The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving’s tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—from his 1820 joint story/essay collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.—is such a remarkable ghost story that it doesn’t even need any ghosts. We can return to it repeatedly, as if it were a cherished song, “playing” it for the latest instance as we frolic amid falling leaves, the sheltered glen, the sun-flecked village green of the mind’s eye in October. If the story has a ghost, this may be it—a place that never truly dies/departs and works our imaginations over.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a story in part about schoolchildren, given that it concerns a teacher—Ichabod Crane, of course—which for a long time was the cinematic fare of schoolchildren. The spooky season rolls ’round, and kids are treated to a classroom screening of Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Half the program, as it were, involved the bumptious amphibian and his friends from Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 novel The Wind in the Willows (itself published in October). Normally you weren’t shown that part; this seasonal viewing treat was all about that headless fellow on horseback who launched a flaming Jack-o’-lantern at you after a midnight chase through the forest.

Jack Kinney and Clyde Geronimi co-directed. Bing Crosby narrates and sings. Wit is in abundance. Both in terms of the animation and the language. Brom Bones arrives on the scene, taps a hogshead of beer, serves his rustic mates, and then makes sure his horse and some dogs can get soused, too. The adaptation runs to 34 minutes. The extended setup to the famed chase renders the payoff possible. Ichabod is a cadger. This version emphasizes how much better he treats his pupils whose parents offer him the choicer repasts at their supper tables. He looks out for number one. As do most of us. He desires the fair maiden Katrina Van Tassel not because of some real love but because her father is rich. Katrina uses Ichabod to induce jealousy in Mr. Bones, with whom she was always going to end up anyway.

Such is life, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” teems with it, which is why Irving’s story endures and reads so “modern” that it might as well have been written tomorrow. Don’t think that because this is Disney that the piece’s action sequence—Ichabod’s post-party trip home—isn’t frightening. Crosby speaks and sings less as fear mounts; we’re left instead with the sounds of the woods at night, a place where things may not be what they seem, may be exactly what they seem, and can be far worse than what they seem.

The third-grader who watches it at school on the Friday before Halloween isn’t apt to pick up on the social commentary and those truths of human nature. Their takeaway will be the horror component, and goodness knows how many of them it subsequently kept up at night, which is healthy. A kind of joyous fear. You understand the look and feel—the psychical signage—of timeless horror. The deathlessness of that Indian corn, pumpkin patch, steeple-against-a-blue-sky spirit of early Americana. You’re now a Sleepy Hollow boy or girl, the same as those forgathering—tarrying—residents who never die in this town, visited and conjured through imagination and the associative, shared memory (once entry is gained) of what’s both a freshly settled and primordial New World nestled along the banks of northeast rivers and harbors leading to sea. A land of shadows by the fire, pumpkins on the doorstep, cider barrels, covered bridges traversed by blown leaves and, if he’s lucky, a pedagogue escaping a Hessian straight out of hell—who could also just be someone having the best Halloween costume moment ever—by making it to that bridge in time. A bridge connects; connection saves. There’s a metaphor in there, as Irving’s tale also connects with us.