This story of Sleepy Hollow starts during the battle of White Plains on November 1st, 1776. Major General William Heath recorded in his diary that a canon took off the head of a Hessian artilleryman. When Washington Irving came to live in the area as a boy, he heard the story and arriving just in time for a yellow fever epidemic, he wrote to his friends that the villagers “speak in hushed whispers the strange cries heard in the woods”

 Irving first heard the legend of a Headless Horseman from a laborer and also from a Dutch housewife his sister boarded with. So he wrote it all down and created a book full of fictionalized existing folklore but purposely crammed it full of actual stories of real people and places that he blurred the lines between fact and fiction. As an example, Ichabod Crane was a real person who fought in the War of 1812.