Sleepy Hollow Cemetery — Attraction in Town of Mount Pleasant

My noble chums and I came to Sleepy Hollow on the Saturday right before Halloween (when else?) to attend The Original Knickerbocker cemetery tour at 11AM. I admittedly did not actively assist in the planning, but the impression I got was that this is a super hot ticket item and that the most popular tours - unsurprisingly, the spooky lantern murdery ones - sell out several months in advance. We were late to the party and ended up here on a gorgeous fall day. If you have your heart set on a lantern tour, having a bright blue sky and fall foliage is a nice plan B. I would caution though that the cemetery is SUPER hilly; we had a pregnant chum who was a little out of breath on some of the inclines.

Because of the insane traffic heading into town from the Tappan Zee, which even extended into the cemetery where we had to spend a little time looking for a parking spot, we ended up being 10 to 15 minutes late. That turned out not to be a problem at all, as the tour did not even start until about 11:15am and we were not the last stragglers to show up, presumably for the same congestion-related reasons. Nice to know if you're planning ahead.

I spent a ton of time in my childhood on vacations going to historic houses and plantations (very nerdy family), so I've seen my share of tours and tour guides. The best ones are entertaining, informative and quick on their feet. Not every tour goes perfect/according to plan, so if your guide can do some improv, that's a bonus in my view. We had an excellent tour guide. I unfortunately didn't catch her name - it was a woman with darker hair - but she knew her stuff. She dropped a few context clues suggesting that she's been doing these tours for years and it shows. Very in command of the cemetery history overall and had interesting anecdotes to provide based on whatever gravestone or structure we happened to be walking by. At one point, we had to wait a few minutes for a group to finish up at our next official stop. Not a problem - she launched quickly into a tutorial on some of the symbols on the gravestones right in front of us and what they specifically meant about the deceased individuals in question, quite a bit of which was completely new to me (with the exception of the Masonic stuff. Lot of that in the aforementioned nerdy family).

We also had to deal with a few accidental tour crashers and one young father who rudely felt the need to take a picture of Washington Irving's grave by stepping in front of the group right next to the guide because he couldn't wait two minutes for everyone to disperse. I honestly don't think there would have been much of a point in getting into a throwdown with that guy (she obviously noticed him though didn't say anything), but the guide was assertive when needed, politely but firmly letting a few people know that it was a paid tour and that they would need to find another way to occupy their time in the graveyard (my words, not hers).

At $15, I think you're getting a bargain with the right guide. We had firsthand experience with a pricier option nearby later in the day that didn't hold a candle to this. Is it the greatest tour I've ever been on? Eh. Probably not, but it was a solid good time, and all of us want to come back for the lantern murder...

Tonight I have finally made peace with the cemetery. There are, as of this midnight moment, no others around, and I've been told to maintain this mystery so others do not replicate my mission. To this end, I will use a psuedonym: Horace Flagbottom the Holy II, twice removed, hitherto referred to as Hory.

A graveyard is an eery place; a cemetery even more so. It is a place where the horrors of one's past come back to life, a girl named Cassie whispering in your ear as she did that lonely night that your shoes were untied, your desperate cry of humiliation in the depths of Toiletland, the sweet smell of revenge on the morning you told her that you were never really friends with her anyway and laughed at her and pointed at her and sang happy birthday to her with the rest of the class. Life can be difficult on a sensitive child. Sometimes I wish I hadn't come to this place.

Here, our ancestors' great ambitions come to mind if not to pass: their thirst for knowledge and acceptance, their desperate thriving for freedom, their bloodthirsty quests to dominate land, power, water, oil, cake, and education, their worries that their mistresses will find out about their wives and vice versa and also their cousins. I sense that I am too poor to identify with the corpses in these graves.

A deer trollops by and I call out to it in terror of what such zombies would do to me, imitating an owl so as to give the impression that I could fly if needed. The deer took notice and tipped his head in confusion, but was happy to drop some wisdom in conversation before moving on with a whistle and a flirty flip of his tail:

Know thyself and know thy demons and ne'er Labor to play force against its own self, Say wiser beings than any I've met. So grow a few flowers on the high shelf And throw away their dirt and watch them shine And see them as they are, soft signs of what May be as time preserves them as divine. They will some way learn that they may be cut But that would ne'er ruin their hope or joy For they know their scent only grows to cloy.

Andrew Carnegie was unavailable for comment, but his gravestone offered a prepared statement that Hory lost...

this place has potential to be a really nice place to visit. It's super big and has some really cool history but I had so many issues while visiting.

first off when you pull in, there are no signs on what way you should go first which is a huge problem because most of the roads are really tight and only a single car can fit through at a time. With it being a popular cemetery to visit, this place gets super busy and everyone thinks they should have the right of way and you need to move. I had to backup so many times and other did as well and I even saw a car back into a grave trying to turn around. Whoever is in charge of this place has done a horrible job making it easy to visit while In a car. It's a mess and to be honest if your drive there i don't recommend you do that if you want to enjoy the peaceful atmosphere while waking and have time to look at everything.

no onsite parking and no parking on the side to get out and walk around other than a few random spots.

small tight roads with lots of traffic going all over the place and others getting mad and screaming at each other for them to turn around or reverse.

clean cemetery.

have a bathroom at the main entrance.

beautiful, especially around fall.

nice history and historical people buried here.

needs to be directed better for people driving through, signs need placed for what way to start and what ways not to go down.

I recommend visiting on foot...