NEW YORK STATE, USA
HalloweeNY
In Washington Irving’s 1820 tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a headless horseman terrifies the inhabitants of Tarrytown in upstate New York. In later retellings, he sometimes hurls a blazing pumpkin, in a defining piece of American Halloween lore. New York City stages its own ghoulish parades around 31 October, but follow the wide Hudson River north to the villages of Westchester County and you’ll get the last of the leaf-peeping season providing a colourful backdrop to all those jack o’lanterns. More than 7,000 of them can be seen lit up at the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, held in the grounds of the 300-year-old Van Cortlandt Manor. And on the outskirts of Tarrytown is Sleepy Hollow itself, home to the Old Dutch Burying Ground, before which Irving’s headless horseman would disappear ‘in a flash of fire and brimstone’.