The Basics
website: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Address: 540 North Broadway, Sleepy Hollow, NY
Hours:
Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM
Saturday and Sunday from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM
Offerings
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery offers a variety of tours that look very interesting, including a Murder and Mayhem tour with grim tales about people buried in the cemetery and another entitled the Good, the Bad, and the Unusual. Details are listed on their website.
My Visit
As an American child, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow was one of those stories that kept me up at night. When I realized that I would be driving past Sleepy Hollow, I decided that I needed to visit the Old Dutch Burial Ground, where Washington Irving was buried. When I arrived, I was a little surprised to find the Old Dutch Church, but the signage read “Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.” A quick Google search revealed that there were actually two cemeteries, with the Old Dutch Burial ground being the graves closest to the Old Dutch Church and the newer rural cemetery being Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. There is no true delineation between the 2 acres of the Old Dutch Burial Ground and the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which takes up the rest of the 90 acres. In the rest of this article, I will call it Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and will not differentiate between the two.
I drove past the Old Dutch Church as the pathway was closed off and looped around to the back of the cemetery. Much like other rural cemeteries, such as Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is very hilly and bucolic. It was easy to lose myself driving through the cemetery, although I did stop every so often to get a closer look at tombstones.
Although there were fewer mausoleums than at larger cemeteries, the ones that were there were well-built, intricate, and in good repair. There was also a communal mausoleum, but I did not get a good picture of it
Planning Your Visit
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