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The Headless Horseman is a fictional character from the 1819 novelette "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by American author Washington Irving. The story, from Irving's collection of short stories titled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., has worked itself into known American folklore/legend through literature and film, including the 1999 Tim Burton film Sleepy Hollow.
The legend of the Headless Horseman (also known as "the Headless Hessian of the Hollow") begins in Sleepy Hollow, New York, during the American Revolutionary War. Traditional folklore holds that the Horseman was a Hessian trooper who was killed during the Battle of White Plains in 28th October 1776. He was decapitated by an American cannonball, and the shattered remains of his head were left on the battlefield while his comrades hastily carried his body away. Eventually, they buried him in the cemetery of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, from which he rises as a malevolent ghost, furiously seeking his lost head and wielding a Jack-o'-Lantern as a temporary replacement and/or weapon. Modern versions of the story refer his rides to Halloween, around which time the battle took place.