Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, painting by John Quidor (1858).

The Headless Horseman has been a motif of European folklore since at least the Middle Ages.^[1]

In Celtic folklore

The Irish dullahan or dulachán ("dark man") is a headless, demonic fairy, usually riding a black horse and carrying his head under his inner lower thigh (or holding it high to see at great distance). 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.^[2] In another version, he is the headless driver of a black carriage.^[3] A similar figure, the gan ceann ("without a head"), can be frightened away by wearing a gold object or putting one in his path.^[4]

The most prominent Scottish 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.^[5]

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English poem that involves a decapitation myth.^[6]

In German folklore

The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (Deutsche Sagen) recount two German folk tales of a headless horseman being spotted with their own eyes.

One is set near Dresden in Saxony. 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 and she sees a headless man in a long grey coat sitting on a grey horse.

In another German tale, set in Brunswick in Lower Saxony, a headless horseman called "the wild huntsman" blows a horn to warn 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 American folklore

The Headless Horseman is a fictional character from the short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by American author Washington Irving. The story, from Irving's collection of short stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., has worked itself into known American folklore/legend through literature and film.

The legend of the Headless Horseman begins in Sleepy Hollow, New York, during the American Revolutionary War. Traditional folklore holds that the Horseman was a Hessian artilleryman who was killed during the Battle of White Plains in 1776. He was decapitated by an American cannonball, and the shattered remains of his head were left on the battlefield while his comrades hastily carried his body away. Eventually they buried him in the cemetery of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, from which each Halloween night he rises as a malevolent ghost, furiously seeking his lost head.^[7]

In Indian folklore

The jhinjhār is a headless horseman found in the folklore of Rajasthan. Unlike most headless horsemen, the jhinjhār is often portrayed as a heroic figure. Most stories about the jhinjhār describe it as a Rajput prince who lost its head while defending a village or caravan from bandits but refusing to back down even after being beheaded, while other versions describe it as a Mughal cavalryman trying to defend its prince. In Madh Pradesh, folklore states that jhinjhārs are said to be born out of violent and wrongful deaths that occur in protecting innocents: they do not harm innocent people, and are also said to fight on foot as well as mounted on horseback. Jhinjhārs are said to be vulnerable to powdered indigo dye, which, if thrown on them, can dispel their frenzy and allow them to die peacefully.

In popular culture

US postage stamp, 1974

Comics

The comic book series Chopper, written by Martin Shapiro, is a modern-day reimagining of the headless horseman. It features a headless outlaw biker on a motorcycle who collects the souls of sinners. The only people who can see him are those who have consumed a strange new Ecstasy-like drug that triggers their sixth sense and opens a gateway to the afterlife. During the hallucinogenic high, any characters who have committed significant sins are hunted by the headless ghost. Once the drug wears off the victim is safe and beyond the headless horseman's ghostly reach.^[8][9][10]

Television

The Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode "Chopper" (initially broadcast on January 31, 1975)^[11] features a headless motorcyclist who enacts revenge for the loss of his head on a rival biker gang,^[12][13] 20 years after his murder.^[14]

In the Midsomer Murders episode "The Dark Rider", a killer lures several victims to their deaths by masquerading as a headless horseman from local legend.^[15]

See also

• cephalophore, beheaded Christian martyred saints
• Saints Gemolo and Himerius of Bosto
• Dullahan, a similar figure from Irish Folklore
• Headless Mule, a character in Brazilian folklore
• List of ghosts
• List of ghost films

Notes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Headless horseriders.