Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman has been a motif of European folklore since at least the Middle Ages.

The Irish dullahan or dulachán ("dark man") is a headless, demonic fairy, usually riding a black horse and carrying his head under his inner lower thigh (or holding it high to see at great distance). He wields a whip made from a human corpse's spine. When the dullahan stops riding, a death occurs. The dullahan calls out a name, at which point the named person immediately dies. In another version, he is the headless driver of a black carriage. A similar figure, the gan ceann ("without a head"), can be frightened away by wearing a gold object or putting one in his path.

The most prominent Scottish tale of the headless horseman concerns a man named Ewen decapitated in a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. The battle denied him any chance to be a chieftain, and both he and his horse are headless in accounts of his haunting of the area.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English poem that involves a decapitation myth.

The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (Deutsche Sagen) recount two German folk tales of a headless horseman being spotted with their own eyes.

One is set near Dresden in Saxony. In this tale, a woman from Dresden goes out early one Sunday morning to gather acorns in a forest. At a place called "Lost Waters", she hears a hunting horn. When she hears it again, she turns around and she sees a headless man in a long grey coat sitting on a grey horse.

In another German tale, set in Brunswick in Lower Saxony, a headless horseman called "the wild huntsman" blows a horn to warn hunters not to ride the next day, because they will meet with an accident.

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