The headless horseman has been a motif of European folklore since at least the Middle ages.The Headless Horseman is a fictional character who appears in a short story called “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” which is in a collection of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon written by Washington Irving. It was made legendary through literature and films, with the result that a variety of stories about “The Headless Horseman” are still told today.[1]
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The legend of the Headless Horseman begins in a town near North Tarrytown, New York named Sleepy Hollow. The Horseman was supposedly a Hessian soldier of unknown rank: one of many such hired to suppress the American Revolutionary War. During the war, the Horseman was one of 548 Hessians killed in a battle for Chatterton Hill, when he fell off his horse and was killed by the enemy. He was buried in a graveyard outside an Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow. Thereafter he appears as a ghost, who presents to nightly travelers an actual danger (rather than the largely harmless fright produced by the majority of ghosts), presumably of decapitation. He carries his own head on his person or that of his horse and uses it as a weapon, though he also carries a sword. In Sleepy Hollow, a Tim Burton film, the Horseman is seen to also be skilled with an axe.[1]
The Irish dullahan or dulachán (also Gan Ceann, meaning "without a head" in Gaelige) is the Irish version of the headless horseman. It is possibly one of the oldest versions of this legend.
The Irish headless horseman is a headless fairie, usually seen riding a black horse and carrying his head under one arm. The flesh of the head is said to have the color and consistency of moldy cheese. The dullahan's whip is actually a human corpse's spine. When the dullahan stops riding, it is where a person is due to die. The dullahan calls out their name, at which point they immediately perish.
The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (Deutsche Sagen) recount two German folk tales of a headless horseman.
One is set near Dresden in eastern Germany. In this tale, a woman from Dresden goes out early one Sunday morning to gather acorns in a forest. At a place called "Lost Waters", she hears a hunting horn. When she hears it again, she turns around she sees a headless man in a long grey coat sitting on a grey horse.
In another German tale, set in Brunswick, a headless horseman called "the wild huntsman" blows a horn which warns hunters not to ride the next day, because they will meet with an accident.
In some German versions of the headless horseman, he seeks out the perpetrators of capital crimes. In others, he has a pack of black hounds with tongues of fire.
In English literature, an early example of a headless horseman is the headless green knight found in the tales of King Arthur.
The most prominent Scottish tale of the headless horseman concerns a man named Ewen killed at a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. The battle denied him of his chance to be a chieftan, and both he and his horse are headless in accounts of his haunting of the area. However Scotland also shares with Irish folklore the tale of the dullahan.
The Wild Huntsman of Scandinavian tales rides a white horse, but his apparel never seems to be described.