31 Days of Halloween | Day 7: The Real Legend of Sleepy Hollow

In 1776, somewhere in the hills of Westchester County, an American cannonball took the head off a Hessian soldier.

His name was never recorded.

His grave has never been found.

And about twenty years later, a young writer named Washington Irving arrived in the Hudson Valley and eventually gave that forgotten soldier a horse.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow would become one of America's great ghost stories. But beneath the Headless Horseman are real battlefields, real graves, a captured British spy, a haunted tulip tree, an old Dutch church—and generations of people who slowly began treating Irving's fiction as their own folklore.

Eventually, the Horseman got a grave.

Then Sleepy Hollow became a Halloween destination.

And finally, the town itself took the ghost's name.

Tonight, we're separating Washington Irving's story from the history underneath it—and finding out how a fictional Headless Horseman became one of America's most enduring Halloween legends.

Welcome to Day Seven of 31 Days of Halloween.