Plot
In 1799, New York City, Ichabod Crane is a 24-year-old officer. He is dispatched by his superiors to the Westchester County hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, New York, to investigate a series of brutal slayings in which the victims have been found decapitated: Peter Van Garrett, his son Dirk, and the widow Emily Winship. A pioneer of new, unproven investigative techniques such as finger-printing and autopsies, Crane arrives in Sleepy Hollow armed with his bag of scientific tools only to be informed by the town's elders that the murderer is not of flesh and blood, rather a headless supernatural warrior from beyond the grave who rides at night on a massive black steed.
Crane begins his investigation, remaining highly skeptical about the supernatural elements in the case until he encounters the Headless Horseman himself, who kills Magistrate Samuel Phillipse on sight. Boarding a room at the home of the town's richest family, the Van Tassels, Crane develops an attraction to their daughter Katrina, while he is plagued by nightmares of his mother's horrific torture when he was a child. Delving further into the mystery with the aid of the orphaned Young Masbath, whose father Jonathan was a victim of the Horseman, Crane discovers within the Western Woods the Horseman's grave, as well as his entry point into the natural world from the supernatural — the gnarled Tree of the Dead.
Crane finds the Horseman's skull is missing, and eventually uncovers a murky plot revolving around revenge and land rights with the Horseman controlled by Katrina's stepmother Lady Van Tassel, who sends the killer after Katrina now to solidify her hold on what she considers her property, a piece of land unjustly claimed by Katrina's father.
Following a fight in the local windmill and a stagecoach chase through the woods, Crane eventually thwarts Lady Van Tassel by returning the skull to the Horseman, who regains his head and heads back to Hell along with his enslaver. With his job in Sleepy Hollow over, Crane, with Katrina and Young Masbath, returns to New York in time for the new century.
Read more about this topic: Sleepy Hollow (film)
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)