Sarah Bishop
SARAH BISHOP
? - 1810
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Little is known about the birth or life of Sarah Bishop before she came to live in a cave on West Mountain. Unlike our Sarah Bishop, she rarely spoke except in prayer and generally avoided human contact. However, she did attend church. On these occasions she would change out of her bundle of rags into a decent dress, which she hid in an unknown location. Samuel G. Goodrich, a.k.a. Peter Parley, mentioned her in his book Recollections of a Lifetime. His family was one of the few families that Sarah would spend time with. So it is to him that we owe the following information. She was of good family and lived on Long Island. During the Revolutionary War, soldiers burned her father’s house and she was subject to some evil act. She fled to Ridgefield and accidentally stumbled onto her cave, where she spent more than 30 years concealed in her sorrows and grief, which slowly ate away at her sanity.
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 Sarah's Cave Presumed location |
Her cave was a natural hollow in the rock about 6’ square with bark for a door. Except for a few rags and an old basin, it was unfurnished. Her bed was the floor of the cave and her pillow a projecting point of rock. In a nearby cleft she kept a supply of roots and nuts that she gathered or were given to her by the local townspeople, as she was never a beggar. In the summer, she grew a patch of beans, cucumbers and potatoes. Nearby were some poor peach trees and numerous highly productive grapevines.
During fair weather, she was often found at a nearby spring, quiet and still as a stone. Animals were her only companions, and it was said she domesticated a rattlesnake that paid her daily visits. In the winter time, she confined herself to her cave, where she survived on roots and nuts. She would never have a fire, even during the coldest periods. Legend has it that when she did not appear in the early spring of 1810, concerned townspeople found her dead but standing erect, her feet sunk in the frozen marsh of the valley. They gently carried her to the burying ground of the Episcopal Church in Salem, New York, which is now North Salem, NY.