Washington Irving’s original short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow did not originally have a true specter.
It was implied that the uptight schoolteacher Ichabod Crane was scared off by Brom Bones in disguise for hitting on his girl.
Later retellings of it, like the original story implied, played up the supernatural angle and made the Headless Horseman into a monster of legend.
But it’s not a wholly American one.
The Headless rider has shown up a lot in fiction: on cartoons like The Real Ghostbusters, an episode of Are you Afraid of the Dark, and even of an episode of Kolchak the Nightstalker.
It’s rare to find a supernatural-fighting hero who hasn’t fought a headless rider.
Three versions of it stand out the most to me at the very least: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad from 1949, which set the standard model; Sleepy Hollow for Tim Burton’s take on the story with modern twists and R-Rated terror; and the novel/anime series Durarara which goes to the source of the legend and provides something the other two only barely do, character for the monster.
And there’s the new TV show that came out earlier this week. I wrote this before I got a chance to watch it and it leaves me wondering how a series can last with only one supernatural villain at its center.
Biology
Here, we have to go into the history of the myth—and Ghostbusters physics in order to make them work.
That said, the biology of these creatures is extremely diverse.
The Rider has been a ghost, an undead killer like Jason Vorhees became or a fairy creature. Yes, really. The oldest headless rider is the Dullahan of Celtic mythology. Washington Irving may have drawn from it or a similar myth when constructing the Headless Horseman and to be fair, they are very similar creatures.
Unstoppable in their quests for heads or to splash people with buckets of blood, they invoke terror and fear where they go.
The
one thing that unifies them is their heedlessness and the quest to
either find the original or get a replacement. It exists almost as a
concept with the pseudo-physical body almost a superficial after though
to the spiritual/emotional drive behind it. A drive so intense that it
supersedes all other functions, with only a few things working against
them. The barrier created by running water, which believers in the
supernatural in western lore hold as a disruption of the supernatural
forces animating and driving the spirit, is the only standard protection
other than finding their original head.
In Ichabod, the quest
for a head, any head, drives the spirit in the series lore.
In this
animated tale, the iconic creature appears as a massive specter,
powerful in build and ability. Laughing without a mouth to give the
words voice and whaling like a banshee while chasing Ichabod and getting
into antics that would become better known on Scooby Doo whenever a
masked man chases Scooby and Shaggy.
In Sleepy Hollow, a witch uses devil magic to summon the Headless Rider and controls him through his skull. Returning the head breaks the Witch’s control of it, and it comes for her life after being enslaved. This creature is fueled by hell, granting it many supernatural powers beyond being a nigh-unstoppable undead abomination. You know, in case that wasn’t enough. Here, his blades are given a burning edge to enhance their cutting power, and cauterizing the wounds as they are made.
Though as a creature from the depths of hell, it is unable to enter holy ground – its blades falling to ash when they land on it.
Given circumstances, it seems that the upcoming show of the same name is drawing a lot from this version.
In Durarara, finding the head of Celty Sturluson, the Dullahan star of the series, is a major recurring plot element and a source of drama.
Hers was stolen from her and now she lives in Ikebukuro Will she as a motorcycle courier. She knows it’s somewhere in the city. And she will find it—but it contains half her memories. Will those memories change who she is, change who she cares about now? How much of her mind is in her head and how her body works actually undergoes deep analysis in Durarara to the point that she’s autopsied at one point.
Her physical body heals rapidly, but has no blood and the organs are just ‘there’. Much like the others, she is driven by the ‘purpose’ rather than biology.
Symbolism
The Horseman in most works is a force of nature, in a sense. Implacable aside from very specific counters. Powerful, deadly, it is best avoided rather than fought. In Ichabod, it acts as the final end of the massive prank war between Ichabod and Bones, invoked as a supernatural horror that exists only to stalk helpless humans. In Sleepy Hollow, it is the killer of a mystery where solving the case ends the killer’s reign.
And then there’s Celty. Celty, Celty, Celty. Unlike just about every other incarnation, she is not an implacable force of nature (though she has the raw supernatural power to be that way sometimes). She is a full on character with wants, desires, and fears. Dear god she has fears. She’s probably the only supernatural monster without a head with pathological fears of both alien invaders and traffic cops.
And not without reason in the latter case, as the traffic cop leader in that series is quite badass.
But there is one thing they all share, and that is the idea that they are roaming and acting the way they are because they are missing something, and in the more recent cases, because that something was stolen from them. They are spirits (or the dead) who are wronged or ‘born’ incomplete. The only way to truly stop them is to undo the wrong done to them. Nothing short of that will truly end them.
Unless you have an unlicensed particle accelerator. Then you can undo a curse in about half an hour.
