Of the man known to his patrons only as Van Brunt, nothing certain is recorded before April 1943, when he kept a respectable trade as the riding master of a New York stable, the Spur, Quirt and Stirrup Riding Academy. To those who hired his horses he was simply “Van,” a genial horseman and a devoted collector of postage stamps. Behind that mild front he conceived one of the more theatrical robbery schemes the city had known, taking for his model the old legend of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

By night Van Brunt rode out into Central Park as a black-cloaked rider without a head, mounted on a night-black horse. Falling upon couples and lone walkers along the park’s lonely byways, he hurled at them a hollow pumpkin “head” fitted with a glass chamber of sleeping gas; the missile burst against its victim, and while the gas did its work the horseman robbed his senseless prey and was gone. A man playing the headless horseman, he reasoned, would be a fool to spend his nights merely frightening people when he might rob them instead — and so he did, until the newspapers were full of him and he had taken his fifth victim.

His undoing began when one of his victims happened to be set upon within sight of the boxer Ted Grant — in truth the masked Wildcat — and his friend Stretch Skinner, who were training nearby. Wildcat gave chase, but the horseman fled into an old abandoned aqueduct that let him vanish at a seeming dead end, leaving behind only a small pair of tongs. Wildcat recognized them not as eyebrow tweezers but as the stamp tongs no serious collector is ever without, and the clue led him back to the riding academy and its stamp-collecting master.

To draw the criminal out, Wildcat had Grant and Skinner pose as a wealthy couple flaunting showy jewels at the Tavern on the Green; the horseman duly struck, and after a running fight to the aqueduct and a last scuffle in a rowboat, Wildcat felled him with a single blow and tore away the mask. Unmasked as Van Brunt, the riding master confessed that he had needed money and had found the headless-horseman legend a perfect disguise, and that he had tried to fix the suspicion on an innocent, talkative stable hand named Pecos. He was handed over to justice and the convict’s stripes (Sensation Comics #16).

Whether Van Brunt ever rode again after his capture has not been recorded.