Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Last October I found myself walking around Sleepy Hollow Cemetery with Kenny. Visiting this place that inspired Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was on my bucket list. It was a quiet day at the cemetery and we were mostly alone picking our way across the expansive grounds. We marveled at the age of headstones and found the graves of the real-life Van Tassels along with other notable greats like William Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and the author himself, Washington Irving.

While I expected some degree of solemn beauty, I didn’t expect how beautifully the cemetery sits in the New York landscape. The hills of the Hudson Valley are steep and as the mists rolled in and out of the grounds settling for a time in little valleys of grave sites. The trees act as silent guardians muffling much of the road noise so that the cemetery itself feels like it’s in another world. Rows of headstones are interrupted by great slabs of granite and vines have claimed many of the mausoleums.

I understand why someone chose to place a cemetery here. It seems that if you are buried in Sleepy Hollow, you may truly rest in peace.

Where to next?