Ichabod Crane quietly faces down the town of Sleepy Hollow. A NEW VERSION OF AMERICA'S FIRST GHOST STORY____Meet American Literatures Original Outcast. He's a suprisingly different type of hero now. “A man’s body is being pulled out of the river tonight. I am watching, crouched in the reeds. I can see the dead man’s face. He has a long neck with a sharp beak of a nose. His head is small and flat. He looks like a dead crane. History will remember him as a Crane. Ichabod Crane. Unfortunately history will get it wrong, for I am Ichabod Crane. Thankfully, I look nothing like the deranged soul that will bear my name.”______ Reluctant Revolutionary War veteran Andrew Stevens is a new agent for the Inspector General. While roaming the countryside, he discovers a reclusive escaped servant girl. She is hiding her beauty behind dirt and rags. She tells him that there’s something terribly wrong in Sleepy Hollow; something she’s too ashamed to admit. The strong, but mild mannered Stevens decides to investigate the town with a new identity, Ichabod Crane, schoolmaster. Brom Bones and the local farmers bully him as a sissy, but Katrina, the town beauty, starts to see through his charade. Fifteen year old Phoebe and her best friend Ingrid develop a fascination with Stevens. Seen through the eyes of school girls with crushes, they secretly watch him and discover a new kind of hero. On Halloween he discovers the town secret and meets seven headless ghosts as he rides into legend on the Hessian Bridge.____________ "When I watched the Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as a boy, I saw only a funny story, with Ichabod Crane as the goat. It never occurred to me that it was sending a message—a person who thinks too much is suspicious and subject to ridicule. I decided to write a new version, one in which a seemingly weak schoolmaster becomes a different kind of hero. It’s a version that I hope is welcomed in the twenty-first centuy."______A.Van Kraft