Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

There may be more original literary works to talk about on Halloween than “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but maybe that’s why I wanted it to conclude The Town Crier’s month on October Reads. Along with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of those fundamental Halloween texts, one of the books in the Halloween Bible. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” introduces us a haunted glen in a Dutch farming settlement in one of the valleys along the Hudson River, outside the river port of Tarrytown—a real place that’s now only a half-hour drive from the Bronx Zoo. The glen, Sleepy Hollow, is a hotbed of ghosts and goblins, for “a drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land … the place still continues under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people.” As Irving’s lens focuses, we meet a Connecticut schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, a lanky, gangly man who eats voraciously, favours students whose mothers are good cooks (as he boards a week with each family a week at a time), and possesses a unique singing voice that’s said to still haunt his abandoned schoolhouse. Besides his physical quirks, Ichabod Crane also loves to scare himself. He spends the late afternoons after class reading Cotton Mather’s The History of New England Witchcraft, “in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.” He reads until night falls and on his way home through the woods he imagines every croaking toad, owl, and whippoorwill a spectre chasing him down.Ichabod soon becomes enamored with Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and heir of one of the wealthy farmers in this valley, and vies for her affections with Brom Bones, the good-hearted, mischievous youth of Sleepy Hollow. At first, Brom strikes a figure as your typical rustic bully: strong, popular, and always playing pranks on those who cross him. But that would be giving Ichabod a very generous reading. Though this is Ichabod’s ill-fated run in with a ghost, no one with a love for Irving’s rich descriptions of Sleepy Hollow could ever hope to see Ichabod win over Katrina Van Tassel’s hand. He spends fewer thoughts on Katrina herself than over the Van Tassel estate, its orchards and cornfields, its turkeys, hogs, ducks, and geese. And no sooner has Ichabod imagined all this rural wealth as his own than he fantasizes about selling it all and moving with his wife and a brood of children to Kentucky or Tennessee, and the vast tracts of land he could buy with the proceeds. Despite his love for home comforts and ghost stories by a warm fire, Ichabod is like any Connecticut Yankee, an expansionist who can look at the loveliest farm in New York and only see cash. One autumn night, after the Van Tassels host a party, Ichabod heads home on his borrowed horse, desolate and discouraged, his meeting with Katrina Van Tassel apparently a disaster, though the narrator never divulges what was said. On his way through Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod finds himself pursued by the Headless Horseman on his black mount, chased toward the church graveyard where the spirit returns every night. But at the bridge before the graveyard, the spectre hurls its head at the unfortunate school teacher. The next morning, Ichabod is nowhere to be found. Only the schoolteacher’s hat is found near the bridge, along with the remains of a shattered pumpkin. Everyone knows Brom Bones pulled off one of his tricks before Ichabod abandoned Sleepy Hollow after his romantic rejection, but “the old country wives … who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means,” and his story joins the many legends that haunt the woods and streams of Sleepy Hollow. Based on the many headless horsemen of European folklore, from the German Wild Huntsman to the Irish Dullahan, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” became a quintessential Euro-American story in Irving’s hands. Irving’s horseman is no medieval sprite; the famous Hessian is the product of the Revolutionary War, not quite 40 years passed when the story was published in The Sketch Book in 1820. One of the Hessian mercenaries employed by Great Britain, the Horseman lost his head to a cannon shot in a nameless battle. Under the influence of the enchanted region, he would return from the dead and haunt the hollow looking for his head. There are plenty of other ghosts and stories in Sleepy Hollow: a woman in white in the dark glen at Raven Rock, Major André at his haunted tree, funeral trains, and troubled spirits. But for a Romantic classic so deeply invested in folklore, published only two years after Shelley’s Frankenstein and eight years after the first Grimm’s Fairy Tales, it keeps an ironic distance from the legend of the Horseman. The structure of Irving’s story insists there really is no ghost. The narrator, Diedrich Knickerbocker, suggests that a farmer from Sleepy Hollow years later discovered that Ichabod had become a judge in New York City. The final line of the story, in a framing postscript in which Knickerbocker reveals he heard the story second-hand himself, goes, “‘Faith sir,’ replied the storyteller, ‘as to that matter, I don’t believe one half of it myself.’” But for those who love to indulge in the feeling of being scared, there’s no doubting that the Headless Horseman rises from the churchyard and scours the glen for his missing head. Ichabod has scared himself senseless with his ghost stories and tales of witchcraft, a vulnerability Brom Bones happily exploited. Every Halloween, we’re happy to do the same to ourselves. And while I can’t speak for you, after watching a good horror movie, I replay the scenes in my head for days. Monster behind the shower curtain? I flee from the bathroom as soon as the light switches off. A hand reaching out from under the bed? I pretty much leap from the light switch onto the bed. The other night, a few days after reading Clive Barker’s story “Midnight Meat Train,” I got on the subway and imagined the train would descend into Lower Bay station where we would be met by a naked, cannibalistic Family Compact. Ghost stories, like any good story, stay with us. After we read them (or watch them), we jump at things we might otherwise have ignored. They change the way we see shadows in the corners of our eyes and how we hear bumps in the night.