Dullahan

Headless horsemen turn up in Irish, German, and other folklore.

The Irish Dullahan, a headless rider on a black horse carrying his head under one arm, a death omen.

He's a fairy.

The Sleepy Hollow Horseman is often described as the most famous version of the Dullahan legend, but turned into a ghost rather than a fairy.

The German Wild Hunt.

Spectral riders storming through the night, tied to Germanic and Norse myth.

Yeah.

I hope you guys have a wonderful and safe Halloween.

Here are some of the reports.

Sleep is disturbed with images of the washerwoman at the Ford and of the Dullahan roaming the countryside.

Of the Morrigan prowling the fields of war and strife.

The Archbishop of Dublin retorts that these fairy tales and superstitions are the notions of adulterous minds.

But with Halloween right around the corner, there was no way we were going to leave you hanging without something special for the season.

So we're reaching back to the GXP archives and bringing you one of our favorite tales of Irish folklore, the Dullahan.

Originally released on October 30th, 2023, this is the legend of the headless horseman who rides through the Irish countryside, bringing death wherever he stops.

So settle in, turn down the lights, and get into the Halloween spirit with us.

But just kind of kicking things off.

If you've seen this thumbnail, you obviously know what it's about.

We're calling this the Dullahan.

Some people know it by another word too, or another moniker, and we're gonna get into this right now.

know.

The figure is called the Dullahan.

In some accounts, the Dullahan is associated with death and appears in Amon's presence on the road.

And the image is very cool and very familiar.

Like you said, the headless horseman.

You know, when I first dug into the Headless Horseman story, what struck me was how it's really a patchwork of medieval European lore and early American imagination.

The image of a rider without a head has been floating around since the Middle Ages, in places like Ireland's Dullahan Tales, or Germanic folklore about the cop-flossy Horseman.

Then Washington Irving slipped that ghostly skeleton into his 1820 tale, giving it an American setting that stuck.

Irving didn't just drop a headless rider.

I enjoyed it a lot.

But it's literally the biker is a Dullahan who has no head.

And then her head is her biker helmet.

And it's a cat-eared motorcycle helmet.

I'm like getting to it like in a fucking second.

The Dullahan is a messenger of death, an omen of doom.

It is said that when a Dullahan stopped, someone would die, that he would point his whip at a mortal and call out their name.

summoning their soul at which point that person would immediately drop dead in another irish version it's fucking metal as fuck so metal i'm like i mean headbangers ball 100 fuck yeah In another Irish version, the headless Delahan is said to drive a black funeral coach drawn by two, four or six headless horses.

So the horses are also headless.

Again, I'm so sorry.

A fertility god that demanded blood sacrifices via decapitation.

but that after Christianity entered the Emerald Isle, Crom Dub became Dullahan, the demonic harbinger of death.