Church rejects kooky wedding

The bride planned to wear black and the groom asked the organist to play "The Munsters" theme song, but a Sleepy Hollow minister said "I won't" to the trick-or-treat nuptials. Now, Jim Nieves and Lisa Panensky of Elmsford, Westchester County, are scrambling to find a new place to get hitched on Halloween.

"I think at the end of the day, we're just going to have it at our house," said Nieves, 47, who had picked out a piratelike ruffled shirt for the wedding to go with Panensky's black cocktail dress. For more than a year, the couple had been looking forward to trading vows in the Old Dutch Church, a historic sanctuary made famous in Washington Irving's scary short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."



They reserved the church 13 months ago, signing a contract they insist explained their unorthodox wedding. "To think that we would just go in there and do whatever we wanted would be pretty disrespectful," said Nieves, a pastry chief. "They were well and fine with the whole idea of doing a Halloween wedding." But two months ago, a new pastor took over the church. When the Rev. Jeff Gargano received an e-mail from the couple on Friday requesting the organist to play the theme songs from "The Addams Family" and "The Munsters," the preacher balked.

"Until then, it never occurred to me that it would be anything other than a regular wedding," said Gargano, formerly of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Gargano said he offered to marry the couple in the church's cemetery, but would not allow a "Halloween costume party" inside the sanctuary. "This is one of the most venerable churches in the country," Gargano said. "I just couldn't trivialize the church like that."