Ichabod: Just a moment, if I may.
We do not yet know the cause of death.
High Constable: When you find them in the river, cause of death is drowning.
Ichabod: Possibly so, if there is water in the lungs,
but by pathology we might be able to determine whether or not he was dead
before he went into the river.
I will need to examine the body.
High Constable: Cut him up. Are we heathens?
Ichabod: The millennium is almost upon us.
In a few months, we will be living in the 19th century,
yet our courts continue to rely on medieval devices of torture.
High Constable: Stand down!
Ichabod: I stand up for sense and justice.
Our jails overflow with men and women convicted on confessions worth no more than this one.
Burgomaster: Constable Crane!
This is a song that we have heard from you more than once.
Now, there are 2 courses open to me.
First, I can let you cool you heels in the cells until you learn respect for the dignity of my office...
Ichabod: I beg pardon.
But why am I the only one who sees that, to solve crimes, to detect the guilty,
we must use our brains to recognize vital clues,
using up-to-date scientific techniques?
Burgomaster: Which brings to me to the second course.
There is a town upstate, 2 days' journey to the north in the Hudson Highlands.
It is a place called Sleepy Hollow.
Have you heard of it?
Ichabod: I have not.
Burgomaster: An isolated farming community, mainly Dutch.
3 persons have been murdered there, all within a fortnight.
Each one found with the head lopped off.
Ichabod: Lopped off?
Burgomaster: Clean as dandelion heads, apparently.
You will take these experimentations of yours to Sleepy Hollow
and there you will detect the murderer.
Bring him here to face our good justice.
Will you do this?
Ichabod: I shall.
Burgomaster: Remember, it is you, Ichabod Crane, who is now put to the test.
Katrina, with her eyes closed: The Pickety Witch, the Pickety Witch, who's got a kiss for the Pickety Witch?
The Pickety Witch, the Pickety Witch, who's got a kiss for the Pickety Witch?
Who's got a kiss for the Pickety Witch?
[she grabs Ichabod] Is it Theodore?
Ichabod: No, pardon, miss. I am only a stranger.
Katrina: Then have a kiss on account. [she kiss him]
Ichabod, to the gemtlemen: I will need to ask you many questions.
But first, let me ask, is anyone suspected?
Van Tassel: How much have your superiors explained to you, Constable?
Ichabod: Only that the 3 were slain in open ground,
their heads found severed from their bodies.
Reverend Steenwyck: Their heads were not found severed.
Their heads were not found at all.
Ichabod: The heads are gone?
Mr. Hardenbrook: Taken. Taken by the Headless Horseman.
Taken back to hell.
The horseman is Hessian mercenary, sent to these shores by German princess,
to keep Americans under the yoke of England.
But unlike his compatriots who came for money, the horseman came for love of carnage.
When battle was joined, there you'd find him.
He rode a giant black steed named Daredevil.
He was infamous for riding his horse hard into battle, chopping off heads at full gallop.
He had filed his teeth down to sharp points to add to the ferocity of his appearance.
This butcher didn't finally reach his end until the winter of '79
not far from here in our Western Woods.
They chopped off his head with his own sword.
Even today, the Western Woods is a haunted place where brave men will not venture.
For what was planted in the ground that day was a seed of evil.
And so it has been for 20 years.
But now the Hessian wakes.
He's on the rampage, cutting off heads where he finds them.
~Baltus van Tassel
Ichabod: Are you saying, is that what you believing?
Mr. Hardenbrook: Seeing is believing.
Ichabod, about the headless body: Interesting. Very interesting.
Van Tassel: What is it?
Ichabod: In headless-corpse cases of this sort,
the head is removed to prevent identification of the body.
Van Tassel: But we know this was Jonathan Masbath.
Ichabod: Precisely. So why was the head removed?
Van Tassel: Why?
Ichabod: Right.
Ichabod: Pardon my intrusion, I saw a light.
Katrina: It is no intrusion.
I come here to read when I am wakeful.
[Katrina put the book under the cushion]
Ichabod: To read books which you must hide?
Katrina: There were my mother's books.
My father believes tales of romance caused the brain fever that killed my mother.
She died 2 years ago come midwinter.
The nurse who cared for her during her sickness is now Lady van Tassel.
Ichabod: There was something else, too.
Why did no one think to mention that the van Garretts are kith and kin to the van Tassels?
Katrina: Why, because there is hardly a household in Sleepy Hollow that is not connected
to every other by blood or marriage.
Ichabod: I see.
[walking to the window]
Katrina: This land we're looking at was van Garrett land,
given to my father when I was in swaddling clothes.
The van Garretts were the richest family around these parts.
When my father brought us to Sleepy Hollow,
van Garrett set him up with an acre and a broken-down cottage.
My father worked hard for his family, and prospered and built this house.
And I owe my happiness to him.
I remember living poor in the cottage.
Katrine, give him a book: Take this.
It is my gift for you.
Ichabod: No, I have no use for it.
