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Hudson Valley Hauntings
By Pauline Uchmanowicz . Photos by Tom DiMauro

With the veil between life and death set to lift and spirits to run rife come All Hallow’s Eve, what better time to reflect on our famously spooky territories? The release this month of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Harvard University Press) by Judith Richardson provides a critical starting point, arriving like the best Halloween tricks, both unexpected and weirdly palpable. Part ghost story compendium and guidebook (including illustrations and maps) and part investigation into the social and cultural meanings of this particular “hauntedness,” the book shows how, according to the author, “the restless history of the region…was crucial to producing ghosts.” Richardson, a lecturer in the English Department at Stanford University, will speak about the legends and tales compiled in Possessions at Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz on November 1—Feast of All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead.

In Possessions, Richardson wades through two centuries of ghost stories and sightings that gave the Hudson River Valley between Manhattan and Albany “a reputation as an uncommonly haunted place.” She begins with the fantasy writing of Washington Irving and uncovers transmissions and variations of his ghostly characters and themes in regional folklore, literature, and theater that reached an “apotheosis” in the mid-20th century. In examining how “ghosts as social artifacts” operate in a particular time and place, she also tests the limits of haunting as a synonym for social or cultural memory as related to nationhood, ethnicity, and gender. Finally, Richardson teases out a “politics of possession,” pondering how “hauntedness affects the real world” and intersects with politics, tourism, economics, and land issues still pertinent today. For example, as she explains, debates over changing the name of North Tarrytown to “the more mythically resonant Sleepy Hollow,” a measure eventually passed in 1996, pitted moneyed recent arrivals seeking “a new identity” against an older working-class community, who identified with the town’s history as the site of a General Motors factory for the past 100 years.

According to Richardson, ghosts continue to mark “often-bitter resentments” surrounding “contests over territory and place,” as in hauntings said to be perpetrated by Native American spirits, souls of Africans and their descendents stolen into slavery, or ghosts of forgotten indentured servants. “Ghosts often represent the things that words have not expressed or cannot express,” she writes, later equating their elusive figures with “the blank spaces between words in historical narratives, the erasures and oversights.” She also links hauntings to “sites of transition, such as roads, bridges, and taverns,” which are peppered with the spirits of transients—hitchhikers, gypsies, tramps, peddlers, and other itinerants.

The straight-up blood, guts, skeletons, and tombstones found in Richardson’s tome owe a large debt to the backdrop of the Hudson Valley’s terrain. Replete with waterways, mountains, forests, and caves, the area offers ideal conditions for sighting or situating spirits and apparitions. “There are Spook Rocks and Spook Hollows, and Spook Fields,” she writes, “spook being a Dutch word for spirit or ghost.” There’s the Maid of Kaaterskill Falls, who haunts the shadow of Indian Head Mountain in Greene County and, according to 19th-century memoirist A.E.P. Searing, will appear “if you tune your thoughts aright, [then] the silvery white garments seem to gleam through the waters of Kaaterskill, and the face will almost shape itself.”

As Richardson repeatedly demonstrates in Possessions, a tour through Hudson Valley ghost country will invariably entangle a traveler in what she labels Irving’s web, spun in large part from the success of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Both come from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820), which names the ghostwriter persona Irving hid behind to obscure either the literary sources or real-world veracity of his stories. As if taking a cue from the author himself on this matter, speculation about the “authentic location” of his two most famous tales has caused various individuals and communities to claim rights to their legacy over the years, as Richardson exposes. Thus the truly inquisitive could find themselves seeking the ghosts of the discoverer Hendrick Hudson and his Half Moon crew, or the headless horseman who pursued Ichabod Crane into oblivion, in a variety of places.

Some interpreters believe the undisclosed identity of Rip Van Winkle’s Kaatskill Mountain village to be Columbia County’s Kinderhook; others name Tarrytown in Westchester. But “residents as well as tourists” have induced his spirit elsewhere, Richardson tells readers. For example, Searing, in her memoir of “a childhood along the Hudson River,” describes seeing “the ghost of the house” in a ruin in Palenville Cove where Rip Van Winkle was said to have lived, just over the Greene County line. In the 1970s, Ulster Country residents of Lloyd claimed the ghost ship of Irving’s tale as their own “since the vessel sailed past the town.” As for the Headless Horseman’s legend, though more definitively placed in Tarrytown than Rip’s, source historians have argued that the author “swiped” the setting from German folklore heard in communities a hundred miles north.

On the west shore of the Hudson, and adjacent to the river’s widest point, the northernmost tip of the Palisades between the towns of Haverstraw and Clarkson became the name and setting of Maxwell Anderson’s celebrated 1936 play “High Tor,” in which, “at the end of the first scene…thunder came up like rumbling bowling balls,” and the captain and crew of a ship lost in 1609, part of Henry Hudson’s fleet, materialized on the stage. “It was on High Tor, according to legend, that the local Lenape tribespeople first spied a ship full of Dutchmen coming up the river in 1609,” Richardson relates. Lenape meanwhile are said to haunt the environs of Ulster County. C.G. Hine, in his book West Bank of the Hudson River (1906), describes “the last remnants of the Indians” who came to New Paltz to sell baskets, until one was drowned in the Wallkill, spooking the others, who then came no more. Some locals claim to still hear them drumming in the hills surrounding Louisa Pond in the town of Esopus.

Among other Hudson Valley specters scrutinized by Richardson’s investigative gaze is a woman of uncertain origin, spotted in various guises and locations in eastern Greene County, dressed in white and wandering along Murderer’s Creek in the town of Athens; wearing black and stalking Green Lake Road in Leeds; or cloaked in gray while meandering through the woods off Leeds-Catskill Road near Cairo, “singing a melancholy song.” All three characters were once tied to celebrated murder.

Another female ghost of more enduring fame who haunts the vicinity “is seen being dragged behind a ghostly horse” like a forebear of James Byrd, the African-American man murdered in Jasper, Texas in 1998 by white ex-con John William King and two accomplices, who dragged Byrd’s body from a pickup truck, dismembering it en route. Her story has origins in an 18th-century murder case involving William Salisbury of Catskill, the richest man in town, and his servant Anna Dorothea Swarts, believed to be either a slave (Swarts is related to the Dutch and German words for “black”) or indentured servant of Scottish, Spanish, or German ancestry. Along the road from Leeds to Cairo, Salisbury supposedly pursued the runaway servant girl and tied her to his horse’s tail, and rode away as she “was dashed to pieces against some rocks and stones.”

The ghosts described in Possessions as a whole illuminate how tales of haunting transpire and function in a contentious politics of space. Seeking these otherworldly beings out in their Hudson Valley habitations may prove to be simultaneously physically frightening and mentally enlightening . Judith Richardson’s scheduled talk about ghost stories and legends of the Hudson Valley begins at 7pm on November 1 at Ariel Booksellers, located at 3 Plattekill Avenue in New Paltz. For more information about the event, call (845) 255-8041.