The headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow haunts the American imagination each autumn.
New York City native Washington Irving breathed life into the galloping ghost in 1819, when he penned “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” one of many stories of life among Dutch settlers along the Hudson River.
The tale trots breathlessly more than 200 years later as one of the world’s most famous ghost stories — remade in many versions and retold in scores of languages.
Irving rode the spooky steed himself into global fame and a legacy as the first international celebrity born in the new nation.
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“He had talent, movie-star good looks and a charm that endeared him to his audience,” writes author Brian Jay Jones in his 2008 biography, “Washington Irving: An American Original.”
“He danced and drank with the glitterati.”
Irving’s impact on American culture is felt today in surprising ways. He gifted New York City with its “Gotham” moniker early in his career and was the first American to make his living purely by pen. Irving served in the U.S. Army in the War of 1812, then spent much of his 30s and 40s traveling Europe.
He wrote biographies of Mohammed, Christopher Columbus and his namesake, George Washington.
“He had talent, movie-star good looks and a charm that endeared him to his audience.”
He influenced and inspired younger authors on both sides of the Atlantic: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lord Byron and fellow masters of the ghost tale Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley.
“Frankenstein” author Shelley penned him love letters; Irving rejected her advances.
“Among Irving’s biggest contributions to Christmas in America was his promotion of St. Nicholas as a beloved character, laying the groundwork for the figure we’d eventually embrace as Santa Claus,” writes the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“He’s often credited with creating Christmas in America as we know it.”
Charles Dickens fawned over Irving and his vision of Christmas. The English author was 30 years old when he visited Irving in New York and met his brother.
Ebenezer Irving.
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Dickens released “A Christmas Carol” the following year. The story made Ebenezer Scrooge one of the most famous names in western literature.
Born with the new nation
Washington Irving was born in Manhattan on April 3, 1783. Father William was a Scottish immigrant from the Orkney Islands who achieved wealth as a New York City merchant; mother Sarah (Sanders) descended from English clergy.
The United States defeated the British Empire in Yorktown in Oct. 1781, only 18 months before Irving’s birth. The Treaty of Paris, securing American independence, was signed on Sept. 3, 1783, when Irving was just five months old.
He was raised on William Street in Lower Manhattan, steps from where George Washington was inaugurated on Wall Street as the first U.S. president in 1789. The site of Irving’s home is now an entrance to the Fulton Street subway station.
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A painting portrays a purported meeting of the two American icons after the inauguration. The 57-year-old Father of His Country paternally pats the 6-year-old future Father of American Letters on the head.
Irving established his fame in 1809 with a brazen marketing scheme. He placed ads in newspapers that claimed a hotel owner found a manuscript left behind by a man named Diedrich Knickerbocker.
“The ads said Knickerbocker skipped town and hadn’t paid his rent,” Dr. Elizabeth Bradley, an Irving biographer and vice president for Historic Hudson Valley, told Fox News Digital.
“The hotel owner threatened to publish the manuscript in order to recoup his debt should Knickerbocker not be found.”
Irving established his fame with a brazen marketing scheme.
The quest made for intense local gossip. City officials joined the search.
As interest in the missing man soared, Irving released the manuscript, “A History of New York,” under the Knickerbocker name.
“It was a great P.T. Barnum-style publicity hoax,” said Bradley. The book “became an instant bestseller and launched Irving’s literary career.”
Knickerbocker authored other Irving tales that followed, including one about a headless horseman.
Great American ghost story
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” juxtaposes the haunting specter of a headless horseman against the backdrop of the idyllic Hudson River countryside.
Residents of his “drowsy, dreamy” land of Sleepy Hollow are bewitched by “marvelous beliefs … trances and visions and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air,” wrote Irving.
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New York City had suffered a yellow fever epidemic in the 1790s when Irving was a teenager. He was sent up the Hudson River to live with relatives, where he most likely encountered old Dutch ghost stories.
Sleepy Hollow’s most haunting specter “is the apparition of a figure on horseback … the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war,” Irving wrote in his famous “Legend.”
The ghost rises from its churchyard grave and “rides forth to the scene of battle in a nightly quest for his head.”
Irving writes breathlessly of the spirit’s search, channeling a chilly October night: “The rushing speed at which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.”
The Horseman “rides forth to the scene of battle in a nightly quest for his head.” — Washington Irving
School teacher Ichabod Crane learns of the tale one night at a celebration at the home of a Dutch farmer. Afterward, on the way home, the skittish Crane realizes he is being followed though the dark of night.
“On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveler in relief against the sky … Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!” writes Irving.
“But his horror was still more increased, on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle.”
The terrified schoolteacher boots his horse and races off in fear — “but the spectre started full jump with him.”
Crane is never seen nor heard from again in Sleepy Hollow. Irving never reveals his fate. The mystery of the psalm-singing schoolteacher remains part of the Legend’s enduring appeal.
Sleepy Hollow embraces haunting legacy
Irving died of a heart attack on Nov. 28, 1859, in his Hudson River mansion, Sunnyside, just south of where Ichabod Crane encountered the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
He was 76 years old.
He is buried today in Sleepy Hollow’s old Dutch church cemetery — the same graveyard in which the maimed Hessian mercenary restlessly rose each night to haunt the countryside in search of his head.
Irving enjoyed achievements beyond literature. President John Tyler named the writer minister to Spain in 1842, a post he held until 1846.
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The American author cast his spell over Europe, too. A statue in Irving’s honor is dedicated outside Alhambra, the Andalusian fortress that he romanticized in his tales from Europe.
His home, with its verdant riverfront location, is a local tourist attraction today.
The community of North Tarrytown officially changed its name to Sleepy Hollow only in 1996. The Horsemen still ride each autumn when the Sleepy Hollow High School football team races onto the gridiron.
The Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow regions, long an ideal location for autumn leaf-peeping, is now a hotspot of Halloween activity. All of it is made possible by Irving’s 205-year-old ghost story.
“You can’t go to Hogwarts but you can go Sleepy Hollow and see all the landmarks of the American legend,” said Bradley.
Irving’s pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker remains on the lips of millions of Americans. The author’s tales were so popular in the 1800s that the name “Knickerbocker” became a synonym for a New York City resident.
The NBA embraced Irving’s legacy in 1946, when New York’s professional basketball team was dubbed the Knickerbockers, though shortened in more recent years to Knicks.
New York City brew tycoon Jacob Ruppert made his fortune selling Knickerbocker beer. He bought the New York Yankees in 1915 and bought Babe Ruth from the Red Sox in 1920.
American sports history was reshaped by a beer named for Irving’s alter ego.
Yet it’s the ghoulish image of the headless Hessian horseman, forever galloping through the Hudson River countryside, that remains Irving’s most memorable legacy and makes Sleepy Hollow synonymous with the great American ghost story.
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“His story is the kind on which America thrives,” writes biographer Jones.
“A likable, average man does something no one has ever done before and becomes very, very famous.”
