The Legend of Sleepy Hole
The Sleepy Hole we all know immediately is a current invention; it was initially North Tarrytown within the late nineteenth century, adopting its present title in 1996, and for good purpose: Sleepy Hole achieved worldwide fame due to Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hole“, an 1820 quick story in regards to the Headless Horseman. Irving lived in Tarrytown and is buried in Sleepy Hole Cemetery.
Not surprisingly, Sleepy Hole’s popularity makes it one thing of a Halloween icon. It is thought-about one of the crucial haunted locations on this planet. And that makes it excellent for fantasy and horror tabletop gaming inspiration.
The Headless Horseman
“The Legend of Sleepy Hole” and its eponymous specter was made well-known by one of many quick tales in Irving’s The Sketch Guide of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Irving used the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon). Irving wrote the guide whereas touring Europe, and it isn’t a shock that the headless ghost has its root in European legends, notably the dullahan.
The parable might have been impressed by the corpse of a Hessian jager discovered by the Van Tassel household and later buried in an unmarked grave within the Previous Dutch Burying Floor. That is the free plot define of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hole, which manages to mix Edgar Allen Poe’s love of ratiocination and his chief investigator C. Auguste Dupin with the superstitious schoolmaster of Ichabod Crane.
Within the story, it is implied the Headless Horseman is a prank performed by Abraham Van Brunt to only drive off Ichabod as a rival for Katrina Van Tassel’s hand. The film goes a lot additional, together with each the prank and a secret plot to make use of the fiendish horseman as an murderer, managed by whomever holds his head.
There are many methods the Headless Horseman has been statted (I attempted as nicely with 5E Foes: Celtic Bestiary, the dullahan entry), however the official model for Dungeons & Dragons options in Van Richten’s Information to Ravenloft.
Rip Van Winkle
The Sleepy Hole TV sequence took a distinct, however associated, method. Ichabod Crane is a spy working for George Washington as a double agent. He beheads a horseman, solely to awaken in 2013 in Sleepy Hole, with Washington’s Bible in hand. He faces off in opposition to the Horseman on this new timeline, who he later learns is an avatar of Demise, underneath the service of the fiendish Moloch. The present mixed parts of the Irving’s quick story with one other story he made well-known, “Rip Van Winkle.”
By the point the present reached its fourth season, it had given up on its Sleepy Hole setting altogether (which was solely loosely primarily based on the precise city). The finale concerned the Thinker’s Stone, Lucifer, and the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Whereas the present might have sputtered (and ended prematurely, with Crane by no means fairly resolving his personal plot), the thought of mixing time journey shenanigans whereas remodeling the Headless Horseman into one of many 4 Horseman of the Apocalypse can definitely be mined for concepts in a fantasy or horror marketing campaign.
The Actual Legend
Sleepy Hole is much weirder than the film or sequence that portrayed it. Here is a quote describing the site, Sleepy Hole Nation:
We have haunted taverns, homes and even a church. Ghosts, spectres, a mysterious girl clad all in black, a girl dressed all in white wailing atop a cliff. Pirates and freeway males. Ghost ships on the Hudson River, a Dutch goblin king residing atop a neighborhood mountain. Unsolved murders. UFOs. Exploding mosquitoes. Yep, we’ve even had a plague of exploding mosquitoes.
The Dutch goblin king is referenced in Irving’s quick story, “The Storm-Ship” which helped make Bannerman Citadel well-known. The goblin leads a crew of imps, able to controlling the winds and invoking storms. Shrink a genie right down to measurement or reskin a bone satan for a similar impact, with a military of imps as well.
The exploding mosquitoes had been impressed by the arrival of gasoline, closely implying that reliance on the gasoline (or was it alcohol?) was inflicting mosquitoes — drawn to open flames — to blow up. Oil-drinking stirges might pose the same menace.
After which there’s Hulda, a heroine spun from fantasy whose magical capabilities have solely expanded within the retelling. She now has her personal gravestone, although there’s little proof she was an actual particular person. Hulda’s been credited with the whole lot from natural therapeutic powers, to stealthily bequeathing presents of meals to her ravenous neighbors, to taking over arms in opposition to British troopers in the course of the Revolutionary Conflict. She’d make an awesome character or NPC for any sport as a extremely succesful ranger.
Sleepy Hole, like a lot of its mythology, is spun from simply sufficient reality to make it plausible. The city itself has capitalized on its popularity, and visiting it throughout Halloween is an expertise. Simply be able to stroll all over the place, as a result of the inflow of vacationers snarls visitors for hours.
