What “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Tells Us About Contagion, Fear and Epidemics

In the nearly 200 years since Washington Irving published his most famous tale, the name of the imaginary hamlet has become synonymous with Halloween. At first glance, this conflation makes perfect sense: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published in 1820, was America’s first ghost story, and the Headless Horseman, everyone’s favorite pumpkin-brandishing decapitate, was decidedly the new nation’s first ghost. But Irving’s spooky story of the ill-fated Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane never actually mentions Halloween—for the simple reason that the holiday was not yet celebrated widely in the United States, and would not be for nearly a century more.