Character Profile: Ty from Sleepy Hollow

Character Profile: Ty from Sleepy Hollow For a little while, Ty looks like the person in this group who might actually stop things before they go too far. He's Craig's roommate. They joke around at the beginning, they share an apartment, and Craig trusts him enough to ask for help finding Katie. When Brian gets Craig onto the railroad tracks, Ty starts objecting. Once the train is coming, he's the one trying to cut Craig free. If that were all we saw, you could read him as somebody who went along with a terrible idea, panicked when it became real and then failed to save his friend. But the rest of Sleepy Hollow doesn't let him stay in that version of the story. Ty helped plan the intimidation. He knew the old tracks and suggested the location. He was also sleeping with Katie, and the two of them were trying to get access to the history exams through Craig. He wasn't just pulled into Brian's problem at the party. He had his own reasons for wanting Craig to cooperate. Then, after Craig dies, Ty helps make the suicide explanation stick. Katie tries to explain the note Craig was carrying, and Ty tells the police that Craig had been depressed and that she might be in denial. That's a deliberate choice. He knows what happened, but he gives them a different explanation because he doesn't want to go to jail. What makes him worth talking about is that the guilt is still there. He struggles to sleep. He's frightened. He sees Craig and the Horseman in ways he can't easily dismiss. None of that pushes him into telling the truth, though. He keeps trying to keep everybody quiet and make the problem go away. When the Horseman starts killing the others, Ty eventually thinks he's found a way out. The legend says it can't leave Tarrytown. He gets across the bridge and starts talking as though he's beaten it, even dismissing the other men as pawns. Craig crosses anyway. Ty's memories then expose Katie's involvement, which gives Craig another name to pursue. That's a particularly ugly end for somebody who spent so much effort controlling what other people knew. The version of events he sold to the police can't help him when Craig can see what he was actually doing. I don't think Ty's guilt is fake. I think the problem is that he keeps treating his own fear as a reason to protect himself rather than a reason to admit what he did. He has several chances to make a different choice. He keeps choosing the cover-up. Source: Grimm Fairy Tales presents Sleepy Hollow #1–4.