More on the Dullahan

 Season 1, Episode 9: Lost Your Mind

The dullahan is a kind of Irish fairy.  They usually ride around on horseback with their head tucked under one arm.  The head is gruesome looking with a smile that stretches across the face and skin that looks like stale dough or moldy cheese.  Sometimes they drive a carriage, which is made out of bones and driven by six black horses that move so fast that the friction of the wheels sets fire to bushes on the sides of the road.

It's said that when the dullahan stops riding, someone will die, and when they ride up and say your name, they call your soul from your body and you drop dead.  The eyes in its head can see all around, so it holds its head aloft in order to see the whole countryside and find the home of a dying person.  If you happen to spot a dullahan riding across the country, instead of saying your name, it may just throw a bucket of blood on you or blind you in one eye.  They have an irrational fear of gold, so carrying some with you is a decent defense.

The dullahan is inspiration for the Headless Horseman in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but my favorite fictional dullahan is from the 1959 live action Disney movie, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, where the banshee calls the dullahan to take Darby's dying daughter away, but Darby offers himself in her stead, which leads to a scene of him sitting around in the dullahan's creepy bone carriage while on his trip to the afterlife.

I took some extreme liberties with this one.  There's no evidence at all that dullahans could put their heads back on their shoulders and have the heads look not creepy enough to interact with people.  But I thought the extremeness of their strangeness was a good jumping off point to tell a story about the friction between honoring your roots and assimilating into American society.