In a drowsy Dutch valley on the Hudson, a lanky, superstitious Yankee schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane sets his cap at a plump farmer's daughter and her father's fat acres — and finds a burlier local rival standing in the way. Riding home alone from a harvest frolic, he meets the region's favorite bogey: a cloaked horseman missing his head. Irving spun this out of Dutch folklore into the first great American ghost story, a tale so snug in the national imagination that the Headless Horseman gallops on long after anyone recalls the pedagogue he chased into the night.