While this hasn’t been a countdown of creatures, saving the slots nearest to Halloween for the best or most popular, I have held off on doing these last two until, well, until last, as they deserve some special mention for being just flat-out the rockingest.

 

Today... the Headless Horseman.

 

‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, for my money, is the best of all American short stories. The language and the sentence structure is archaic, sure, but that provides a wonderful texture and is why I like the tale so much. There is something so substantial when Washington Irving (or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville, for that matter) writes about evil. Midnights are blacker. Deeds are darker. Words are whole, unqualified, adamantine. Even when an idea is nuanced it feels solid, hewn not written. There is something so absolute, so strong even in the discussion of intangible emotions and fleeting thoughts. This tale was discovered fully-formed, or so it feels, and all Irving did was to hack it from the rocky mountainside where he found it.

 

But even as sure as the narrator of the ‘The Legend’ may sound, there are unknowables. These wisps and notions fill the Hollow with its gossamer ghosts. Was it Brom? Was it the Horseman? Did Ichabod lose his head or just vacate the valley? The narrator feeds us some possibilities but there is no surety in them. The language remains strong but it describes maybes and what-ifs.

 

Absolutely brilliant. For all that direct writing we still have a great mystery at the end. The Horseman remains as shadowy as he did at the start, a phantom full of many more midnight scourings of Sleepy Hollow, if he exists at all. He may just be the fearful fancy of a mind lost in the dark.