The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
A superstitious schoolmaster rides home at night, and something throws a head at him. Or someone does.
What happens
Ichabod Crane, a lanky Connecticut schoolmaster in the Dutch valley of Sleepy Hollow, courts Katrina Van Tassel, an heiress, against the local hero Brom Bones. At night he trades ghost stories with the farm wives, particularly of the Headless Horseman, a Hessian trooper whose head was lost to a cannonball. He has read few books, but he is a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History of New-England Witchcraft, and believes it.
After a party at the Van Tassels', Ichabod, turned down, rides home through the dark. A horseman joins him, and has no head. At the bridge by the church the figure rises in its stirrups and hurls something at Ichabod. Ichabod is not seen again. A shattered pumpkin lies on the road. Brom Bones marries Katrina and laughs whenever the story of the pumpkin comes up.
Read the full text on Wikisource. Irving published it in 1820, in The Sketch Book. He ends with the teller admitting: "as to that matter, I don't believe one half of it myself."
Why it frightens
Suggestibility. Ichabod has been fed a diet of witchcraft and ghost stories, and by dark his imagination does the rest. Every tree is a figure and every sound a hoofbeat. The horseman arrives after the fear, not before it.
There is a criminological reading too: a rival uses local folklore as a weapon. If the rider is Brom, the legend is a tool of intimidation, a ghost story deployed to drive a man out of a town. It works because everyone shares the story. That is how a rumour, or a moral panic, gets its power, and we cover that process in our essay on the Halloween candy legend.
On screen
- Sleepy Hollow (1999): Tim Burton's gothic reimagining, with the horseman as a real supernatural killer.
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949): the Sleepy Hollow half of Disney's animated The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, narrated by Bing Crosby.
