You know, it really is a mystery figure, a kind of avenger figure that could be anything you like. We don't know that it is actually a horseman. SIMON: And why do you think? What persists? What makes it so durable?īRADLEY: Well, I think that Headless Horseman enables us to project anything we like onto it because we don't know what the horseman looks like. It's everywhere from Will Rogers, who famously had a silent film in which he starred as Ichabod Crane, if you can believe it, to 'Scooby-Doo,' to Tim Burton, of course, Kanye West. SIMON: And, of course, we see the legacy of 'The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow' turn up in American literature and popular entertainment to this day, don't we?īRADLEY: It's everywhere. This story was an immediate hit, as was the entire collection in which it was featured, which was called 'The Sketch Book Of Geoffrey Crayon, Esquire.' He was very fond of nom de plume. SIMON: Was the story an immediate hit, or did it take a while?īRADLEY: You know, Irving really had a lot of very youthful success.

In 1776, there was Hessian trooper whose head, according to General William Heath's subsequent letter, was carried away by a cannonball, just as Irving says in his tale. SIMON: And one of those stories is, in fact, forgive me, a headless horseman, right?īRADLEY: That's right. But another was Tarrytown, where Irving stayed with family, friends and first heard some of the stories that would make their way into the legend. And so Greenwich Village was one of the suburbs to which people fled. It only extended as far as Chambers Street. Of course, Manhattan at that time was very tiny.

And he moved briefly to Tarrytown, to the Tarrytown area in 1798 during a yellow fever epidemic that gripped Manhattan. Irving is a born and bred New Yorker - was, I should say, a born and bred New Yorker.

SIMON: So this story is kind of the product of a previous pandemic, isn't it?īRADLEY: It absolutely is. Thank you so much for being with us.ĮLIZABETH BRADLEY: I'm very happy to speak with you. We're joined now from Tarrytown, N.Y., the setting of 'The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow,' by historian Elizabeth Bradley, who's written about this. But on a dark autumn night, he's scared away by the Headless Horseman, who may or may not have been a rival suitor, but he wields a pumpkin as his severed head. We meet him in 'The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow' when a gangly schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane tries to court a wealthy young woman. Two hundred years ago, Washington Irving created a character who's haunted generations ever since, the Headless Horseman.

The sleepy hollow book