In most stories, with each event, there is a mood displayed through the setting. It can be good, bad, romantic, mysterious and much more. In the case of "The Devil and Tom Walker," the mood is eerie. The author, Washington Irving, uses explicit setting descriptions to create the perfect mood for his characters. The main setting, the swamp, creates an overall mood by forming visual and sensory images, triggering feelings with those images, and combining those feelings into the mood.

Irving provides the reader with an abundance of imagery in the story, especially when describing the main setting: the swamp. Part of the main focus is on that swamp, being that it is the terrible abode of the devil himself. The swamp was portrayed by Irving as "thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks...which made it dark at noonday," and "full of pits and quagmires...where...