Tim Burton brought The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to the big screen in 1999 with the movie appropriately titled Sleepy Hollow, but is the town real or does it only exist in fiction? The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story written by Washington Irving and published in 1820. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a superstitious schoolmaster who comes across with a headless horseman in the town of Sleepy Hollow. After that encounter, Crane disappears, and it’s unknown if he fled in horror or was “spirited away by supernatural means”.
The story has been adapted to different media for years, and one of the most popular versions is Tim Burton’s 1999 movie Sleepy Hollow. As it happens with all tales that make it to the big screen, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow went through many changes when landing in Burton’s hands. In it, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is a New York City police constable who is dispatched to Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of brutal murders by decapitation. There he meets Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), heir to one of the town’s richest farmers. The town of Sleepy Hollow has a very peculiar look, and it’s inevitable to wonder: is Sleepy Hollow a real place?
As it turns out, Washington Irving was inspired by a real-life village called Sleepy Hollow. Located in the town of Mount Pleasant in Westchester County, New York, Sleepy Hollow can be found on the east bank of the Hudson River, with the village of Tarrytown to the south. Irving lived in Tarrytown, so it’s easy to see why he borrowed Sleepy Hollow for his version of the legend of the Headless Horseman. The movie, however, wasn’t filmed there, but could have done so very close to it.
The production crew of Sleepy Hollow originally intended to shoot on location, and scouted throughout Upstate New York along the Hudson Valley. The chosen place was Tarrytown, and the production start date was settled. However, production designers found that the places weren’t quite “lending themselves to the sort of expressionism” they were going for, and thus started looking for a different location. Producer Scott Rudin then suggested moving production to the UK, which offered the level of craftsmanship in period detail and costuming necessary for the movie, and as Burton made Batman in Britain, he agreed. Sleepy Hollow was then shot at Leavesden Film Studios (where Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace had just been filmed) and Shepperton Studios. For exterior shots, the whole town had to be built, and for that, they moved to Hambleden estate.
While it’s not possible to visit the places seen in Sleepy Hollow, those curious to see what the town really looks like can visit the real place in New York, though it will obviously look very different from what Irving and Burton painted. The real town of Sleepy Hollow, however, has been used as filming location for various movies and TV shows, so you have probably already seen it, though (ironically) not in the movie of the same name.