Kinderhook

Ichabod sucks.

Well, he knew several people that may or may not have inspired him for this character, one of which being Jesse Merwin, who taught at the local schoolhouse in Kinderhook, which is a little bit further north of here along the Hudson River.

And Irving spent several months there in 1809.

And many in the Tarrytown area, even I guess today, still claim that they think Samuel Youngs, who was a local school teacher at the time and also a friend of Washington Irving, was the true inspiration for Ichabod Crane.

Please enjoy responsibly.

The man known to history as Martin van Buren was born as Martin von Buren on the 5th of December 1782 in the village of Kinderhook in the Hudson Valley in the state of New York.

His father was Abraham von Buren, a modest farmer and tavern owner who later served for 10 years as town clerk of Kinderhook.

In 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was issued during the American Revolutionary War, 39-year-old Abraham married Martin's mother, 30-year-old Maria Hus von Ahlen.

Maria had been married to Johann von Ahlen and had three children with him before his death in 1773.

Van Buren's political career would reflect this political fluidity and he would live through the first, second and third party systems in the US.

As a young boy, Martin helped out at his father's farm and tavern, where he was regarded as intelligent and respectful.

He attended his local one-room school in Kinderhook until the age of 14, where he learned English and a small amount of Latin.

The one thing that kind of ties it back to my other world is we also own a farm.

So we have a fully organic regenerative farm in Kinderhook, New York.

All

right.

And between the Hudson Valley and the Great Lakes, there's a lot of country, and the reports come out of all of it.

The oldest set of reports after Whitehall comes from Columbia County in the Hudson Valley south of Albany from around the village of Kinderhook, and they're mostly the work of one family.

Bruce Hallenbeck grew up in Kinderhook, and starting in the late nineteen seventies, members of his family began reporting an upright hairy creature on and around their property on a wooded hill outside the village.

His account, which he's written up and given in interviews over the years, includes a sighting by his aunt in nineteen eighty of a large dark figure on two legs crossing a road near the house, along with sightings by other relatives, footprints, and screams heard at night from the hill.

The local paper picked it up, and the thing got a name, the Kinderhook Creature, and Hallenbeck went on collecting reports from the county for decades and writing about them, and he's the reason the Hudson Valley has a Bigfoot literature at all.

The Kinderhook reports never produced a photograph or a cast that got past the local paper.

What they produced was a cluster, a run of sightings from one hill over a few years, which is the same shape as Whitehall and the same shape as most of the places this trip has stopped.

The rest of what follows never made it into any paper.

Magdalenas will be there.

These are both in Kinderhook, I believe.

Mexican restaurants galore.

Absolutely, we're going to have Venezuelan food there as well.

So even later on, the church was still maintaining that this was true evidence that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

Yes, it was August of 1981 when the enzyme came out that finally retracted the church's support for the legitimacy of the Kinderhook plates due to scientific testing in 1980.

Yeah,

it took them a long time being ran by prophets, seers, and revelators to acknowledge that this was a modern-day fabrication.

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Back in 1962, something unusual was floating in the woods of Kinderhook, New York.

Bruce Hallenbach was 10 years old at the time, playing in the forest behind his grandparents' house with his 7-year-old cousin, Chari, when they noticed something strange hiding behind a tree.

A bright blue blob-like creature seemed to be watching the kids.

Quickly, the two children decided to run back to their family's home.

Years later, when one of Bruce's friends described a strange encounter with a floating bell-shaped thing in the woods, he realized it must be the same creature.

Known by locals as the Kinderhook Blob.

This particular globular fellow comes from a long line of jelly-like beings encountered across the world, whether on the fourth floor or floating eerily through the trees.

[laughs]

Yeah, or there's the Benedict Arnold house in Kinderhook.

Oh yeah.

[laughs]

Wow.

Um, but anyway, um-

That's right near you, right? Kinderhook?

Yeah, Kinderhook's right near us.