Show & Tell: Ichabod's Head
A guest tale rises from the rich soil of Sleepy Hollow
Today in rebellion against Black Friday, during which (as an adamant buy-less-er) I do anything but scour sales—my spawn and I will instead: decorate a dead evergreen, play games, craft holiday cards. I am grateful for what feels like this luxurious extra day off, so on that front, I will post a story in someone else’s words. A highlight from my live October Sleepy Show & Tell event surrounding my Legendary book launch and that mesmerizing hair train.
Michael Baker, fire chief, catering company owner, children’s book author who is known to dress up sometimes as a tick-fighting superhero (complete with long white socks pulled over his pants-ends), was once my kindest ally on the Board of Directors when I ran the Hudson Valley Writers Center. Recently, when I sent a mass blast announcing my new edition of Washington Irving’s timeless classic featuring the Headless Horseman, he emerged as the keeper of an astounding object and its neck.
In Michael’s own words from when he first shared this tale with me in email:
“In the 1940’s my mother’s parents, Albert and May Kennelly, purchased a house called Ashbrook off Sleepy Hollow Road, which was a quarter of a mile from the real Van Tassel house and nestled between John D. Rockefeller’s third house and the fields of Fieldwood Farm. It was a great home and I have many happy memories of my time spent there. One special memory is the sculpture of what we named Ichabod. This sculpture by an unknown artist that I have pictured below was dug up by my grandfather and placed behind his barn for no one to see as he did not like the look of this very frightened man. His dislike of Ichabod was shared by other family member with one exception—me.
“When Munna and Al, as we called them, moved in the early ‘60s, I asked if I could have Ichabod, and since then he has always been with me. I took him to college and, later in life, on every Halloween we would be together even if Halloween fell on a work day and he had to go to work with me. As you might tell, Ichabod is very special to me and in many ways represents my own unique quirky creative self. Something I know you can well understand.
“You will no doubt see that Ichabod is in two pieces, which was not the way I inherited him. As I said, I would take him wherever I lived. One day, bringing him back from college while carrying this weighty friend up the stairs to my parent’s house, I slipped, and it was either me or Ichabod. I chose to save my leg and let him drop. Though a tragedy at the time, it has allowed me to move his head with a lot less effort. Currently his head resides as you see in the picture with me, and his bust has been taken to my daughter Jennifer’s house in anticipation of a reunion in the future.
“Though Ichabod has never had a public appearance, if a having him at one of your book events would help, we both would be happy to oblige. Of course, it would have to be around Halloween.”
And with those words, my idea to host a Show & Tell was born. Michael was a great presenter with his “I Lost my Head in Sleepy Hollow” shirt, even though that’s actually where he found it, along with the spare cannonball thrown in for good measure here.
Of course, as a citizen sleuth, I had further questions. How is that your grandfather came upon this sculpture in the ground? How heavy is it? What would it take to reconnect? And who might this artist be? Could the statue have been nabbed from the Rockefellers?
He later continued, doing deeper into some details,
“My Grandfather, Albert Kennelly, bought his house around 1936. The property that was next to John D. Rockefeller, III’s home was a three-acre parcel nestled in between the Rockefeller Fieldwood Farm. The property had an open field next to the Rockefeller riding trails. In the normal exploration of a new property he found Ichabod in the thick brush, half buried next to the field. Al, as we called him, was a very proper man and did not have the excitement I would have had in finding this art work. He immediately relegated it to the back of the barn next to the field. As the expression on the art work was quite scary and the proximity to Sleepy Hollow and the Van Tassel house a mile down the road, he named it Ichabod.
“Ichabod’s head weighs 36 pounds and the body is a similar weight. One advantage of the decapitation is that it is much easier for me to carry him. I usually have left his body home when traveling for show and tell.
“I did investigate professionally connecting body and head but decided not to. Besides being quite costly, carrying his whole body around as I do would be more difficult.
“As far as the artist, that has always been a question. An old resident of Arch Hill once told me he thought there was an artist who lived in his house which is just off Route 9 and Requa Street. He did not know that person’s name.”
So it often goes with the best art—obscure, inscrutable and unknown.
Because of the insane traffic that unseasonably warm day of the Show & Tell in these Halloween-congested villages of Sleepy Hollow Country, with some 20,000 or so packed into a few blocks at a nearby street festival, poor Michael had to park his car over a mile down the road and roll the head and neck pieces, weighing nearly 80 pounds total, in a wagon to my event. He arrived quite winded and sweaty and had to take a seat to calm his racing heart. I am ever-grateful for his effort and his inspiring affection for this oddity that, when rejected by his repulsed grandparents, he protected and cherished. Hauled and heralded as a priceless object no matter its actual value or origins, or its physical obstinance.
