Mist and stars, amongst shadowed trees, cold hands freeze, and Shadow chars.
– Old Saying
If you ever come to a crossroads at a nail hour, chances are you’ll meet a Nayalood. No matter how much you might want to, even if fear clutches and gnaws at your heart and the gibbering howl of a thousand upon a thousand dead screams in your mind, do not run, do not nod, and do not speak. If it is midnight, walk straight across the cross roads and keep on walking, even if your plan was to go left or right. And if it is midday, turn around, go home, and try again tomorrow.
– Cormac Harrillan, a wandering troubadour.
Dully, Dully where did you go?
up-road in moonlight,
down-road in sunlight
Dully, Dully why did you go?
looking for laughter,
craving some chatter
Dully, Dully how do you go?
lacking laughter lacking chatter
looking for a thinker
or for another rider
Dully, Dully it’s time to GO!
– Blegokaran children’s rhyme called “Catch the Dully”. One child is voted to be the ‘Dully’, and the other children ring around the Dully in a circle. The children sing the question lines to the Dully, who responds, until the final GO! at which point all the children scatter as the Dully tries to catch one to be the next Dully.
Folklore & History
The Dullahan. Perhaps better known to you as the (a?) horseman of the headless variety. For our purposes, we aren’t going to dive tooo deep into the various origin myths of the Headless Horseman (that would be a friggin book) but we are going to splash around in the shallows of history. We might even dunk our heads, if we’re lucky.
First up, let’s take a gander at some Appalachian tales that have to do with headless men (and one sheep). Most of these are excerpts from ghost (or haint) tales that I have scrounged from The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales, by Ruth Ann Musick. They have varying degrees of similarity to myths of the headless horseman, but all broadly fall under the “Headless” motif and in that sense are heavily influenced by Britannic and Germanic myth.
Return of the Headless Man
In this tale, the narrator describes a group of loggers in Barbour County, West Virginia. One of these men has an unfortunate encounter with a circular saw, only to return several months later:
“One night in the quiet logging camp, as a night watchman made the rounds…he saw the figure of a man standing in the exact spot of the accident. Caught by surprise, he froze for a few minutes…He was shocked to see the same person that had been killed…. then the figure disappeared, and the watchman turned and ran to town to report the headless man's return.
Night after night the same thing would happen. One night the watchman shot at the figure to see if that would stop him, but it didn't. The man would just vanish into the night.
Then, about a month later, a forest fire burned down all the woods, including the logging camp. So the loggers moved on to another location. Just for curiosity the loggers came back to see if the man was still there. He wasn't. The general opinion of the woodsmen was that the dead man had gotten his revenge and now he was happy."1
The reference to fire is a common association with the headless horseman motif, which I will dive into later when we look at the Green Knight (yes, that Green Knight) and the Dullahan.
The Headless Rider
This story is from Pleasant Hill in Doddrige County. The narrator speaks of a graveyard where a murdered traveler was buried long ago…
“at a certain time each month, when the moon was full, the ghost haunted the road in the form of a headless man…. one night as my great-uncle was coming home very late, his mare seemed to be weighted down with such a heavy load, she could hardly take a step…. Looking around, he saw the headless man sitting behind him.
The mare took fright but could only struggle along slowly until they came opposite the mysterious grave; then the man disappeared. The mare ran all the way home, and from that time on it was almost impossible to ride her past that spot after dusk.”2
Again, a common motif of the headless riders (and of many revenant-esque figures) is closely associated to place of death. In this case, a creepy graveyard.
The Old Well
This tale begins with one ‘Uncle Harry’ going to visit a lass he is sweet on after dark, and decides to take a short-cut past the “old Barclay house” which we are informed has been deserted for the past 15 years. Of course, when Uncle Harry passes by the deserted manse, he hears a “moaning sound” coming from the water well:
“As he slowly approached the well, the sound grew louder, and the beating of his heart grew more intense with every step.
Suddenly he saw a large, unrecognizable shadow behind the well. He approached hesitantly. By now the shadow had taken form. It was a man without a head, standing with an axe on his shoulder. For a few seconds, every muscle and bone in my uncle's' body froze; then, he ran home as if all hell were after him.
