"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" combines gothic horror and comedy to produce a tale whose mood is simultaneously spooky and lighthearted. Knickerbocker opens the story by gently mocking the husbands of Tarry Town for their “inveterate propensity […] to linger about the village tavern on market days,” then transitions into a description of the eerie Sleepy Hollow, its supernatural atmosphere, and its ghostly inhabitants. He performs a similar mood-based bait-and-switch when he introduces his central character, Ichabod Crane. Knickerbocker’s physical description of Ichabod is comical, but his account of the phantoms that Ichabod encounters on his evening walk home is legitimately unnerving.
This synthesis of funny and creepy elements culminates when Ichabod Crane encounters the Headless Horseman on his ride home from the Van Tassel party. The Horseman first appears to Ichabod as a looming, dark shape:
“In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, black and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveler.”
This passage contains plenty of straight-ahead horror elements, from the nighttime ride to the monstrous figure on horseback. But even at this tense narrative moment, Irving cannot resist making fun of his superstitious hero with an ironic dig. When Ichabod loses Hans Van Ripper’s saddle while escaping the Headless Horseman, Irving writes:
For a moment the terror of Hans Van Ripper’s wrath passed across his mind—for it was his Sunday saddle; but this was no time for petty fears; the goblin was hard on his haunches, and (unskillful rider that he was!) he had much ado to maintain his seat.
Knickerbocker makes light of Ichabod’s poor horsemanship, his ingratiating nature, and his fanciful worldview. Ichabod is dismissing the real fear or ruining his benefactor’s saddle in favor of an invented, supernatural fear: the Headless Horseman. Even at the suspenseful crux of the story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" resists categorization as either pure horror or pure comedy—the amusing and the terrifying are interwoven throughout.
