The Legend of the Headless Hessian

by Jeff Williamson

Washington Irving (1783-1859) first visited Tarrytown in 1798 to escape an outbreak of yellow fever around his home in New York City.  The area was rife with folk tales, inhabited as it was already for two centuries by Dutch colonists, and for generations before that by Native Americans who had their own stories of the supernatural.  Even during the Revolutionary War, tales of ghosts and strange goings-on sprang up: Loyalist and Patriot irregulars alike operated in the area, and it was not unusual for someone to disappear. John André, the British officer complicit in the Benedict Arnold plot to hand over West Point, was caught nearby and executed just across the Hudson River; his spirit too was assumed to be restless.

A Young Washington Irving 

Among the Dutch wheat farms of the larger district of Tarrytown and hills that sloped down to the Hudson River, young Irving met some of the characters, or at least the names, of one of his most famous tales -- and in turn gave the small area the name for which it is known: Sleepy Hollow. 

Ichabod Crane, the story’s nervous yet dapper schoolteacher from Connecticut, might be an amalgamation of several individuals, including an Ichabod of the New Jersey Cavalry or any of the Cranes of Morristown, New Jersey, another place Irving visited in his youth.  There were also several Cranes in New York City who Irving may have known.  However, the most common view is that Ichabod Crane is someone with whom Irving served in the War of 1812.

The character of Katherine Van Tassel -- Crane’s romantic interest, or at least objective, in the story -- appears to be based on two women: Eleanor Brush nee Van Tassel (1764-1861) and her aunt Catriena nee Ecker Van Tassel (1736-1796).  Irving may have based his character on Eleanor the person, but Catriena’s monument bears a bit more telling.  Her gravestone stands in the Old Dutch Churchyard, the cherub face still intact and, according to some, appears to watch visitors -- a play of the shadows as the sunlight moves across the sky.  Not only does the stone itself represent an important relic of the past, it also helps mark the position of another character in the story.

1930's postcard depicting the 18th century Old Dutch Church

Using Catriena’s grave as a point of reference, it is possible to then see the grave of the star of the story: the Headless Horseman.  More specifically, the Headless Hessian, who seems to have been based by Irving upon a very real individual indeed.

There are several contenders for the nameless mercenary who occupies such a central role in the tale.  Irving himself only gives a vague source of the unfortunate: “the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannonball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War.”  For a bit more detail, there is a version of the tale told by Bill Lent, a long-time historic interpreter and caretaker of the old churchyard who died in 2013.  His version, as relayed to a visitor of the churchyard in 2010, starts in the late summer of 1776.

The British, after taking up station on Staten Island, proceeded to Long Island and Manhattan, as the Continental Army under George Washington continued to evade north through Harlem and White Plains before slipping across the Hudson to northern New Jersey.  As the British and their Hessian mercenaries consolidated their position in and around New York City, they issued orders that all privately held firearms should be turned in; anyone found with a firearm in their home faced destruction of their property as a potential threat to the soldiers of the Crown. 

At some point that fall, a local home, perhaps of the Cowenhoven family, was found to have a fouling piece – though another version has it that the farm of Cornelius and Elizabeth Van Tassel was raided by the British and offered some resistance.  In either case, true to the standing command, the house was put to the torch.  However, in the rush, everyone failed to notice that a young girl was still in the home as flames began to devour the first floor.  As the family wailed helplessly, a Hessian trooper ran into the inferno and rescued the girl.  Whether there was a sense of kinship or regret, or maybe a linguistic understanding between the Dutch and the soldiers from Hesse-Kassel, is unknown. 

What is known is that as British General William Howe tried in vain to bait Washington into a pitched battle, the British and Hessians continued to engage only against rear-guard actions -- short, fierce but ultimately indecisive skirmishes.  In any number of these, at least several Hessians had the opportunity to lose their heads to cannonballs:  the Battle of White Plains or even later as the Royal troops pursued Washington across New Jersey (Morristown, Battle of Bound Brook, an engagement near Pluckemin).  Some are discussed in Peter Lubrecht’s “New Jersey Hessians: Truth and Lore in the American Revolution” (The History Press, 2016). 

One of the favorite candidates was a few days after White Plains, however, when Major William Heath recorded in his report after a brief holding action on November 1, 1776, that a cannon shot took off the head of a Hessian trooper and killed a horse.  This specificity explains why it is a favorite.

There is no way to know if this hapless soldier was the same who saved the girl from the burning house, but nine miles away, back in Sleepy Hollow, the mother of the saved girl, as the story goes, heard of this soldier and appeared duty-bound to repay him with an act of respect.  The dead Hessian was brought to the Old Dutch Church and buried in an unmarked grave. Hessians were not terribly popular even before the war, and with the effect of martial law, feelings on their presence ran strong.  Yet, along the east side of the graveyard, a plot was prepared and the soldier was laid to rest, far from home in a hostile land.

Returning to Lent’s tale, the Hessian’s grave -- while unmarked -- is easy to find.  Irving obviously gained information for his tale.  While inspecting the face of Catriena’s stone, looking towards the east boundary of the churchyard -- just above where the old bridge crossed the Pocantico River (today a new wooden bridge crosses a hundred yards or more upstream) -- one spots a small patch of ground bereft of any marker.  The tale of the Headless Horseman has no stone to verify his position in the cemetery or even in real life.  Irving, it seems, made his story the epitaph of a mercenary whose legendary martial skills in combat were secondary to what may have been an act of kindness in saving a little girl -- an act that planted a seed of rich work of literature on a bare patch of earth.  Yet, there is where the headless Hessian reposes, unnamed, still longing for his lost head. 

When visiting the Old Dutch Church in Tarrytown, the grave of one other resident from this tale is worth a stop.  Just a bit further up the hill from Catriena is the Irving plot and vault where Washington Irving was laid to rest after his death in 1852.