This story was originally told in The Headless Horseman, an 1865 novel by Mayne Reid. In Texas, the headless horseman is a criminal who was beheaded, tied upright on a gray horse, and left to wander Texas. He is described as a “a headless man in a long gray coat sitting on a gray horse”. German folklore compiled by the Brothers Grimm states that the headless horseman seeks criminals in which the punishment of the crime was beheading. The headless horseman from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is similar to figures of other stories. In Sleepy Hollow, a Tim Burton film, the Horseman is seen to also be skilled with an axe. 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. 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 was buried in a graveyard outside an Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow. During the war, the Horseman was one of 548 Hessians killed in a battle for Chatterton Hill, wherein his head was severed by a cannonball. The Horseman was supposedly a Hessian soldier of unknown rank one of many such hired to suppress the American Revolutionary War. The legend of the Headless Horseman begins in a town near North Tarrytown, New York named Sleepy Hollow. However, whether these sightings are fact or fiction is not known. Some people have even reported seeing the Headlesss Horseman over the centuries. It was made legendary through literature and films, with the result that a variety of stories about “The Headless Horseman” are still told today. 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.
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