The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Not far from a sleepy market town on the Hudson River lies a small, quiet valley called Sleepy Hollow.A gentle stream runs through it, and the only sounds are a whistling quail or a tapping woodpecker.The people there say a strange, drowsy spell hangs over the whole valley, making everyone dream and see strange things.

The valley’s most famous ghost is a horseman without a head, who gallops through the night on a huge black horse.People say he was once a soldier whose head was carried away by a cannonball in an old war.Every night, they say, his ghost searches for its lost head, riding fastest just before he must return to the churchyard at dawn.

Into this dreamy valley came a schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, tall and thin, with long arms, big ears, and a nose like a weathervane.From a distance, striding along a hilltop in his loose, flapping clothes, he looked less like a man than a scarecrow escaped from a cornfield.His one-room schoolhouse stood by a brook, at the foot of a wooded hill, with a birch tree growing right beside the door.

Ichabod ran his classroom with a firm hand, believing deeply in the old saying, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”Yet he was not truly cruel: he punished the weak little children gently and saved his sternest lessons for the biggest troublemakers.He liked to say he was only “doing his duty” by their parents, and somehow no child in Sleepy Hollow ever thought him unfair.

On quiet evenings, Ichabod loved nothing more than sitting by a farmhouse fire, listening to old wives tell ghost stories.He knew every local legend of witches, haunted bridges, and wandering spirits, and could tell them back even better than he heard them.But the tale that gripped him most of all — and that he could never quite shake off on his long walks home in the dark — was the story of the Headless Horseman.

Walking home alone through the shadowy valley after such an evening, Ichabod would hear every rustling leaf and see a ghost in every bent old tree.And so, wide awake with fright, the brave schoolmaster of Sleepy Hollow would hurry his steps and begin, quite loudly, to whistle.