale that became one of the first internationally successful works of American fiction.

The village, originally incorporated in 1849 as North Tarrytown, voted in a 1996 referendum to rename itself Sleepy Hollow, formally adopting the identity of Irving's fictional setting — a rare instance of a real community renaming itself after a place in literature inspired by, but distinct from, its own history. The Old Dutch Burying Ground and adjacent Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (final resting place of figures including Andrew Carnegie and Irving himself) remain active visitor sites, particularly around Halloween, and a covered wooden bridge near the cemetery — though rebuilt several times since Irving's day — is popularly identified by visitors as "the" bridge the Headless Horseman could not cross, the boundary beyond which, in the story, his pursuit was bound by the rules of the supernatural to end.