The Dullahan: Ireland’s Headless Horseman and the Death Coach

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Between twelve and one at night, the story goes, a big carriage came through the streets of Kilrush in Co. Clare. The horses had no heads, and neither had the coachmen. Anyone caught in the street had to kneel as it passed, or the whip would strike them dead.

One woman on Vandeleur Street didn’t believe a word of it. She looked out, the whip hit her window, and she was killed. That was written down in Kilrush in the late 1930s, for the Schools’ Collection.

This is Ireland’s headless horseman, the Dullahan. At Halloween he gets mixed up with an American rider holding a pumpkin. Most of the earliest Dullahan stories happen in my own county, Cork. Here is what the old books really say, and what the internet added.

What is a Dullahan?

The Dullahan is a headless phantom from Irish folklore. In some stories it is a rider carrying its own head. In others it drives a black coach pulled by headless horses, and the coach passing or pausing at your door is an omen of death.

That coach is the cóiste bodhar, the death coach. W. B. Yeats summed the creature up in 1892: “This is a most gruesome thing. He has no head, or carries it under his arm.”

The Dullahan comes from country folklore. No medieval Irish text uses the name or describes this figure. The first headless Dullahan stories I can find in print are Croker’s, in 1828.

What does Dullahan mean?

Nobody is sure. In 1828 Croker printed a note from the Irish scholar Edward O’Reilly, who wrote it Dubhlachan and said it meant “a dark sullen person”. Croker queried that, but agreed dubh (DUV), black, was part of the word.

Modern dictionaries don’t settle it. Ó Dónaill gives dúlachán only as a lake trout, and I couldn’t find a goblin entry in Dinneen. So “dark” has some old backing, but the popular “ceann, head” part has nothing behind it.

What does cóiste bodhar mean?

Ó Dónaill glosses cóiste bodhar (KOH-shteh BOW-er, with bow rhyming with cow) as “headless coach, ghostly funeral hearse”. Dinneen has it too.

Bodhar means deaf, and of a sound it means dull or rumbling. So it is the “deaf coach”, a shade off the “silent coach” you’ll often read. Croker spelled it the way it sounded: “Coach a bower”.

The Dullahan legend in Croker’s Cork tales (1828)

Croker was a Cork man. The 1828 second series of his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland has a whole section called The Dullahan.

The Good Woman

Larry Dodd, a horse dealer, is riding home from Cashel on a June evening when he offers a hooded woman a lift. She leads him to the ruined church of Kilnaslattery. He grabs her and finds she has no head: he “had actually held a Dullahan in his embrace”.

Inside, headless people are dancing. Larry wakes next morning in the old church and his new horse is gone. The joke in the title is that a woman without a head is a good woman, because she has no tongue.

Hanlon’s Mill

Near Ballyduff, on the river Awbeg in north Cork, Michael Noonan sees a black coach sweep past without a sound. Six headless black horses pull it, and a headless coachman in black touches them up with a long whip.

Next morning the master of Ballygibblin has taken a fit. By the following night, in Croker’s words, Ballygibblin is “a house of mourning”.

The Death Coach

This is a comic ballad, and a very Cork one. Horses, driver and passengers are all headless. The spokes are dead men’s thigh bones, “the pole is the spine of the back”, and two hollow skulls serve as lamps.

It races from Rathcooney churchyard down the hill of Glanmire, past Lota, up Tivoli and through Cork city, then out the Blackrock road to Ballintemple churchyard. The passengers come “from the parish of Skull” and are bound for the Old Head of Kinsale. Croker loved a pun. His note says the coach is “generally regarded as a sign of death”.

The Headless Horseman

This is the friendliest Dullahan in the book. Charley Culnane is riding home from Fermoy along the Blackwater on a wet night before Christmas. At Kilcummer Hill a rider at least eight feet tall joins him on a headless white horse.

The head sits under his right arm, and Croker compares it to “a large cream cheese hung round with black puddings”. They race across country. The ghost says he broke his neck at Kilcummer a hundred years before, and Charley is the first man brave enough to ride with him.

Then he tucks his head into the pocket of his scarlet hunting coat and vanishes. Nobody dies.

What Yeats said about the Dullahan

In Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Yeats lists the “Dallahan, or headless phantom” among the solitary fairies, beside the púca. He says one used to stand in a Sligo street on dark nights.

He also calls the coach an omen that sometimes comes with the banshee: a black coach “mounted by a coffin” and driven by a Dullahan. Oscar Wilde reviewed the 1888 book and summed it up: “A Dullahan is the most terrible thing in the world.”

The death coach in Ireland: where it was seen

Between 1937 and 1939, Irish schoolchildren wrote down local lore for the Schools’ Collection. A search of the transcribed pages on dúchas.ie finds “Dullahan” only twice, and both times it’s a surname. People talked instead about the headless coach, the death coach or the cóiste bodhar.

Co. Clare

At Doolin, the cóiste bodhar was “never seen but heard”, rattling chains on the roads near Fisherstreet at about two in the morning. When it was heard, it was said, someone whose name began with O had to die. In Clare, that narrows it down very little.

At Ennistymon House, a servant just got the gate open before the coach swept through. Next morning, the story goes, Sir Burton Macnamara died in London. Family records put the old admiral’s death in Dublin, in December 1876. The Dúchas account says about 1889, but T. J. Westropp’s Clare folklore survey of 1910 dates the coach to 11 December 1876.

