According to legend, who fell asleep in the Catskill Mountains for 20 years, following a game of 9-pins with the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew?
Sleep the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, in which seven Christians flee into a cave during pagan times in order to escape persecution, but fall asleep and wake up 360 years later to discover, to their astonishment, that the Roman Empire is now predominately Christian. The American author Washington Irving's short story "Rip Van Winkle", first published in 1819 in his collection of short stories "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.", is about a man in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep on one of the Catskill Mountains and wakes up twenty years later
Catskill Mountains towers have been renovated and opened to the public as observation posts with panoramic views. The remaining towers are: The Catskill Mountain House, built in 1824, was a hotel near Palenville, New York, in the Catskill Mountains overlooking the Hudson River Valley. In its prime at the turn of the century, visitors included United States Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Chester A. Arthur and Theodore Roosevelt. Shortly after it was completed, the Mountain House became a regular subject for Washington Irving and artists from the new Hudson River School, most notably artists Thomas Cole and William Henry Bartlett. From 1872, the