Show Notes
In 1776, somewhere in the hills of Westchester County, an American cannonball took the head off a Hessian soldier.
His name was never recorded.
His grave has never been found.
And about twenty years later, a young writer named Washington Irving arrived in the Hudson Valley and eventually gave that forgotten soldier a horse.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow would become one of America's great ghost stories. But beneath the Headless Horseman are real battlefields, real graves, a captured British spy, a haunted tulip tree, an old Dutch church—and generations of people who slowly began treating Irving's fiction as their own folklore.
Eventually, the Horseman got a grave.
Then Sleepy Hollow became a Halloween destination.
And finally, the town itself took the ghost's name.
Tonight, we're separating Washington Irving's story from the history underneath it—and finding out how a fictional Headless Horseman became one of America's most enduring Halloween legends.
Welcome to Day Seven of 31 Days of Halloween.
More from Haunted American History
In 1967, the RMS Queen Mary arrived in Long Beach, California, after more than three decades crossing the Atlantic.
In Savannah, Georgia, ghost stories are everywhere.
On November 13, 1974, a young man ran into a bar in Amityville, New York, shouting that his parents had been shot.
In 1907, a wealthy Boston businessman named Thomas Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth.
In 1891, a jeweler in Salem, Massachusetts, began selling a silver souvenir spoon decorated with a witch on a broomstick.