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🏘️ Croton Local History
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to speak; but a visit to a Hudson River vineyard, with all its glorious resources of hill-side, valley, river, and mountain view, is something strangers from afar take delight in accomplishing, and our own citizens must be proud to enjoy.” 3 La Belle
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Riviere (the Beautiful River) was a 19th century name for the Ohio River, which had become a grape-growing area when this article was written. ↩ Plum curculio is a major insect pest of apple, plum, apricot and cherry, and a minor pest of pear and
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peach. See the University of Maine Cooperative Extension website . ↩ This letter was anonymously attributed to “R * * * * *” ↩ Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens
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On Halloween, in 1922, the world-famous magician Harry Houdini gave what he called a “pseudo séance” in the Harmon home of his friend, journalist and social reformer Sophie Irene Loeb. He used the word “pseudo” when he recalled the incident in his
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book Magician Among Spirits , because he was famous not only for astounding feats of magic, but also for debunking the spiritualists, mediums and seers who used tricks to fool credulous people into believing they could actually communicate with the
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dead. “Gladly would I embrace Spiritualism, if it could prove its claims,” he wrote in the forward, “but I’m not willing to be deluded by the fraudulent impositions of so-called psychics, or accept as sacred reality any of the evidence that has been
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placed before me thus far.” 1 During his later years Houdini would occasionally give séances for the edification of friends. “The effects he would produce in the course of an evening . . . would make the ordinary mediumistic phenomena seem quite
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childish. Spectators would be awed, in spite of repeated assurances from Houdini that he was merely tricking them.” 2 At Loeb’s house the séance included two slates, which were examined by the guests before the lights were dimmed. “I asked if the
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Spirits would manifest,” wrote Houdini, “and when the slates were opened there was a message containing a code word. Miss Loeb was astounded, for the message, signed by Jack London, contained a code word which she claimed no one in the whole world
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knew about. I did it by trickery, but she declared that if she had not known I was a magician she would have believed readily that I had psychic powers.” Four years later to the day—on Halloween, 1926—Harry Houdini died in Detroit from complications
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of a ruptured appendix. Sophie Irene Loeb was one of the honorary pallbearers at his funeral. Harry Houdini. A Magician Among the Spirits . Harper & Row, 1924. Margaret C. Scoggin. The Lure of Danger: True Adventure Stories . Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.
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(Opens in new window) Tumblr Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Like Loading... Related Published October 31, 2013 October 31, 2023
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Article from the Syracuse Journal, May 2, 1913, one of the many newspapers which carried the Devil’s Footprints story. Where are the Devil’s Footprints? This simple question was recently posed to a group of Crotonites—experts in local history, in
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Hudson Valley geology, and some people who grew up here and explored all of Croton’s old ruins and haunted places in their youth. They all had the same reply: “ What footprints?” The answer takes us back more than a century, to when Alfred P.
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Gardiner purchased most of the land on Hessian Hill and built a magnificent estate. As the New York Times reported in 1906, “A. P. Gardiner has bought the Hessian Hill farm at Croton-on-Hudson from the Cockcroft estate. It has a frontage on the
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Hudson and extends back for over a mile. Hessian Hill has an elevation of 600 feet and commands a fine view of the river. Mr. Gardiner will improve the property extensively and make it his country home.” 1 Did Gardiner know he had acquired the
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Devil’s Footprints? We may never know, but six years after he purchased the property the New York Press revealed the whole fascinating story, in an article that was picked up by newspapers across the country. 2 A 1908 map showing the location of A.P.
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Gardiner’s Hessian Hill estate. From Atlas of the rural country district north of New York City . . . by E. Belcher Hyde, 1908. Plate 12. Click the image to enlarge it. The Devil’s Footprints “Mysterious footprints in the solid rock on the east and
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west banks of the Hudson at Croton have puzzled the scientists, who believe them to have been made by a primeval man before the Stone Age. On the east shore, along the old Albany postroad (sic) and at the bottom of a steep hill belonging to the A. P.
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Gardiner estate, lies a huge boulder shadowed by tall trees . . . Its smooth surface bears the imprint of a pair of human feet placed side by side, as if a barefooted man had walked down the hill and stood on the spot while the stone was still soft
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and yielding from nature’s crucible. Every toe is clearly defined, and judging from the mold he left in the granite the foot of this ancient man was both large and shapely. Behind the footprints, all the way to the top of the rock, are a series of
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peculiar indentations such as the links of a heavy chain would make in soft earth. Exactly opposite, on High Tor Mountain, on the other side of the Hudson, the footprints again appear on the rock, but with the heels turned toward the river, as if the
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man was traveling away from it due west. By actual measurement the footprints on both sides of the river correspond in every particular and were undoubtedly made by the same pair of feet. Today, only the foundations of Gardiner’s home are left at the
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top of Hessian Hill. Click the image to enlarge it. Many weird and wonderful legends have been read from the footprints in the rock. One of these attributes them to the devil, who was chained up in Connecticut for a number of years, but finally
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escaped and fled into New York. Dragging his chain after him, he paused on the boulder at the foot of Hessian Hill to rest before he continued his flight to the vast Adirondack wilderness. The indentations in the Hessian Hill rock are pointed out as
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the marks of his chain, and the footprints on High Tor as further corroborative evidence of the truth of this tale. Another story relates that a cave man was approached from the rear by a terrible many-legged serpent as he stood upon the boulder, and
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that he was so frightened he leaped clear across the Hudson and landed on the other side. The indentations are supposed to have been made by the serpents’ legs . . . The building on the right is a private home today and the entrance gate columns are