A single black-and-white photo is always tied to this story. It shows a man in overalls and a large newsboy hat leaning against the back of an old car. Nobody knows whether it’s a photo of Carl Pruitt or how exactly it became attached to the story. The earliest source of the tale seems to be the late Michael Paul Henson’s More Kentucky Ghost Stories, which was published in 1996.
Researchers have tried to locate Pruitt’s death certificate without success, but they have found a death record in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1950, for an Enos C. Prewitt…who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
All that aside, we’re left with a solid moral: don’t disrespect the gravestones of angry killers.
The Bronze Lady
CURRENT LOCATION:
SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY, SLEEPY HOLLOW, NEW YORK
SCULPTOR:
ANDREW O’CONNOR JR.
MODEL:
JESS PHOEBE BROWN
CREATED FOR:
GENERAL SAMUEL RUSSELL THOMAS
YEAR OF INSTALLATION:
1903
ALSO KNOWN AS:
RECUEILLEMENT
The Old Dutch Church Burying Ground and its neighbor Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York, are famous for their connections to Washington Irving and his 1820 story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But there is another dark force besides the Headless Horseman at work amongst those graves. She is called the Bronze Lady.
Washington Irving buried his fictional horseman in the Old Dutch Church Burying Ground, and in the story, it is from there that the dark rider gallops forth to claim the heads of nervous schoolteachers. The Old Dutch Church itself rises above the gravestones on the far side of the bridge that is the finish line for anyone being chased by the headless fiend. Meanwhile, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which is newer and shares a border with the older cemetery, became the final resting place of Washington Irving following his death in 1859.
The Old Dutch Burying Ground occupies 2.5 acres directly behind the church. It was founded around 1685. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is much larger, about 90 acres, and opened in 1849. Besides Washington Irving, members of such wealthy New York families as the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Chryslers, and Astors also molder here. Irving was instrumental in the newer cemetery’s development, as well as its name. The village where it’s located was then known as North Tarrytown, and the town’s leaders originally proposed to name the burial ground Tarrytown Cemetery. Irving successfully pressured them to dismiss their first choice for his preferred Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. A century and a half later, in 1997, the name of the village was also changed to Sleepy Hollow, to capitalize on the famous spooky story set there.
But there’s another spooky story set there. The Bronze Lady of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery has had to live in the shadow of the Headless Horseman even though she…is real.
The Bronze Lady is a larger-than-life statue of a woman seated with her eyes closed and her two hands clasping one of her knees. A shroud covers her hair and a flowing robe covers her body. Unlike most other graveyard statues, time and the elements haven’t conspired to make her especially creepy. She looks exactly like what she is — a large, dark statue of a woman.
She’s squeezed between two pine trees and faces a large, square mausoleum, which houses the tomb of General Samuel Russell Thomas. Thomas earned his stars in the Civil War, ascending the ranks of the Union from second lieutenant to brigadier general. After the war, he ascended the tax bracket with the same gusto, making it big in the pig iron, coal, and railroad industries — big enough for his corpse to be marked with both a large mausoleum and a statue.
Even though the statue and mausoleum are part of the same memorial, the way they are situated is unusual, and that arrangement may be the inspiration for the curse. The female form faces the mausoleum as if she’s not there to be looked at, but to look. Almost like she’s guarding it. Or waiting for someone to walk through the green bronze doors. The effect is unintentionally eerie. So eerie, in fact, that many locals have grown up swapping stories about how the statue is cursed.
Tales are told of crying sounds coming from the Bronze Lady. Some claim to have felt actual tears on her cheeks. Kids sneak out there at Halloween and dare each other to touch the statue. If you peek through the keyhole of the mausoleum or knock on its metal doors, it’s said that you’ll have nightmares. If you treat the statue with violence — say, kick her shins or slap her face or spit on her — she will haunt you for the rest of your life. In one story, if you peek through the keyhole after abusing the statue, you’ll see a red eye staring back at you. Another claims that to break the curse, you need to slap the statue again and then knock three times on the mausoleum door.
Strangely, there is a positive legend of the statue as well: if you are nice to her, she will protect you for the rest of your life. And evidently, many people hold to this superstition; cemetery staff often find coins in her lap.
The sculpture was created by Andrew O’Connor Jr. at the behest of the general’s widow, Ann Augusta Porter Thomas, after her husband’s death on January 14, 1903. The statue’s name is Recueillement (French for “contemplation”). The model for the sculpture was Jess Phoebe Brown, one of O’Connor’s favorite models.
According to the 1995 book The Sculptors O’Connor by Doris Flodin Soderman, when Mrs. Thomas visited O’Connor’s studio to check on the statue that she had commissioned, she didn’t like the way it looked. She wanted the statue to appear happier — maybe more hopeful about the family’s post-death prospects. O’Connor dutifully asked his client to give him another week to address her feedback. When Mrs. Thomas returned, he showed her a new cast of the head bearing a much happier expression. Mrs. Thomas declared it perfect, at which point O’Connor dashed the head to the floor, smashing it into pieces, and said, “I just made this to show you that I could do it, but I should never let such a monstrosity out of my studio.”
Inside the mausoleum, only two crypts are marked with names: Samuel Russell Thomas and his son Edward. Mrs. Thomas wasn’t interred there. As for Edward, even though his name appears on a crypt, the cemetery has no record of anybody being interred there.
Maybe if O’Connor had listened to Mrs. Thomas, his work of art wouldn’t be cursed today. But then again, maybe that was inevitable. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving characterized the people of the valley this way:
They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions.…