OK, I learned something cool today. As I read the description of the dullahan in Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft—“Dullahans are headless undead warriors—the remains of villains who let vengeance consume them. These decapitated hunters haunt the areas where they were slain, butchering innocents in search of their severed heads or to quench their thirst for revenge”—my thoughts immediately went to Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in which the legendary “headless horseman” was said to be a former Hessian auxiliary soldier beheaded by a cannon shot during the American Revolution, prowling the area around the battlefield where he fell. But it turns out that this was already a longstanding mythical trope even in Irving’s time, found in tales from the Rhineland region of Germany (which includes the region of Hesse!) and the British Isles—and in the Irish version of the trope, the undead warrior is called a dulachán, anglicized as “dullahan.”
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