For almost a week after the incident, my uncle tried to give every possible explanation for what had happened. He had finally convinced himself that his imagination had been playing tricks on him, when an old farmer told him he had once found a man's head near the old Barclay house. But the old farmer said he couldn't imagine where the body could be.”3
Presumably, the body was yeeted into the well (importance of place, once again). Interestingly, the description of “axe on his shoulder” seems to harken back to the Green Knight, notable for both wielding an axe and not dying after he gets his head chopped off.
The Green Knight, Dullahan, Brothers Grimm, and Sleepy Hollow
I could go keep going down this rabbit hole and include tale after decapitating tale, but I would like to go swimming in the metaphorical waters of history right now. Best I can tell, the headless horseman / knight / rider motif harkens all the way back to medieval folklore from Europe - specifically, Germany, Ireland, and France - beginning with everyone’s favorite fighting tree man: the Green Knight!
Ok so perhaps it isn’t precisely the same thing, but from everything I have been able to track down, it does seem that the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green is one of the earlier Western references to a headless man, though indeed he is not referred to as a phantom. The copy of the tale that I have describes him as follows, right after Gawain beheads the verdant vanquisher:
“… and yet neither faltered nor fell the fierce man at all, but stoutly he strode forth, still strong on his shanks, and roughly he reached out among the rows that stood there, caught up his comely head and quickly upraised it, and then hastened to his horse, laid hold of the bridle, stepped into stirrup-iron, and strode up aloft, his head by the hair in his hand holding; and he settled himself then in the saddle as firmly as if unharmed by mishap, though in the hall he might wear no head…
With a rude roar and rush his reins he turned then, and hastened out through the hall-door with his head in his hand, and fire of the flint flew from the feet of his charger.
To what country he came in that court no man knew, no more than they had learned from what land he had journeyed [emphasis mine].4
A quite vivid description, and one that resembles the motifs seen in lore surrounding the Dullahan, a type of faerie from Irish folklore. Not that I am one to draw a through line or imply some type of telos to folkloric traditions, I am simply pointing out the similarities as the Dullahan is described as a “headless phantom” dressed in midnight black, lugging his head around with him wherever he goes.5 This head was said to resemble "moldy cheese, or yeasty bread, in both patina and texture" which the Dullahan would hold aloft to peer into houses where death had come a calling.6
According to some more fanciful descriptions, the Dullahan rides a black horse with flaming eyes and hooves that spark as they strike ground as the creature brandishes a whip made from a human spinal column7... not exactly subtle, but right terrifying if you met this thing on a moonless night. Or on a sunny day.
Alright, enough of the Dullahan, there’s oodles to read about the creature on the internet (or here). Maybe I’ll circle back around to this one come Halloween, but for now, on to Sleepy Hollow! Not really, I just didn’t feel right talking about headless ghosts without mentioning that old rag. In summary, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a constitutive thread in American folklore that tells us of Ichabod Crane, a schoolmaster from Connecticut, who is chased through Sleepy Hollow by the Headless Horseman – interestingly, Crane’s horse is called Gunpowder – and eventually taken by the Horseman.
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 traveller.8
This version of the Headless Horseman is supposedly a Hessian solder whose head lost a duel with a cannonball - which may itself have roots in German folklore, as the Brothers Grimm related the tale of Hans Jagenteufel, a headless spirit condemned to wander the world for his sins (mainly being hard on poor folk, drinking, carousing, and wickedness).
Inspiration
Let us recap on some major themes:
The Headless are usually associated with a specific place. They do not wander and haunt the wide world (I supposed this is broadly true for many ghosts, but hey, I think it worth pointing out).
The Headless have something to do with fire and horses. Usually only one horse.
The Headless wield a weapon of some-sort - taking my cue from the Appalachian ghost stories, let’s go with an axe.
The Headless appear after dark, never in daylight.
Oke. I want to go in a slightly different direction on this one, and that is with environmental storytelling, or using the environment to tell (show) a story when no one is around to speak to it. Let us say your players have wandered into town looking for work and they hear a rumor of that a village, let’s call it Tolemac, burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances several days back. Tolemac itself can be as close or as far away as you want it to be.
