Skyrim's Headless Horseman Has No Head Because Bethesda Keeps Blowing It Up
Skyrim is a fantastic game with a world that feels alive due to its random encounters. Every five minutes you're interrupted by a bandit, a travelling bard, or a massive dragon, and these encounters make the whole world feel a lot more special as a result. The game's Headless Horseman is one of the more interesting and mysterious encounters, though it's never really explained how the poor soul lost his head to begin with.
Well, a bunch of Skyrim devs recently came together (thanks PCGamesN) and were asked about their favorite features and development tricks that fans may not be aware of. Justin Schram - a level designer for Skyrim and Fallout 4 - was the one to lift the lid on the mystery of the Headless Horseman, and his fate his a lot more depressing than any of us imagined.
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It turns out that in order to make the Headless Horseman actually headless, Bethesda needed to get a little creative. Fellow dev Joel Burgess had recently figured out how to make a character headless without killing them, by using a script command when they spawn in an NPC to make their head explode. Obviously, you'd see this happen if you were to see the person spawn, so characters were hidden behind walls and corners to be spawned outside the player's line of vision. You can probably imagine how this relates to the Headless Horseman.
Using this script, Schram added a horseman to the game, put a ghost shader over the top of him, blows up his noggin as soon as he spawns, and has him travel to one specific destination across the whole of Skyrim (Hamvir's Rest) no matter where you see him spawn.
That means the next time you encounter the Headless Horseman out on your travels, maybe
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