The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Part One · The Drowsy Valley

Not far from the broad Hudson River in New York, there is a little valley among the hills that is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook murmurs through it, an occasional woodpecker taps on a tree, and a drowsy, dreamy feeling seems to hang over the entire place like a mist. The people who live there are called the people of Sleepy Hollow, and they are full of marvelous beliefs. They see strange sights, they hear music and voices in the air, and the valley has more ghost stories than anywhere else in the country. Even visitors who stay there for a little while begin to dream with their eyes open and to see things in the twilight.

The most famous ghost of all is a figure on horseback, without a head. Some people say he was a soldier from across the ocean who lost his head to a cannonball in a battle during the American Revolution. Every night, the story goes, the Headless Horseman gallops out of the churchyard where he is buried, and he rides through the valley like a midnight wind, searching for his missing head. Sometimes he is late returning before daybreak, and then he races back to the churchyard so furiously that travelers hear him rushing past in the dark, like a sudden gust of wind, and feel the chill of his passing long afterward.

In this haunted valley, about two hundred years ago, there lived a schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, who had come from Connecticut to instruct the children of the neighborhood. He was tall and extraordinarily skinny, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, and hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves. His head was small and flat on top, with enormous ears, big green glassy eyes and a long nose like a snipe's beak, so that he looked like a scarecrow that had escaped from a cornfield. On a windy day, with his clothes flapping around him, you might have mistaken him for the spirit of hunger itself, wandering across the countryside.

Ichabod lived with each family in turn, a week at a time, and he had an astonishing appetite for such a thin man. He also taught singing, and on Sundays his nasal voice rang out above everyone else's in the church, quivering and echoing across the millpond. But Ichabod's greatest delight was to listen to ghost stories, and he believed every single word of them. On winter evenings he sat by the fire with the farmers' wives, swapping tales of haunted fields and haunted bridges and, above all, the Headless Horseman. Then he would walk home alone through the dark woods, trembling at every shadow and singing hymns loudly to keep the goblins away.

Part Two · Katrina and Brom

Among Ichabod's singing pupils was Katrina Van Tassel, the only daughter of a wealthy farmer. She was eighteen, plump and rosy-cheeked, and as merry as she was pretty. Ichabod admired her enormously, but he admired her father's farm almost as much. As he gazed at the fat pigs and the plump geese and the ducks paddling in the pond, his imagination pictured every one of them roasted and served on a platter, with an apple in its mouth or swimming in rich gravy. He imagined the fields of wheat and the orchards of apples turned into money, and himself the proud master of it all, riding off to adventures with Katrina beside him.

Unfortunately, Ichabod had a formidable rival. His name was Brom Van Brunt, but everybody called him Brom Bones. He was a broad-shouldered, curly-haired giant of a young man, the strongest rider and the best wrestler in the countryside, and he was always ready for mischief, though there was more fun than meanness in it. Brom had also decided that he would marry Katrina. He could not fight Ichabod fairly, because the schoolteacher would never fight. So instead Brom played pranks on him. He stuffed up the schoolhouse chimney with smoke, he turned all the furniture upside down at night, and he taught his dog to howl whenever Ichabod sang.

One fine autumn afternoon, a messenger arrived at the schoolhouse with an invitation to a party at the Van Tassels' farm that very evening. Ichabod dismissed his pupils an hour early, without even bothering to scold the slow ones, and they scampered off across the green, yelling with delight. He spent an extra half hour brushing his only black suit and arranging his hair in a little mirror. Then, so that he could arrive in style, he borrowed a horse from the farmer he was living with. The horse was named Gunpowder, and he was an elderly, bony plow horse with a ragged mane and a wicked gleam in his one good eye.

Part Three · The Party

Ichabod rode up to the Van Tassels' house as the sun was setting over the hills. The rooms were crowded with farmers in their best clothes, with their wives and their daughters, and in the middle of them all stood Brom Bones, who had ridden over on his spirited black horse, Daredevil. But Ichabod hardly noticed his rival, because his eyes were fixed on the supper table. It was piled with doughnuts and crullers, honey cakes and ginger cakes, apple pies and peach pies and pumpkin pies, slices of ham and smoked beef, and plates of chicken, with pitchers of milk and cream. Ichabod sampled absolutely everything, and with every mouthful he imagined how magnificent his life would be as master of this house.

