The story you're about to hear was found written down among the papers of a dead man.

The horrible and frightening tale it was of a haunted town, a dedicated school teacher,

and a man who'd lost his head.

Sound like an episode of Dateline?

What could be?

But no.

I'm Keith Morrison,

and this is the story of Ickabod Crane and the headless horseman.

Welcome to our new podcast series. The stories will be classics and some of the most mysterious

suspenseful and spine-tingling fiction you have ever heard. Since it's Halloween

we begin with a truly harrowing tale, the legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. It happened this otherworldly haunting, this terror in the night, a long time ago.

The year was 1790, just north of New York City.

In a place the local housewives dubbed Terry Town,

or the way their husbands tarried at the village bar on the way home.

They were Dutch, many of them, descendants of the original settlers,

and they farmed the tranquil lands around them. But they knew all of them about the silent glen nestled in the hills nearby.

The place they called with a shudder, sleepy hollow.

For the villagers seemed almost to feel the ghosts around them, felt a haunting shiver when they

blew out the candles at night, and thought about that story of the soldier beheaded in the Revolutionary

War who was said to Rome the countryside at night in an endless search for his lost head.

And then one day a tall man arrived in this little town,

a school teacher for the local children and his name was Ickabad Crane.

...