The urbane and civilized narrator of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" gives a sense of ironic distance to the narrative. The story is one of simple country people, of a very different type from the well-travelled sophisticate Washington Irving. This is most evident when he is describing Ichabod's reputation for learning:

He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s “History of New England Witchcraft,” in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.

The narrator's familiarity with the reader here creates a sense of distance from Ichabod and his superstition, which is understood by both narrator and reader to be rather ludicrous and the product of very little learning. The same is true of the extensive descriptions of Baltus Van Tassel's wealth:

Here rows of resplendent pewter, ranged on a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one corner stood a huge bag of wool, ready to be spun; in another, a quantity of linsey-woolsey just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, and strings of dried apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons along the walls, mingled with the gaud of red peppers; and a door left ajar gave him a peep into the best parlor, where the claw-footed chairs and dark mahogany tables shone like mirrors...

This is impressive to the schoolmaster and the people of Sleepy Hollow, but not to the author of Tales of the Alhambra. Irving's confidential tone with the reader lets us in on the joke in these preliminary descriptions and has the same effect on our perception of the headless horseman. The author does not need to spell out what happens for us to distance ourselves from Ichabod's point of view and see this as a piece of comic folklore rather than a horror story.