Supernatural elements in Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle

Supernatural elements are the basic of this story. Even the story's setting is almost supernatural in itself. The Catskills are described as filled with "...magical hues and shapes..... when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits….." Supernatural elements are mostly found in the incident of Rip’s twenty years sleep which is described below. 

One autumn day, to escape his wife's nagging, Van Winkle wanders up the mountains with his dog, Wolf. Hearing his name called out [“As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a distance hallooing, “Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!”], Rip sees a man wearing antiquated Dutch clothing; he is carrying a keg up the mountain and requires help. “he looked anxiously in the same direction, and perceived a strange figure slowly toiling up the rocks, and bending under the weight of something he carried on his back.”

 Together, they proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of thunderous noises: a group of ornately dressed, silent, bearded men who are playing nine-pins. “On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins.”  “What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest face, the most mysterious silence...” “As Rip and his companion approached them, they suddenly desisted from their play, and stared at him with such fixed, statue-like gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lack-lustre countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together”

Rip does not ask who they are or how they know his name “He obeyed with fear and trembling”. Instead, he begins to drink some of their moonshine and soon falls asleep. Rip awakes in the morning to find that his dog is gone, his gun is rusted and he's had an abnormal amount of beard-growth over night. Eventually, after returning back to village, he comes to know that he slept for twenty years.

Later Rip learns that the men he met in the mountains are rumored to be the ghosts of Hendrick (Henry) Hudson's crew, which had vanished long ago as old Peter Vanderdonk confirmed “That his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses playing at ninepins in a hollow of the mountain; and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant peals of thunder.”