In my recent essay “Eerie Rider: The Headless Horseman’s Forays into Pop Culture” (included in my e-book The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Ultimate Annotated Edition), I traced various post-“Legend” career moments of Washington Irving’s galloping Hessian. Here’s one more (surprising) example of a text that I would argue falls under the shadow of Sleepy Hollow: Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho.

The surname that Bloch gives to his (seeming) female lead, Mary Crane, echoes that of Irving’s famous character Ichabod Crane. Such connection might seem facile at first, but grows more intriguing when one considers Mary’s death at the hands of Norman Bates (in a scene that plays out quite differently from Hitchcock’s film adaptation):

Then she did see it there–just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair, and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn’t a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman.

Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

And her head.

Just as Ichabod is primed for Brom Bones’s ostensible prank by the dark tales told earlier that evening at the Van Tassel party, Mary Crane’s mistaken perception of her murderer as a crazy old woman is influenced by her previous discussion with Norman of his mentally ill mother. The apparently floating head in the shower steam recalls the Hessian’s disembodied noggin that Ichabod spies. Mary’s sudden beheading (vs. the multiple stab wounds to the torso suffered by her filmic counterpart Marion) forms a more graphic version of the hapless fate of the brained Ichabod in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The felling of the schoolteacher comes at a great surprise to Ichabod (and the reader), since he believes he has survived the Horseman’s midnight chase by crossing the church bridge. In Bloch’s novel, Mary ironically believes that she has Norman to thank for her “safety” and “future security” (her conversation with him convinces her to return the money she has stolen). Her path for moral redemption mapped out, Mary promptly decides to “take a nice, long hot shower. Get the dirt off her hide, just as she was going to get the dirt cleaned out of her insides.” Alas, Mary never gets the chance to “come clean”: before she can shampoo with some Head & Shoulders (as it were), the cross-dressing Norman removes her head from her shoulders.

So by employing the surname Crane, Bloch embeds a clue that in hindsight foreshadows a climactic act of terrible head trauma. I imagine that Irving’s masterful melding of the comic and the macabre in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” naturally appealed to Bloch, perhaps the genre’s most notable figure when it comes to the mixing of humor and horror. A hint of Bloch’s wicked wit can be detected, for example, earlier in this chapter that concludes with Mary’s beheading. When first shown her motel room, Mary notices “the shower stall in the bathroom beyond. Actually, she would have preferred a tub, but this would do.” And it does just fine, at least in terms of the blood bath it soon encompasses.