What If He Got His Head Back?

The Dullahan, the Headless Horseman, and a Deal with the Devil

20 December 2025 ~ 2 min read

Most Americans know the Headless Horseman. Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow gave us the image—a spectral rider galloping through the night, a jack-o’-lantern where his head should be, terrorizing Ichabod Crane across a bridge in the Hudson Valley. It’s one of the foundational stories of American horror. What most readers don’t know is that Irving’s horseman has an older, darker ancestor across the Atlantic.

The dullahan is an Irish death figure—a headless rider who carries his own decaying head under one arm and drives a coach drawn by black horses. Where Irving’s Horseman is a local ghost story, the dullahan is something more elemental. He doesn’t haunt a particular road or valley. He rides wherever death is coming, and when he stops and speaks your name, you die. No negotiation, no escape. In Irish folklore, the dullahan belongs to the Morrígan—the goddess of war, fate, and sovereignty—and he serves as one of her instruments of ending. He is hers, absolutely and without question.

As I was writing The Morrígan’s Game, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dullahan. Not the horror of him—the tragedy. Here’s a figure who was once whole, who lost his head (the folklore doesn’t always explain how), and who’s spent centuries riding through the dark carrying the rotting evidence of what he used to be. That’s not just frightening. That’s sad. And sadness, in my experience, is where the best story questions come from.

So I asked the question nobody asks: what if the dullahan got his head back?

What if someone offered him the one thing he’d lost—his wholeness, his identity, his face—in exchange for a favor? And what if that someone was the Devil, who has his own reasons for wanting a headless death rider in his debt? And what if the Morrígan, whose creature the dullahan has always been, didn’t appreciate another power meddling with what belongs to her?

I’ll let the novel answer those questions. But I will say this: the dullahan’s story in The Morrígan’s Game became one of my favorite threads to write, because it’s about the cost of getting what you want. The Headless Horseman is terrifying because he has no head. The dullahan in this novel is terrifying for a different reason—because he does.

— Liam