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.