Co. Galway

Near Kilcolgan, a man drew a cross on the road with his blackthorn stick. The coach vanished at the cross, the account says, but he died a few days later anyway.

For spots you can visit, see my list of haunted places around Ireland. I’d avoid the Doolin road at two in the morning.

How to protect yourself from the Dullahan

In the stories, the coachman’s long whip is the danger. A lady near Cork told Croker the driver could “whip the eyes out of any one” who looked at him.

Croker’s 1828 notes add a coach said to drive through Doneraile every Saturday night and stop at doors. Whoever opened the door had a basin of blood flung in their face.

So the old advice was simple. Don’t look out, don’t open the door, and kneel if it passes.

The Dullahan’s weakness: is it really gold?

Almost every website says gold is the Dullahan’s one weakness. Croker, Yeats, Lady Wilde and Patrick Kennedy never mention it.

If anything, one Clare story puts the headless rider beside gold, not running from it. At Loughville, near Kilnamona, an officer was said to have beheaded the soldier he left minding his gold. Afterwards a headless man on a white horse rode the avenue at midnight and scared off treasure hunters.

The whip made from a human spine is another modern addition. In Croker’s ballad the spine is the coach’s pole, and the coachman’s whip is just long. Doris Sutherland traces these ideas to a web adaptation of Bob Curran’s A Field Guide to Irish Fairies (1997).

Does the Dullahan call out your name?

You’ll often read that the Dullahan shouts a name and that person dies on the spot. None of the old sources I checked say this. I can’t find it before that web adaptation of Curran’s 1997 book.

In Croker, headless figures do call two men by name. The Kilnaslattery dancers hail Larry Dodd, and the horseman shouts at Charley Culnane to stop. Both men live.

Is the Dullahan Crom Dubh?

Some writers say the Dullahan is the old god Crom Dubh, who demanded human heads under King Tigernmas. There is no early source for it, and Sutherland finds this in the same Curran adaptation.

The medieval Dindshenchas names a different idol, Crom Cruach (krum KROO-akh), at Mag Slécht in Co. Cavan. Some scholars think the two Croms are one figure, but no early source ties either to headless riders. The Dindshenchas says Tigernmas died worshipping Crom Cruach there on Samain eve. The sacrifice it describes is of firstborn children.

Crom Dubh (krum DUV) belongs to Lughnasa, the harvest festival of late July and early August. And the Dindshenchas says Crom Cruach was formed of gold, an odd ancestor for a creature supposedly afraid of it.

The Dullahan and Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow came out in 1820. His horseman is said to be a Hessian trooper who lost his head to a cannonball. After Ichabod Crane vanishes, a smashed pumpkin turns up.

No source I’ve found shows Irving took it from Ireland. Scholars since Henry Pochmann in 1930 have traced Irving’s debts to German writers, including Musäus and Bürger. And Croker’s Dullahan stories came out in 1828, eight years after Irving’s.

Croker’s own notes list headless horses in England and Wales, phantom coaches in Scotland and Denmark, and a skeleton hearse in Brittany. The two horsemen are cousins at most.

Is the Dullahan a Halloween creature?

Not in any of the old sources quoted here. Croker’s Dullahans ride in June and before Christmas, and the Doneraile coach ran on Saturday nights. The Halloween link is modern, though a headless coachman suits October. For the old traditions of the night, see how the Irish invented Halloween.

The Dullahan in film, anime (Durarara!!) and games

In Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), a banshee calls up the Dullahan and the death coach to take Katie away. In the Japanese series Durarara!! (light novels from 2004, anime from 2010), Celty Sturluson is a dullahan from Ireland hunting Tokyo for her stolen head. She rides a black motorbike that neighs like a horse. Dullahans also turn up in video and tabletop games, where a lot of the gold lore now lives.

Dullahan FAQ

What is the Dullahan’s weakness?

The internet says gold, but none of the old sources I checked back that up. In the older accounts, you kept safe by kneeling, keeping the door shut and not looking out.

What happens if a Dullahan says your name?

In the old sources, the name isn’t a death sentence. Croker’s headless figures call Larry Dodd and Charley Culnane by name, and both survive. The omen was simply the coach passing or stopping at a house.

How do you pronounce Dullahan?

Say DULL-a-hawn. The Irish death coach, cóiste bodhar, is said KOH-shteh BOW-er.

Is the Sleepy Hollow Headless Horseman based on the Dullahan?

There’s no evidence of it. Irving’s story came out in 1820, eight years before Croker’s tales. Scholars point to German writers instead.

Is the Dullahan good or evil?

Mostly a grim omen, and its whip can blind or kill. But Croker’s headless horseman at Kilcummer is friendly to a brave rider.

More Irish folklore

• How the Irish Invented Halloween: Samhain, Turnip Lanterns and Barmbrack
• Banshee: The Wailing Women of Irish Folklore
• The Púca (Pooka): Ireland’s Shape-Shifter
• Cat Sìth: The Fairy Cat of Scottish and Irish Folklore
• 10 Haunted Places Around Ireland That You Have To Visit
• 10 Incredible Celtic Gods and Goddesses
• 5 Irish Myths You Probably Believe (But Are Totally False!)

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