Sleepy Hollow. Or thats how it starts. Numerous incarnations have been in the media that tells us the story of the Headless Horseman. A Disney version, a Tim Burton version, and the last two years, Roberto Orci developed the masterpiece of “Sleepy Hollow” for Fox Television.

But what is the real story of the Headless Horseman?

According to Washington Irvings “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” it all started one cold winter night. The setting is New Year. A certain Dutchman known as Ichabod Crane leaves the tavern in Tarrytown. (In the show of Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown is known as a Psychiatric Ward where Jennifer Mills is kept.)

Ichabod starts walking to his home in the hollow nearby. His path leads next to the old Sleepy Hollow cemetery. That is where a headless Hessian soldier was buried. According to the legend, the Hessians head had been carried away by a cannonball during some nameless battle while in the Revolutionary War.

At midnight, Ichabod came within the site of the graveyard. The weather had warmed up during the week, and the snow was almost gone from the road. It was a dark night with no moon, and the only light came from his lantern. The lanterns were given to the Dutch from the french nuns and were believed to remove demons from possessed bodies. At a latter point, the French Nuns and the Dutch gave the lanterns as a gift to Benjamin Franklin in protection of the country.

Ichabod was nervous about passing the graveyard as he remembered the rumors of a galloping ghost that he had head at the tavern. He began stumbling along, and hummed to himself in order to keep his courage. However, his eye was caught by a light rising from the ground in the cemetery. He stopped and his heart pounded in fear. Before his startled eyes, a white mist burst forth from an unmarked grave and formed into a large white horse with glowing red eyes that carried a headless rider. That ride was known to be the Horseman of Death according to the Scriptures of the “Apocalypse”.

Ichabod let out a terrible scream as the horse leapt towards him at a full gallop. He took to his heels, and began running as fast as he could. He made it to the bridge since he knew that ghosts and evil spirits would not care to cross running water. He stumbled suddenly and fell while rolling off the road into a melting patch of snow. The headless rider thundered past him, and Ichabod got a second look at the headless ghost. Ichabod had recognized a Hessians commanders uniform on the ghost.

Ichabod then waited a good hour after the ghost disappeared before crawling out the bushes and making his way home. He felt that the Horseman may have vanished, just as the tales from the Roanoke Colony. After fortifying himself with schnapps, he told his wife Katrina Van Tassel about the ghost. By noon of the next day, the story was all over Tarrytown. The good Dutch folk were divided in their opinions. Some thought that the horseman must be roaming the roads at night in search of its head, while others claimed that the Hessian soldier rose from the grave the lead the Hessian soldiers in a charge up nearby Chatterton Hill, not knowing that the hill was taken by the Brits.

Whatever the reason, the Headless Horseman continues to roam the roads near Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown to this day on dark nights.

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