Historical Echoes
It’s no wonder that many headless creatures prowl the night among the thousands who annually attend Collinsville’s spirited Halloween parade in the south end of my hometown of Canton, Connecticut. Ever since the American Revolution, headless phantoms have been part of our historical DNA as the grisly story below explains. I offer this version of the long told tale as a Halloween love letter to the quirky, creative community where I live.
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Canton’s Headless Horseman
It could seem like Halloween any night of the year on a stretch of U.S. Route 44 from the Canton Green to the Shoppes at Farmington Valley. Some folks probably wish it was. It would be comforting to think that the ghastly phantom of a headless horseman that occasionally rides out of the low mist gathering at night was merely a plastic masked goblin or cabbage night trickster.
Indeed, the apparition was once flesh and blood, a French paymaster who left Hartford on Horseback early one October morning in 1777. He was bound for Saratoga on the Hartford-Albany Post Road, then a narrow, wagon rutted and muddy track where the four lane blacktop runs today. His battered leather saddle bags were heavy with gold to pay French officers fighting with the American army. With aid of the French, the Americans under the command of Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates had chased a superior force of British regulars and Hessian mercenaries to Saratoga and had them under siege.