History + Haunting in the Hudson Valley

My writer pal Joe Doherty sent me this quote today:

...the final factor that enabled Irving to turn a romantic eye to his home ground was that in England his perspective on America became informed by distance. Nostalgic and homesick, Irving could write about ghosts in the Hudson Valley, not simply because the Hudson was haunted, but because he was haunted by the Hudson -- by a sense of estrangement from it, and by the certainty that it was being transformed in his absence.
- Judith Richardson, Possessions; the History and uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley