Lyndhurst

On Saturday three of my friends and I went to Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown for a day filled with fall delights. We had gone last year for the first time, and loved it so we knew we'd be back. One thing we didn't do last year was tour Lyndhurst, "one of America’s finest Gothic Revival mansions," so it was our first stop this year.

Lyndhurst was designed in 1838 by Alexander Jackson Davis and had five different owners from three different prominent families before it became part of the National Historic Trust for Preservation in 1961. The mansion is furnished with original furniture/décor from all five owners so the inside is just as interesting and historic as the outside.

Of course since it's October, the mansion was also decorated for Halloween, which I would usually be annoyed about if it didn't naturally fit so well with the gothic architecture and if I didn't love Halloween as much as I do.

There were tombstones out front, ghouls in the trees and spiderwebs on everything. They even had a few pieces of mourning wear on display, and one very awesome example of Victorian memorial hair art (when asked if anyone knew what it was made from, I was the only one to very enthusiastically—and totally embarrassingly—yell out, "HAIR!"). 

The grounds of the estate are worth a visit alone. Before we even took the house tour we saw the bones of the nation's first steel-framed conservatory, a shingle-style, stand-alone bowling alley, Jay Gould's footbridge—over the railroad tracks and down to the river—that he used to board his boat, a rose garden, a children's playhouse bigger than most New York studio apartments and sweeping views of the Hudson river.

Lyndhurst was also used for the filming of two Dark Shadows movies in the '70s, which I have never seen but I will definitely be tracking down soon. I dream of one day owning a real-life haunted mansion that I can fill with taxidermy and curiosities and clones of Mozart (my cat)—I wouldn't mind having my own bowling alley either.