Irving was an American citizen, whose parents hailed originally from Cornwall, and the story was written while travelling in England. The horseman takes the form of a Hessian soldier slain during the American Revolutionary War. The most famous and lasting iteration of the Dullahan figure must be the headless horseman featured in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which is set in rural New York. It’s not difficult to see parallels between these dark myths. Stoker lived in Clontarf and it is thought that details in his novel may have been inspired by, among other things, the practice of burying corpses with a stake through the heart at the suicide burial plot at the crossroads of Ballybough and Clonliffe Road - another measure to prevent the deads’ unquiet spirits from wandering the earth. The gruesome process of beheading corpses to ensure their spirits don’t roam recalls the origins of another famous Irish horror creation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Photograph: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images ”Ĭhristopher Lee in the 1958 film, ‘Dracula’, directed by Terence Fisher. In Norway the heads of corpses were cut off to make their ghosts feeble. These headless phantoms are found elsewhere than in Ireland. It will go rumbling to your door, and if you open it, according to Croker, a basin of blood will be thrown in your face. The Dullahan is recorded in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry edited by WB Yeats: “An omen that sometimes accompanies the banshee is the coach-a-bower (cóiste bodhar) - an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a Dullahan. The flesh of the face is decayed, with the specific (and slightly odd) reference to the consistency of the flesh being akin to mouldy cheese recurring in many tellings of the tale. Frustrated by the loss of his sacrifice, he still roams the roads, calling the names of those doomed to die, and carrying his head under his arm. He is said to be the embodiment of Crom Dubh, a fertility god who demanded blood sacrifice in the form of decapitation, his worship ended with the coming of Christianity to Ireland. The Dullahan (“dark man”) was a malevolent harbinger of death whose roots lie in Celtic mythology. From the middle English of Gawain and the Green Knight to the stories of the Brothers Grimm, headless horsemen abound, haunting the highways and byways of remote locations and even occasionally marauding our city streets. The legend of a decapitated horseman carrying his own head is one that crops up in numerous European storytelling traditions. This week we’re going to look at an Irish ghoul who has made an appearance in ghost stories around the world - the Dullahan, or also known as the headless horseman.
Irish ghost stories and funerary traditions travelled with the Irish diaspora and often became entangled with local customs to form entirely new traditions through the decades. Halloween is fast approaching and it’s time to delve back in the origins of Irish traditions and explore how Samhain became Halloween.
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