You’ve probably heard that the number of legs a horse has in the air in a statue indicates how the rider died. Usually it goes something like this:

• 2 legs in the air: rider died in battle
• 1 leg in the air: rider died by wounds made in battle
• 0 legs in the air: rider died by any other reason

As cool of an idea as that would be (to basically homogenize all equestrian statues everywhere. That’s not true.

This “code” mostly holds true for equestrian statues of Gettysburg, however even there you can find exceptions. For example: James Longstreet wasn’t wounded in his battle yet his horse has one foot raised

If you go somewhere with a lot of statues (like Washington which has plenty), you’ll most likely disprove the “rule” easily. For instance, in Washignton, only 10 out of about 30 are “correct”.

There is also no record of any kind of sculptors being aware of this “rule” or of it being a tradition.

So then what happened? Well, if you think about it, the odds of a statue being in the “correct” horse posture is 1 in 3. So all “confirmations” are basically statistical probabilities that our brains try to make a pattern of.

This is seen all around the world, because of the same statistical likelihood however, all over the world you can find “incorrect” statues:

Peter the Great actually died due to disease.

So there you go, just one of those things which we would’ve liked to be true because it would’ve been cool, but it’s just a pattern our brains try to find, much like pareidolia:

But that’s another story.