Katrina: Are you so certain of everything?
[Ichabod accept it, open the first page and there're her mother's name]
Ichabod: It was your mother's.
Katrina: Keep it close to your heart.
It is sure protection against harm.
Ichabod: Are you so certain of everything?
It is no magic.
It is what we call optics.
Seperate pictures which become one in the spinning.
It is truth, but truth is not always appearance.
~Ichabod Crane
Ichabod: Do you believe the father kills her?
Mr. Philipse: The Horseman killed her.
Ichabod: How often do I have to tell you, there is no Horseman.
Never was a Horseman, and never will be a Horseman.
Ichabod, on his bed, terrified: It was a headless horseman.
Van Tassel: You must not excite yourself.
Ichabod: But it was a headless horseman!
Van Tassel: Of course it was. That's why you're here.
Ichabod: No, you must believe me.
It was a horseman, a dead one. Headless!
Van Tassel: I know, I know.
Ichabod: You don't know because you were not there! It's all true!
Van Tassel: Of course it is, I told you. Everyone told you.
Ichabod: I saw him. [and he passed out]
[after digging the Horseman's grave]
The skull is gone. Taken.
That is why the Horseman returns from the grave.
To take heads till his own is restored to him.
~Ichabod Crane
Katrina: Will you take nothing from Sleepy Hollow that was worth the coming here?
Ichabod: No, no, not nothing.
A kiss from a lovely young woman before she saw my face or knew my name.
Katrina: Yes, without sense or reason.
Ichabod: Forgive me, I speak of kisses and you lost your brave man, Brom.
Katrina: I have shed my tears for Brom, and yet my heart is not broken.
Do you think me wicked?
Ichabod: No.
But perhaps there is a bit of a witch in you, Katrina.
Katrina: Why do you say that?
Ichabod: Because you have bewitched me.
Katrina: I think you have no heart.
And I had a mind once to give you mine.
Ichabod: Yes, I think you loved me that day when you followed me into the Western Woods
to have braved such peril.
Katrina: What peril was there for me,
if it was my own father who controlled the Headless Horseman?
[ride her horse]
Goodbye, Ichabod Crane.
I curse the day you came to Sleepy Hollow.
Young Masbath: You think it was Katrina, don't you?
Ichabod: That can never be uttered.
Young Masbath: A strange sort of witch with a kind and loving heart.
How can you think so?
Ichabod: I have good reason.
Young Masbath: Then you are bewitched by reason.
Ichabod: I am beaten down by it!
It is a hard lesson for a hard world, and you had better learn it, Young Masbath.
Villainy wears many masks.
None so dangerous as the mask of virtue.
~Ichabod Crane
Katrina: Father saw the Horseman kill you.
Lady van Tassel: He saw the Horseman come towards me with his sword unsheathed,
but it is I who govern the Horseman, my dear.
And Baltus did not stay to watch.
Katrina: But there was body.
Lady van Tassel: The servant girl, Sarah.
And I always thought she was useless.
But it seems she had a purpose after all.
Katrina: Who are you?
Lady van Tassel: My family name was Archer.
Katrina: The archer.
Lady van Tassel: I lived with my father and mother and sister in a cottage not far from here.
Until one day my father died,
and the landlord, who had received many years of loyal service from my parents,
evicted us.
No one in this God-fearing town would take us in
because my mother was suspected of witchcraft.
But she schooled her daughters well,
while we lived as outcast in the Western Woods.
She died within a year.
My sister and I remained in our refuge, seeing not a soul.
Until one day, whilst gathering firewood, we crossed the path of the Hessian.
I saw his death.
At that moment, I offered my soul to Satan,
if he would raise the Hessian from the grave to avenge me.
Katrina: Avenge you?
Lady van Tassel: Against van Garrett.
The landlors who showed us no mercy and left us to starve,
whilst Baltus van Tassel and his simpering wife and girl child stole our home.
I swore I would make myself mistress of all he had.
The easiest part was the first.
To enter your house as your mother's sick nurse,
and put her body into the grave and my own into the marriage bed.
Not quite so easy was to secure my legacy.
The Widow had to go, of course.
And the servant, Masbath.
And then, just the other day, that silly midwife Killian told me the Widow had told her a big secret.
And she told me this right in front of her husband.
What a goose!
So, another little job for the Horseman.
But lust delivered the Reverend Steenwyck into my power.
Fear did the same for the notary, Hardenbrook, and the drunkard Philipse.
And the doctor's silence I exchanged for my complicity in his fornications with the servant girl, Sarah.
Katrina: Yes, you have everything now.
Lady van Tassel: No!
You have, my dear, by your father's will.
I get everything in the event of your death.
Oh, my sister by the way, sadly passed away.
Quite recently.
Katrina: You killed your own sister?
Lady van Tassel: She brought it on herself by helping you and your master! [to Young Masbath]
You're just in time to have your head cut off.
The Horseman comes!
And tonight, he comes for you!
*****
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