Episode Transcript
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0:03
The story you're about to hear was
0:05
found written down among
0:08
the papers of a dead man. The
0:11
horrible and frightening tale it was
0:14
of a haunted town, a
0:16
dedicated school teacher, and
0:19
a man who lost his head. Sound
0:22
like an episode of Dateline?
0:25
Or could be? I'm
0:30
Keith Morrison and this is the story
0:33
of Ichabod Crane and
0:35
the Headless Horseman. Welcome
0:39
to our new podcast series, where
0:41
the stories will be classics and
0:44
some of the most mysterious, suspenseful,
0:46
and spine-tingling fiction you
0:49
have ever heard. Since it's
0:51
Halloween, we begin with
0:53
a truly harrowing tale, The
0:56
Legend of Sleepy Hollow by
0:58
Washington Irving.
1:09
It happened, this otherworldly
1:11
haunting, this terror in the night,
1:15
a long time ago.
1:18
The year was 1790, just
1:21
north of New York City, in
1:23
a place the local housewives dubbed Tarrytown,
1:27
for the way their husbands tarried
1:29
at the village bar on the way home.
1:31
They were Dutch,
1:33
many of them, descendants of the original
1:36
settlers, and they farmed
1:38
the tranquil lands around them.
1:41
But they knew, all of them, about
1:44
the silent glen nestled
1:46
in the hills nearby, the place
1:49
they called, with a shudder, Sleepy
1:52
Hollow.
1:54
For the villagers seemed almost to feel
1:56
the ghosts around them, felt a haunting
1:58
shiver when they blew out their windows. the candles at night
2:02
and thought about that story of the soldier
2:05
headed in the Revolutionary War who
2:07
was said to roam the countryside at night
2:10
in an endless search for his lost
2:12
head. And
2:15
then one day a tall man
2:18
arrived in this little town, a
2:20
schoolteacher for the local children,
2:23
and his name was Ichabod
2:26
Crane. And
2:29
now
2:30
Washington Irving's words as
2:33
we pick up the story.
2:38
He was tall but exceedingly lank
2:42
with narrow shoulders and long
2:44
arms and legs, hands that
2:46
dangled a mile out of his sleeves, might
2:49
have served for shovels. As
2:52
whole frame most loosely hung together,
2:54
his head was small and flat at top
2:57
with huge ears, large
3:00
green glassy eyes, and
3:02
a long sniped nose so
3:05
it looked like a weathercock perched upon
3:07
his spindle neck to tell which way
3:09
the wind blew. To see
3:12
him striding along the profile of a hill
3:14
on a windy day with his clothes
3:16
bagging and fluttering about him, one
3:19
might have mistaken him for some scarecrow
3:22
eloped from a cornfield. His
3:25
schoolhouse was a low building of one
3:28
large room, rudely
3:30
constructed of logs, the
3:32
windows partly glazed and partly
3:35
patched with leaves of old copy books.
3:39
It stood in a rather lonely but
3:41
pleasant
3:41
situation just in the foot
3:43
of a woody hill, with a brook
3:45
running close by and a
3:47
formidable birch tree growing at one
3:50
end of it from hence
3:52
the little murmur of his pupils voices
3:54
might be heard in a drowsy summer's
3:57
day like the hum of a beehive.
4:01
Thank you for listening.
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