The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

In the remote Dutch settlements of the Hudson Valley, where moss-green legends cling to every groaning tree and moonlit millpond, there lives a specter that has haunted American imagination for two centuries. Washington Irving's 1820 masterpiece introduced the world to the Headless Horseman, a Hessian soldier whose ghostly midnight rides through Sleepy Hollow have become synonymous with American Halloween itself. Ichabod Crane arrives in this enchanted glen not as a hero but as something far more interesting: a lanky, ambitious schoolteacher with an overflowing stomach and an even more overflowing imagination. The stories the locals tell about specters and Indian demons send him trembling through the woods, singing hymns to keep his courage up. Yet he cannot resist pursuing Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy Dutch farmer, despite competition from the burly, trickster Brom Bones. The story's famous climax a midnight ride through the hollow, a ghoul in pursuit has terrified and delighted readers for two hundred years. Irving's masterpiece endures because it operates on every level: ghost story, romantic comedy, satire of credulity, and meditation on how the past haunts the present.