Sleepy Hollow's Halloween Rider

Wendell Boone
Field Correspondent, The Far Country

Fieldnotes — Tarrytown churchyard, late October

Halloween in America owes more to a quiet valley on the east bank of the Hudson than most of its revellers know. The debt runs through a short story published in 1820, in a collection called The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, written by a New Yorker named Washington Irving who had gone travelling in England and come home homesick for his own country's ghosts. He gave it one, and it has not left since.

The tale is set in and around Sleepy Hollow, a Dutch settlement near Tarrytown where, Irving tells us, the whole region lies under a kind of drowsy spell, and the dead do not rest quite as they should elsewhere. Chief among the restless is a horseman without a head, said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, one of the German mercenaries hired into British service during the Revolutionary War, whose head was carried off by a cannonball in some nameless skirmish. He is buried in the old churchyard, the story goes, but rides out nightly in search of what he lost, galloping between the battle-ground and the grave and needing to be back in the earth before the cocks crow. Ichabod Crane, the lanky schoolmaster who serves as the story's unlucky hero, meets him on the road home from a harvest party, and the chase that follows, across a bridge by the church, ending in a thrown pumpkin where a head should have been, is one of the best-known scenes in American letters.

I should be honest about the record here, in the Society's usual way. Irving never calls this night Halloween. The story unfolds in autumn, at harvest time, built around a husking-bee at the Van Tassel farm of exactly the kind Dutch and English settlers kept through October, with cider, dancing, and ghost stories told by the fireside before the ride home. That is close kin to Halloween without being named as such, the same turning of the year, the same thinning of the ordinary that older cultures marked at Samhain and that the Hudson Valley's own Dutch and Scots-Irish settlers brought their own versions of across the water. The pumpkin at the story's climax did the rest of the work. Within a century it had pulled Sleepy Hollow firmly into Halloween's orbit, head and all.

The motif itself is older than Irving, and not his alone. Riders missing their heads turn up across European tradition, from Ireland's dullahan to assorted headless huntsmen of German and British lore, and Irving, who had been reading widely among German folk tales before he wrote this one, likely knew as much. What he did was graft an old, wandering motif onto a specific American graveyard, a specific war, and a specific kind of restless soldier's ghost, and in doing so gave the new country a haunting that felt entirely its own.

The Old Dutch Church and its burying ground still stand in what is now called Sleepy Hollow, New York, and Irving himself is buried nearby. Every October the crowds come anyway, lanterns out, bridge rebuilt but the dark water beneath it unchanged, to walk the ground where a story and a Halloween became, for all practical purposes, the same thing.

Wendell Boone is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Far Country. Desert, plains and the long roads between — coyote in his many jobs, roadside apparitions, cattle-country omens. He collects the versions truckers tell, which he maintains are the only ones still being actively made.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.