Der Kopflose Reiter

Before Washington Irving ever wrote a word, someone lost their head at White Plains.

Michael Reiter is a blacksmith's son, seized from a market square in the hills of Hesse and sold, like twelve thousand of his countrymen, into a war that isn't his. Marched across an ocean to fight for a king he's never seen, against rebels he's been taught to fear, Michael learns quickly that survival means one thing only: getting the frightened boys in his file home alive.

He almost succeeds.

From the smoke of Long Island to the ashes of a burning New York, through a summer heat that feels like a curse and a winter that promises none, Michael fights not for glory, but for the eighteen-year-old beside him who still flinches at cannon fire. Then, on a hillside above White Plains called Chatterton's Hill, a single cannon shot ends everything he was.

And begins the legend that would outlive him by two hundred and fifty years.

Rooted in the documented campaigns of 1776, from the Battle of Long Island to the Great Fire of New York to the fight for Chatterton's Hill, and grounded in the one true, unsettling fact behind Washington Irving's most famous ghost story, DER KOPFLOSE REITER: The Rise of the Horseman tells the tale Irving never did. Not the schoolmaster who fled him. The soldier who became him.

A Gothic historical novelette for readers who want their folklore to have footnotes, and their ghost stories to have a heartbeat.