The Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas Thomas Mayne Reid Depending on the legend, the Horseman is either carrying his head, or is missing his head altogether, and is searching for it. Examples include the dullahan from Ireland, who is a demonic fairy usually depicted riding a horse and carrying his head under his arm; the titular knight from the English tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a short story written in 1820 by American Washington Irving, which has been adapted into several other works of literature and film including the 1949 Disney animated film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and the 1999 Tim Burton film Sleepy Hollow. In Irish folklore - The dullahan or dulachán ("dark man") is a headless, demonic fairy, usually riding a horse and carrying his head under his arm. He wields a whip made from a human corpse's spine. When the dullahan stops riding, a death occurs. The dullahan calls out a name, at which point the named person immediately dies. In another version, he is the headless driver of a black carriage, the Cóiste Bodhar. A similar figure, the gan ceann ("without a head"), can be frightened away by wearing a gold object or putting one in his path. In Scottish folklore - The most prominent Scots tale of the headless horseman concerns a man named Ewen decapitated in a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. The battle denied him any chance to be a chieftain, and both he and his horse are headless in accounts of his haunting of the area. Among the Highland Scottish diaspora in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, seeing the image or hearing the sound of a horse or headless rider is traditionally regarded as an omen of an imminent death within the family. In German folklore - In Germany, headless-horseman stories come mostly from the Rhineland. Rather than using decapitation, the headless horsemen killed their victims simply by touching them. They were revenants who had to wander the earth until they had atoned for their sins, sometimes by doing a good deed for a stranger, but instead of showing their gratitude by shaking hands, the stranger and the horseman held a tree branch between them and the branch would wither and die rather than the stranger. Irving travelled in Germany in 1821 and had become familiar with Dutch and German folklore. In particular the last of the "Legenden von Rübezahl" ('Legends of Rübezahl') from Johann Karl August Musäus's literary retellings of German folktales (Volksmärchen der Deutschen, 1783) is said to have inspired The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.