Sleepy Hollow

Summary

In 1799, New York City police constable Ichabod Crane 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. 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 own investigation, remaining highly skeptical about the supernatural elements in the case until he encounters the Headless Horseman himself. 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 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, though the murders continue until Crane 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 (where he describes as where "the Bronx is up and the Battery is down..."—Tim Burton's nod to the song "New York, New York (On the Town)" by Leonard Bernstein), in time for the new century.