September 21, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

It is September, and autumn continues.

Washington Irving, American writer and author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Adventure of the German Student,” wrote a classic autumn tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

The main character, Icabod Crane, is riding alone at midnight through a spooky forest.  Previously, Crane had attended a party near Sleepy Hollow; he was wooing a young, beautiful heiress, but she rejected his marriage proposal. As he returns home, he is understandably dejected.  But he is also fearful that he might encounter the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a dead soldier who rides the dark roads at night.

 As Irving describes it: “It was the very witching time of night...the hour was as dismal as himself...All the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon now came crowding upon his recollection.  The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight....”

Predictably, Crane does, indeed, encounter the horseman: “In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, black, and towering.  It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveller.” When this shape emerges from the shadows, Crane sees that it is headless and immediately, he sets spurs to his horse and flees as fast as he can.

The Headless Horseman chases Crane, riding even faster, and finally throws its head at him, knocking him off his horse. The next day, Crane's horse is found wandering by itself and the saddle is discovered in the dusty road; nearby are the remains of a shattered pumpkin.  But there is no trace of Crane.

Among the townspeople, there is a suspicion that a rival for the affections of the beautiful heiress, a man named Brom Bones, was responsible for the attack on Crane—the theory is that Bones masqueraded as the Headless Horseman and threw a pumpkin at Crane which knocked him out.  Furthermore, or so the theory goes, when Crane woke up the next morning, he was mortified by losing the heiress and by his encounter with the horseman and so, he fled from Sleepy Hollow.

The majority of the townspeople, however, do not hold this theory.   Instead, they assume that Crane encountered the actual Headless Horseman and that the latter spirited him away to hell.  Thus, Crane is dead.  This view ends up being confirmed later when  a number of people hear the voice of Crane’s ghost at twilight, singing “a melancholy psalm-tune” among the “tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.”

JLS