Interesting potential drama stewed as we waited for the intrepid crowd to settle and the show to start, when the Collections Coordinator of Lyndhurst Mansion, Emma, keeper of the infamous hair train, spied a portion of Ichabod’s head under wraps and thought she might know its shady origins. There had long been a mystery surrounding a vandalized fountain figure at Lyndhurst whose head one day had gone missing. But alas, she declared to me upon its public unveiling, that this wasn’t their long lost head. Oh well. She did not seize the item before the show or send my worn out friend off in cuffs with any art calvary.
Such is the nature in living in the sort of place so beautiful and historic that you’re always aware the likes of the Goulds of Lyndhurst or the Rockefellers of Oil chose this for their country escape estates. Something amazing and ancient might, at any moment, emerge from the soil. Fieldwood Farm of the Pocantico Hills section of town has since been absorbed into the vast Rockefeller State Preserve, a glorious gift the wealthy family still somewhat dwelling in our midst donated to allow everyone access to their grand backyards. I’ve asked my kids about every other day of their childhoods here as we witness yet another sunset over the Hudson or happen upon another goat in a meadow, do you know how lucky you are to live in such a place as this? (Luckily, they say yes.)
Could this head be the victim of a dramatic heist? I imagine it’s hard to just slink off undetected with such a heavy piece of stone in tow. But, in my search online of sculptures stolen, there’s one story in the New York Times archives from 1979 about a weighty “Ancient Statue Taken From the Met Found in Locker,” whose strange abduction remained a mystery though its damage was fixable.
The 2,500‐year‐old marble sculpture snatched from its pedestal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last Friday was found last night in a locker in Grand Central Terminal, undamaged except for small Valentine‐like heart that had been carved over the right eye of the $150,000 ancient Greek head.
The sculpture was retrieved after the Rockefeller Center security office received an anonymous telephone tip saying where it could be found.
Within minutes after the tip was relayed to the Midtown North detective squad, Detectives Robert Patterson and Michael Williams went to the terminal, used a pocketknife to break into the locker and found the sculpture inside.
According to museum officials, the sculpture was wrenched from its five‐foot high wooden base between 3:15 P.M. and 3:25 P. M. on Friday during a change of guards in the west side of the Cypriot gallery corridor, where it had been on display.
At the time it was stolen, the museum said that it weighed about 20 pounds, but to Detective Patterson, who cradled the head on its trip to the station house, seemed heavier than that.
“It weighed at least 50 pounds,” he said.
Then there was the story of two bronzes snatched midday a few weeks apart from a gallery only to be found 32 years later, as relayed by Observer.com.
In 1983, two bronze sculptures were stolen from Hirschl & Adler Gallery in New York within a span of three weeks. On both occasions, thieves made off with the treasures in the middle of the day. Now, 32 years later, the valuable bronzes by Paul Manship (creator of Rockefeller Center’s world-famous Prometheus sculpture) and Prince Paul Troubetzkoy have resurfaced and been returned to the gallery by Art Recovery International, a private group that works with law enforcement and art professionals to recover stolen artworks.
The cold cases were reopened in December 2014, when an anonymous collector who had held them in a private collection for the past 30 years consigned the works for sale to Gerald Peters Gallery. According to Art Recovery International’s CEO Christopher A. Marinello, the owner had purchased them from a store in New York’s diamond district in 1985, unaware that the items had been stolen decades years earlier.
And what happens in my online hunt for the maker/taker of Michael’s art when I tweak my search a little for key words missing rather than stolen? Search for a “sculpture missing Rockefeller” and you come instead to the saga of the actual missing Michael Rockefeller in the weirdest twist of all. The youngest son of then Governor Nelson Rockefeller was lost forever as he himself collected such art figurines, in this case, tribal wooden carvings to fill his father’s Museum of Primitive Art.
From Vox article in 2015, the unbelievable assertion from Carl Hoffman, “53 years ago, a Rockefeller son was eaten by cannibals.”
On November 19, 1961, Michael Rockefeller vanished. The 23-year old Harvard graduate and son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was in Netherlands New Guinea collecting the haunting wooden carvings of the Asmat people for his father’s recently opened Museum of Primitive Art. On that November day, his boat capsized, and he swam toward shore. He was never heard from again.
The story of Rockefeller’s disappearance captivated the media in the US and around the world. The New York Times ran near-daily updates on the search, which was conducted by helicopters, airplanes, ships, and thousands of locals. After no trace of him was found, the official pronouncement was that he’d drowned. But rumors about the scion’s fate have fueled songs, TV shows, novels, countless articles, and even an off-Broadway play. In early February, a documentary called The Search for Michael Rockefeller, a sensationalized, incomplete account based on research done in the early 1970s, will air on Netflix.
Despite insistent denials by the Rockefeller family and the Dutch government over the years, the evidence is abundant and clear, as I discovered while researching my book Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibalism, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art. Rockefeller made it to shore and was killed and ceremonially eaten by the Asmat. Not only that, the Dutch government and the Catholic Church knew and kept it a secret.
Maybe Carl can cook us up a conspiracy for Ichabod’s head.
Wow that is such a great head! I can understand your attachment.