When the music began, Ichabod danced with tremendous enthusiasm, his arms and legs flying in every direction, and Katrina smiled at him while Brom sat in a corner, glowering jealously. Later the guests gathered on the porch to exchange ghost stories. Somebody described a woman in white who wailed in a dark glen. Then Brom Bones announced that he had met the Headless Horseman himself one night. He had challenged the ghost to a race, he said, and his horse was winning, until they reached the bridge by the church. There the Horseman suddenly burst into a flash of fire and vanished over the treetops with a crack like thunder. Everybody shivered delightfully, and Ichabod shivered more than anyone.

At last the party ended, and the farmers rattled away in their wagons. Ichabod lingered behind, as suitors often do, for a private conversation with Katrina, feeling certain that she would agree to marry him. Nobody knows exactly what she told him, but he left the house soon afterward, looking extremely gloomy, as if he had been sitting on a hen's nest of disappointment. He went straight to the stable, roused the grumbling Gunpowder from his sleep, and set off for home in the middle of the night, through the loneliest and most haunted part of Sleepy Hollow. Behind him, the windows of the farmhouse went dark one by one. Ahead of him, there was nothing but the night.

Part Four · The Ride

The night was as dark as ink. Far below, the Hudson River gleamed faintly, and every ghost story Ichabod had ever heard came crowding back into his memory. He passed an enormous old tulip tree, whose twisted branches looked like gigantic arms reaching down toward the road, and he was absolutely certain that he heard a groan. It was only two branches rubbing together in the breeze, but his teeth chattered and his knees knocked against the saddle. As he approached the little stream near Wiley's Swamp, Gunpowder suddenly refused to go on. Then, in the shadows beside the road, Ichabod saw something huge, black and towering. It did not move. It seemed to be waiting for him, like a monster ready to spring on a traveler.

"Who are you?" stammered Ichabod, but there was no answer. The shadowy shape stirred and leaped into the road, and Ichabod saw that it was a horseman of tremendous size, on a powerful black horse. The stranger rode silently beside him, keeping exactly in step with Gunpowder, whether Ichabod hurried or slowed down. Ichabod tried to sing a hymn to keep his courage up, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Then, as they climbed a rise and the stranger's outline appeared against the sky, Ichabod saw with horror that the rider had no head! Even worse, the head was resting on the front of the saddle in front of him.

Ichabod urged Gunpowder on desperately, and away they galloped through the darkness, with stones flying and sparks flashing. The Horseman thundered close behind them, his black cloak streaming out in the wind like a pair of enormous wings. Ichabod's saddle slipped off, and he clung to Gunpowder's neck. "If I can only reach that bridge," he thought, "I'll be safe," because everybody knew that the ghost vanished at the church bridge. Gunpowder clattered across the wooden planks, and Ichabod looked back. There was the Horseman, rising in his stirrups and hurling his head straight at him! It struck Ichabod on the head with a tremendous crash, and he tumbled headlong into the dust.

The next morning, Gunpowder was found calmly munching grass at his master's gate, without his saddle. Ichabod did not appear at the schoolhouse, and searchers followed the hoofprints down to the bridge. Beside the brook, where the water was deep and black, they discovered Ichabod's hat, and close beside it lay a shattered pumpkin. Ichabod Crane was never seen in Sleepy Hollow again. Some years later, a farmer who traveled to New York brought back word that Ichabod was still alive. He had become a lawyer and then a judge in a distant part of the country, and he never told anybody why he had left in such a hurry.

Not long afterward, Brom Bones married the lovely Katrina, and they had a merry wedding with fiddles and dancing. Whenever anybody told the story of Ichabod and the Headless Horseman, Brom looked exceedingly knowing, and he burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin. Some people suspected that he knew more about that night than he would say. But the old wives of Sleepy Hollow insist to this day that Ichabod was carried away by the ghost. The schoolhouse was soon deserted, and they say that on still summer evenings, a plowboy passing by can sometimes hear a thin voice singing a sad hymn among the trees.