On his way home, however, Ichabod is also spooked by the stories he’s just heard, and every rustle and chirp terrifies him. He also enjoys gathering with the old Dutch wives to hear ghost stories and to tell his own, many of which come from Cotton Mather’s “History of New England Witchcraft,” his preferred book. He leads the psalm singing lessons at church and enjoys flirting with the young women, who admire him for his intellectualism. Ichabod, tall and lanky with a voracious appetite, is stern and strict in the schoolhouse but can be shrewd and ingratiating when it suits him, such as at the farmhouses of the students where he lodges. One of those “tarrying” in Sleepy Hollow for a time is our protagonist, Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher from Connecticut. One of their favorites is of the Headless Horseman, an old Hessian trooper whose head was shot off during the Revolutionary War, and who gallops off in search of it each night.

The townspeople, most of whom have Dutch heritage, love to gather and tell supernatural tales. A few miles from town is a small village called “Sleepy Hollow” which has a somnolent, bewitching quality: all the inhabitants, and indeed anyone who stays in the village for awhile, are prone to see visions and ghosts. The story opens with a note that it has been found among the possessions of the “late” Diedrich Knickerbocker, who is the narrator of “Sleepy Hollow.” Knickerbocker describes the setting, the quiet, bucolic “Tarry Town” in upstate New York that time seems to have passed by.

The legend of sleepy hollow annotated