The Ghost of Sleepy Hollow

A Con Games Column

SLEEPY HOLLOW, NEW YORK—My family came to bury our beloved aunt here in a place where ghosts live and breathe.

I know these ghosts to be true because other families, with no one to bury, kept walking past us up to a cemetery with a creek running by alongside. These fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and grandparents were walking up the same hill with purpose, with some slight hope of seeing the Headless Horseman of legend who rode hereabouts.

The other families have no business here other than a box to be checked because of a short story written two hundred years ago. In the modern era both movies and a Hallmark television movie and a network television show came along with a love story about a ghost from here with no head: the legend explains why tourists arrive in a steady trickle to visit a cemetery in a sleepy town everyone has heard of.

None of these considerations matter for our tribe. You can tell we are a tribe because everyone is wearing the same clothes—the men wear white shirts and dark ties and the men and women all wear black because we are here for the same reason. A hole has been dug. A pile of dirt awaits and a scooper to scoop the dirt to fill the hole in the ground if not the one in our hearts. A gravedigger wearing gloves watches from behind a tombstone and awaits his turn.

The remains of our beloved aunt are in a box waiting for transferal to the ground and hence eternity. Her husband, now a widower, gets down on his knees and recites a poem then recites a prayer from the Bible in a beautiful way that makes it sound true. His voice catches on her memory and he has to stop. Then he opens the box and pours the remains into the hole, stopping and starting, slowly enough for us to sees how the wisps of what she leaves behind will float in the air forever.

Friends and family follow her husband with a few words and a scoop of dirt. They are crying or sniffling as they scoop the dirt into the hole. They talk of her laugh and her life and her bravery in the face of death.

Our beloved aunt had the worst health of anyone I ever knew—left for dead in her twenties, then in and out of hospitals till her finale fifty years later. The right place for her to find eternal rest is a place full of ghosts because she had that ghostly quality, as if the betrayal of her body left only her soul behind. She could walk around our house, up and down stairs, without making a sound, suddenly appearing from nowhere when you opened a door or turned around.

She is still here, in this cemetery, though nowhere to be found once the wisps are whisked away on the wind.