Alva Review-Courier -

Sarah Bishop’s life was totally disrupted during the American Revolutionary War. Kidnapped by British soldiers, she endured sexual abuse until escaping several years later.

Eventually, she made her way to Westchester County, New York, near that state’s border with Connecticut. There she lived the last three decades of her life.

Bishop chose to make her home in a “cave” that was really a small space she found inside a pile of large rocks on the side of a formation known as West Mountain.

She wanted to live the remainder of her life alone – away from society. She became known to locals as the “Hermitess of West Mountain.”

Near her rocky abode, Bishop cleared a small plot of land and planted a yearly garden of potatoes, beans, cucumbers, peaches and grapes. In the winter she subsisted on roots and nuts.

Her home had no heat or other amenities. Visitors reported that it was so small that only one person could fit into it. The only things they found in it besides Bishop were a Bible and “a few rags scattered here and there.”

Bishop was, by all accounts, religious. She often went into the nearby town of North Salem and attended services with the local Presbyterian congregation.

One chronicler says she kept some dresses at the home of a friend and would wear them to church. She occasionally spent the night with some of the congregation members.

But mostly she kept to herself on West Mountain. One winter night in late 1809 she visited a family who lived on a nearby farm. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.

Several weeks later concerned townspeople went out to check on Bishop’s welfare. They found her body standing upright and wedged between some rock outcroppings.

Apparently, she had slipped and fallen into the rock formation and was unable to get herself out.

The unhappy story of this sad and lonely woman became part of the area’s local lore – kept alive by oral and written accounts of the region’s history.