The Legend of the Headless Hessian

by Jeff Williamson Washington Irving (1783-1859) first visited Tarrytown in 1798 to escape an outbreak of yellow fever around his home in New York City. The area was rife with folk tales, inhabited as it was already for two centuries by Dutch colonists, and for generations before that by Native Americans who had their own stories of the supernatural. Even during the Revolutionary War, tales of…