When Diedrich Knickerbocker was reported missing in New York City in the fall of 1809, locals who read of his disappearance in local papers were unaware that it was a marketing tactic by Washington Irving. Knickerbocker (an elderly Dutch New Yorker) had been created by Irving to sell the “missing” man’s satirical history of the Empire State, concluding with the decline of colonial Holland in the Hudson Valley. Ten years later, bankrupt and living in England, Irving began publishing The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which featured two iconic tales of the Dutch Hudson Valley penned “by” Knickerbocker: Rip Van Winkle and The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Today, the latter stands as a ghostly keystone in the arching myth of a Halloween with jack-o’-lanterns, witches and ghouls haunting the autumn night. 180 years after it’s publication, the largest-budgeted version of Sleepy Hollow opened in the depths of the fall season – telling of a little town perched in the Hudson Highlands that’s held in the murderous thrall of a headless horseman. Set in 1799, the plot begins with the murder of wealthy Dutch landholder, Peter Van Garret – who descends from the town’s colonial founders – as part of a revenge plot against another landlord, Baltus Van Tassel, carried out by a marginalized Hollow citizen over some lost farmland. In reality, the early 19th Century saw a boiling-over of anger at owners of large upstate land grants. By the 1840’s, a spate of anti-rent revolts had swept down through the Hudson Valley, centered around the small town of Berne, which stood on the vast Rensselaerswyck estate. The Rensselaers operated their thousands of acres as Dutch patroons – much like feudal lords who extracted a yearly rent and tribute from tenant farmers possessed of no legal opportunity to buy the land they worked. 100 years later, Anya Seton adapted their plight into a novel, which was then turned into the film, Dragonwyck. Here, Nicholas Van Ryn is the hereditary patroon of the Dragonwyck estate, and accepts his tribute from a carved throne-like chair built on a raised platform. Explaining the history of the chair to a visiting duke seated beside him, Nicholas wryly explains that “it represents, among other things, over 200 years of extreme discomfort.” For most of those two centuries, the Bleecker family worked part of the Dragonwyck estate, but when ordered to remove his hat and bring forth a tribute of winter wheat, Klaas Bleecker refuses, and loudly declares “I’m a free American citizen! I take my hat off for no man!” This hints at a thorny issue involving the American Revolution, wherein local farmers who fought for the Continental Army expected land reform after the war – or at least a plot to call their own. The roots of these expectations can be glimpsed in Last of the Mohicans. When Cora Munro asks Hawkeye why a slain family of white settlers had lived unprotected on the upstate frontier, he replies that “after seven years indentured service in Virginia, they headed out here ’cause the frontier’s the only land available to poor people. Out here, they’re beholden to none. Not living by another’s leave.” This is to say nothing of the Huron, Delaware, Mohawk and other tribes who’s land rights were an afterthought to encroaching Dutch and English colonists by the dawn of 1757, when the story takes place. Soon after, Munro and Hawkeye temporarily evade a Huron war party beneath a thundering waterfall inspired by Mohicans author, James Fenimore Cooper’s take on Glens Falls, which pours into the upper Hudson. Yet it is further south, and amidst the thunderous echoes of the Catskill Mountains, that the climactic event in the life of a kindly (but lazy) colonist, Rip Van Winkle – adapted by Francis Ford Coppola for Faerie Tale Theatre – unfolds on the eve of the Revolution. While hunting for deer, Van Winkle is drawn toward a promontory above the Hudson, where he meets a Dutchman strangely dressed as an original settler from Holland. They travel up a supernatural mountain, where dwells the ghost of river explorer, Henry Hudson and the damned crew of his ship, the Half Moon. After downing one too many flagons of drink, Van Winkle quickly falls asleep, only to awaken 20 years later into a newly-American Hudson Valley much-changed from the one he knew. The old legends of 150 years under colonial rule in the New Netherlands, and then New York, paled now against tales of revolution and nation-building. Yet for myth-makers like Irving, this was a chance to conjure up country hollows teaming with spirits as genuine to readers, and later film viewers, as the long-ago disappearance of one Diedrich Knickerbocker – his place in time now only a ghost story.