Important thing to note here: always remember that your players need a hook. They need a reason to go somewhere. Perhaps one of the players grew up in Tolemac. Perhaps their dear old Gran still lives there…
Now we need some ingredients for our environmental storytelling. This is one of the areas that I struggle with the most, primarily because TTRPGs are imagined worlds, and describing the environment can get confusing. Of course, everyone has their own solution and their own style, but you want to describe the journey in some detail, but not too much.
For each day of travel, make sure you describe at least three elements: terrain, weather, encounters. To give our approach to Tolemac the necessary oomph, here is an example:
Terrain: The road winds through hills crusted with gnarled forests whose thorny branches grasp towards the road even as they creak and groan in the wind.
Weather: A light mist creeps down from the hill tops and through the little hollows in the hill sides, gentle tendrils that flow softly yet inevitably towards you.
Encounter: As you travel through the mist, thorny branches dragging at your clothing, you spy a well just off to the right of the path, outside of a burned out cabin. A lone axe leans forlornly against the well, a charred corpse still reaching for it with an outstretched hand…
This is not Tolemac. This is simply the approach to Tolemac, letting the players see that this fire was not limited to the village. They will likely want to investigate at this point. Perhaps this cabin once belonged to Old Man Breedens. Perhaps the occupant is unknown. If they do choose to enter the house, describe the sound of galloping hooves outside, faint, like an echo. If you really want to foreshadow hard, you could even describe all the occupants of this house (or just the single corpse in the yard) as having had their heads removed.
Alternatively, maybe this house is functioning just fine and no one is dead, but the kids out front are singing the Dully, Dully song from the top of this post. Or something else entirely. The point here is to foreshadow and set the stage for Tolemac.
Raising the Stakes
This next bit is always tricky. How do we ante up? Ideally, you build upon what you already established through travel either by doubling down for a resonant effect, or going in a completely different direction for a dissonant effect. This ain’t rocket science and I’m no author, but that’s ok - all you’re doing is playing on expectation.
So then, do just that. If you want to go the bloody death route, describe a burned out husk of a village shrouded in dark fog barely lit by a slivered moon. Carnage visited this place, and not a soul is left to tell the tale. Perhaps they even find the corpse of dear old Gran, now headless. Or perhaps everyone in the village is simply…gone (just like old Ichabod Crane at the end of Sleepy Hollow).
Alternatively, you may want to take the path of dissonance - describe a happy village with children outside playing dully, dully in a creepy, tropy kind of way. ‘Fire?’ the villagers will ask in confusion, ‘what fire in the village? how could a place like this burn down?’
How indeed.
Bring it Home
Now that our C-list novella is almost done, let’s bring it home. Time for the big reveal: our headless ghost. When you do your reveal, think about what motivates your headless. A personal favorite of mine is that the Headless has lost their head and is searching for it, thinking one of the villagers has it. Maybe they do. If so, I would recommend making the head a magic item of some sort with a desirable quality (letting you predict when someone is going to die) and a negative quality (it burns your hand whenever you hold it but you can’t stop holding it), but now you have either a search quest to save the village, or a negotiation tactic. Of course, if the village is already slaughtered, this may not aid you much in negotiations.
Alternatively, the players could offer to find the head for the Headless, now you have a fetch quest but with something on the line to fight for.
Regardless of what you end up doing, the point here is to give your players agency and a chance to use their heads, so to speak.
That’s all I got time for right now y’all, work has been super crazy so I haven’t had as much time to work on this as I would like, but stay tuned for another post coming soon!!
Cheerio,
N
Return of the Headless Man (58) - Ruth Ann Musick, “Return of the Headless Man,” in The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales (University of Kentucky Press, 1976).
The Headless Rider (59) - Ruth Ann Musick, “Return of the Headless Man,” in The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales (University of Kentucky Press, 1976).
The Old Well (60-61) - Ruth Ann Musick, “Return of the Headless Man,” in The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales (University of Kentucky Press, 1976).
JRR Tolkien, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (S.l., NY: MARINER BOOKS, 2021), 39-40.
Harris, Marissa. "Daoine Sidhe: Celtic Superstitions of Death Within Irish Fairy Tales Featuring the Dullahan and Banshee." (2017), 15.
The Dullahan, the Irish Headless Horseman - Brian Witt. https://shamrockclubwis.com/Reflections/2008October.pdf
ibid.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/hc/rip-van-winkle-the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-2/