by Lillyana Knox
The headless horseman is a legend that most people know, but do you know the full story? The Horseman has been a figure that has appeared in folklore since the Middle Ages. The creature has been depicted as a headless rider on horseback. The legends say that the horseman is either carrying its decapitated head or missing it all together and is in search of its head. The backstory of this creature is one of pain.
In Washington Irving’s short story of 1820 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, the headless rider who at the time had a head was a German mercenary whose head was blown off by a cannonball during the battle of the American Revolutionary War. It is said that the ghost rides out from the Old Dutch Church graveyard in Sleepy Hollow, New York every night searching for his head or looking for a living traveler's head to put on his empty neck.
