by Janeal Mulaney

Created on: June 22, 2010   Last Updated: June 24, 2010

The Headless Horseman Myth

The best-known myth came from the imagination of Washington Irving through a short story called ‘The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow’. Although it has shown up in many different states for various reasons they all seem to stem from the one short story.

The first time I heard the legend of the headless horseman it was in Colorado, it was indeed different then the headless horse I later read about in the school library. In my hometown it didn’t have a covered bridge in the story, this might have been because we had no covered bridge, but we did have an old rickety bridge that crossed over a canal and that was our bridge in the story. Our story also left out any reference to a man named Ichabod Crane. In fact it left out all the caricatures except for the headless horseman.

I’m not sure what started this fable or ghost story, maybe an adult started the story to keep children away from the old bridge which in fact had started to rot away and was no longer safe. I just know as a child, we were told the headless horseman stayed on the bridge to collect children’s heads, and he would take off the head of anyone who tried to pass over the old bridge and throw the bodies into the canal so no one could find them.

Reading over the Internet I’ve found even more stories about the headless horseman and why he was created for different purposes. In Texas it was due to cattle rustling, and he was called El Muerto, or the Dead One. It is claimed that anyone who saw him ran screeching like banshees into the night.

In Ireland and Scotland among other countries there are also legends about a headless horseman.

It is very easy to imagine these fables have some kind of fact behind them, with all the wars that have come and gone throughout the years of our Nation’s history as well as wars throughout the world. Many myths are made up of some kind of truth, maybe there was a Hessian soldier that was in the British army, and maybe he was beheaded. A lot of people were back then, some are still beheaded today.  We do know that there was a man named Ichabod Crane, and there have been millions of schoolteachers throughout our history. So it’s not too far of a stretch to believe the short story was made up with more truths than fiction.

What ever is fact and what ever part is fiction, it has became a wonderful classic for children as well adults.

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