The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Irving, Washington
Published: 1820
Type(s): Short Fiction, Horror, Ghost Stories
Source: http://www.gutenberg.org
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Also available on Feedbooks for Irving:
• Old Christmas (1819)
• Astoria (1835)
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A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky.
CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.
IN the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern
shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated
by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always
prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas
when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by
some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly
known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in
former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the
inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern
on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely
advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this
village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of
land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole
world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull
one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a wood-
pecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform
tranquillity.
I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting
was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I
had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet,
and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath still-
ness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If
ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and
its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I
know of none more promising than this little valley.
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its
inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this
sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY
HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys
throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence
seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some
say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the
early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet
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or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was
discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still con-
tinues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over
the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual rever-
ie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances
and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices
in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted
spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener
across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the night-
mare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her
gambols.
The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and
seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the appar-
ition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the
ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a
cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and
who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the
gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not con-
fined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and espe-
cially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of
the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in
collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege
that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the
ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and
that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hol-
low, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to
get back to the churchyard before daybreak.
Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has
furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and
the spectre is known at all the country firesides, by the name of the
Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not
confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously im-
bibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake
they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure,
in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to
grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions.
I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud, for it is in such little
retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great
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State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed,
while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making
such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by
them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water, which
border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding
quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed
by the rush of the passing current. Though many years have elapsed
since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I
should not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in
its sheltered bosom.
In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American
history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the
name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried,”
in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicin-
ity. He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union
with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth
yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The
cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but
exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that
dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels,
and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small,
and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe
nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck
to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of
a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him,
one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon
the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.
His schoolhouse was a low building of one large room, rudely con-
structed of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with
leaves of old copybooks. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant
hours, by a withe twisted in the handle of the door, and stakes set
against the window shutters; so that though a thief might get in with
perfect ease, he would find some embarrassment in getting out,—an idea
most probably borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the
mystery of an eelpot. The schoolhouse stood in a rather lonely but pleas-
ant situation, just at the foot of a woody hill, with a brook running close
by, and a formidable birch-tree growing at one end of it. From hence the
low murmur of his pupils’ voices, conning over their lessons, might be
heard in a drowsy summer’s day, like the hum of a beehive; interrupted
now and then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of
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menace or command, or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the
birch, as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery path of know-
ledge. Truth to say, he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind
the golden maxim, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Ichabod Crane’s
scholars certainly were not spoiled.
I would not have it imagined, however, that he was one of those cruel
potentates of the school who joy in the smart of their subjects; on the con-
trary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity;
taking the burden off the backs of the weak, and laying it on those of the
strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the
rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice were satis-
fied by inflicting a double portion on some little tough wrong-headed,
broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged
and sullen beneath the birch. All this he called “doing his duty by their
parents;” and he never inflicted a chastisement without following it by
the assurance, so consolatory to the smarting urchin, that “he would re-
member it and thank him for it the longest day he had to live.”
When school hours were over, he was even the companion and play-
mate of the larger boys; and on holiday afternoons would convoy some
of the smaller ones home, who happened to have pretty sisters, or good
housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard. Indeed,
it behooved him to keep on good terms with his pupils. The revenue
arising from his school was small, and would have been scarcely suffi-
cient to furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder, and,
though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but to help out his
maintenance, he was, according to country custom in those parts,
boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers whose children he in-
structed. With these he lived successively a week at a time, thus going
the rounds of the neighborhood, with all his worldly effects tied up in a
cotton handkerchief.
That all this might not be too onerous on the purses of his rustic pat-
rons, who are apt to consider the costs of schooling a grievous burden,
and schoolmasters as mere drones, he had various ways of rendering
himself both useful and agreeable. He assisted the farmers occasionally
in the lighter labors of their farms, helped to make hay, mended the
fences, took the horses to water, drove the cows from pasture, and cut
wood for the winter fire. He laid aside, too, all the dominant dignity and
absolute sway with which he lorded it in his little empire, the school, and
became wonderfully gentle and ingratiating. He found favor in the eyes
of the mothers by petting the children, particularly the youngest; and
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like the lion bold, which whilom so magnanimously the lamb did hold,
he would sit with a child on one knee, and rock a cradle with his foot for
whole hours together.
In addition to his other vocations, he was the singing-master of the
neighborhood, and picked up many bright shillings by instructing the
young folks in psalmody. It was a matter of no little vanity to him on
Sundays, to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band of
chosen singers; where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the
palm from the parson. Certain it is, his voice resounded far above all the
rest of the congregation; and there are peculiar quavers still to be heard
in that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the
opposite side of the millpond, on a still Sunday morning, which are said
to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane. Thus, by
divers little makeshifts, in that ingenious way which is commonly de-
nominated “by hook and by crook,” the worthy pedagogue got on toler-
ably enough, and was thought, by all who understood nothing of the
labor of headwork, to have a wonderfully easy life of it.
The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female
circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle, gentle-
manlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the
rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the par-
son. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the
tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of
cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver teapot. Our
man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the
country damsels. How he would figure among them in the churchyard,
between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for them from the wild
vines that overran the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all
the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of
them, along the banks of the adjacent millpond; while the more bashful
country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance
and address.
From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travelling gazette,
carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that
his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover,
esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read sev-
eral books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s
“History of New England Witchcraft,” in which, by the way, he most
firmly and potently believed.
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He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple
credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it,
were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his resid-
ence in this spell-bound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for
his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dis-
missed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bor-
dering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there con
over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering dusk of evening made
the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his
way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse
where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witch-
ing hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whip-poor-
will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of
storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in
the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fireflies, too, which
sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him,
as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by
chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight
against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea
that he was struck with a witch’s token. His only resource on such occa-
sions, either to drown thought or drive away evil spirits, was to sing
psalm tunes and the good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their
doors of an evening, were often filled with awe at hearing his nasal
melody, “in linked sweetness long drawn out,” floating from the distant
hill, or along the dusky road.
Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter
evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with
a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to
their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and
haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particu-
larly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as
they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anec-
dotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and
sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut;
and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and
shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely
turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!
But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the
chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the
crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its
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face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk
homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the
dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he
eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from
some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub
covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path!
How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps
on the frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder,
lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him!
And how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing
blast, howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hes-
sian on one of his nightly scourings!
All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the
mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in
his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his
lonely perambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he
would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his
works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more per-
plexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches
put together, and that was—a woman.
Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each
week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel,
the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a
blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting
and rosy-cheeked as one of her father’s peaches, and universally famed,
not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was withal a
little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a
mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off her
charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold, which her great-
great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam; the tempting stom-
acher of the olden time, and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to dis-
play the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.
Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it is
not to be wondered at that so tempting a morsel soon found favor in his
eyes, more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion.
Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented,
liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his
thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those
everything was snug, happy and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with
his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty
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abundance, rather than the style in which he lived. His stronghold was
situated on the banks of th