When Leora Dillon watched Disney’s animated feature The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as a child, the gothic tale of horror failed to frighten her.
Quite the opposite.
“I always dreamed as a kid that I wanted to be the Headless Horseman,” she said recently. “I wanted a big, black horse.”
Decades later, her childhood dream came true. By then, Dillon was running her own boarding and training business, Corinthian Equestrian Center, in Warwick, N.Y.
In 2017, that big, black horse appeared in the form of Eagle, a four-year-old gelding that had spent its life pulling carts. One October evening, Dillon decided to dress up as Washington Irving’s infamous villain and ride Eagle into town.
“People went nuts, they were blown away,” she recalled. “They couldn’t believe it.”
That impromptu performance led to appearances at local events that she did just for fun, until “people started saying, ‘Hey, I’ll pay you to come down.’ I didn’t even think there was a business aspect to it.”
Thus began an endeavor that will bring Dillon to the villages of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown throughout October to portray the evil horseman who pursues Ichabod Crane in Irving’s classic horror story.
She was at the Sleepy Hollow Street Fair on Oct. 5; the Sleepy Hollow High School homecoming football game on Oct. 19; the Sleepy Hollow Film Festival the weekend of Oct. 11; and will be at the Tarrytown Halloween Parade on Oct. 26.
Dillon is taking the entire month off from her job as an ER trauma nurse to ride Falcon, a black Freisan sport horse that is among the dozens of animals she’s rescued.
At the parade she’ll be joined by her husband, Gerry Silveira, who’ll be astride Eagle dressed as Ichabod; her friend Kristin Vaccarro will be in costume as the Grim Reaper while riding Marley, another rescue horse.
You might wonder how a headless rider knows where she’s going with a pair of shoulder pads encasing her head and black mesh covering her face. “It’s very hard for me to see, but the horse can see and he ain’t gonna run into nothing,” Dillon said with a laugh.
Dillon usually remains silent during her visits (after all, the Horseman has no head) but gestures to the crowd to pet the horses, who’ve become celebrities in their own rite.
The horses “love the attention,” Dillon said. “They love doing the parades, they’re never spooked at anything. They love the people, they love being petted by the people. They have as much fun as we do.”
The horses wear cleated shoes specially made to protect their legs while on pavement, she said.
Julia McCue, owner of Horsefeathers in Tarrytown and a member of the Chamber of Commerce and parade committee, recommended Dillon to replace Hugh Frances, who retired from the Horseman’s role.
“It’s amazing, the things that she can do on horseback, and how well-trained her horses are,” McCue said. “When I met her it was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is a force of nature.’ This woman is the real deal.”
A particular crowd-pleaser is the Friesan horses’ trot, she said.
“It adds a little bit of whimsy,” McCue said. “You see this big scary character on this big black horse and the horse is dancing.”
corinthianequestriancenter.com
