Not long after moving to Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod falls in love with one of his psalmistry students, Katrina Van Tassel, the 18-year-old daughter of Baltus Van Tassel, the town’s wealthiest farmer. He devours stories from Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft and eagerly trades stories of witches, omens, and strange events in Connecticut with the locals. He enjoys home-cooked meals and ingratiates himself to his students’ mothers for invitations to dinners. He helps the farmers with whom he lodges and makes friends with the town’s women by providing lessons in psalmistry (the singing of psalms) and exchanging regional gossip (16). Ichabod becomes popular in town by making himself useful. Ichabod is the town’s only teacher, and he teachers the male children of local farmers in a one-room schoolhouse. These details are significant to the plot because the narrator will refer to Ichabod’s awkward movements and physiognomy throughout the story.
He is a rather comic figure, with spindly arms dangling from too-short sleeves, feet like shovels, large ears, and a tiny flat head (9). Ichabod is tall and lanky, with a high-beaked nose and large green eyes. The narrator claims that he visited Sleepy Hollow when he was young, so he knows the region firsthand.Īfter setting the scene, the narrator tells the story of Ichabod Crane, an itinerant schoolteacher who moved from Connecticut to Sleepy Hollow 30 years before, around 1790. He returns to the church graveyard, where his body is buried, each morning. Residents and local historians believe that the Headless Horseman gallops through the valley at night searching for his head and terrorizing those who get in his way. He is rumored to be a Hessian-a German soldier who fought with the British-general beheaded by a cannonball during the American Revolutionary War (3). The most feared spirit in the region is a ghostly rider on horseback without a head.
Regardless of the source, superstitions, visions, and hallucinations abound, making the area infamous and avoided by outsiders. The Dutch residents, who have lived there for generations, believe the area is bewitched, either by “a High German doctor, during the early days of settlements an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe” (3). The narrator notes that Sleepy Hollow has a somnolent, mysterious quality. Two miles north of Tarry Town is a valley called Sleepy Hollow, which is where the main action of the story takes place. Dietrich Knickerbocker, a fictional Dutch historian of Irving’s invention, narrates the story, which is set near the northern New York port village of Tarry Town (real name Tarrytown, where Irving settled in 1835), situated on the Tappan Zee River (also the name of the real river that runs through the region).
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