The pumpkin is the newcomer.
For most of its history, the thing we now call a jack-o’-lantern was a turnip. In Ireland and Scotland people hollowed out turnips, mangelwurzels, and sometimes potatoes, cut faces into them, and set an ember or a stub of candle inside. The faces were not meant to be friendly. The lantern was carried on the road or left in a window on the last night of October, looking out.
And the man it was named for didn’t carve it for fun. He was carrying it because he had nowhere else to go.
The legend of Stingy Jack
The story has a dozen versions, which is how you know it was told out loud for a long time before anyone wrote it down. The bones stay the same.
Jack is a drinker, a cheat, and a man nobody in the village trusts with a debt. In some tellings he’s a blacksmith. In most he’s just Jack. One night he ends up drinking with the Devil, and when the bill comes Jack has no money, so he talks the Devil into turning himself into a coin to pay it.
The Devil does it. Jack drops the coin into his pocket, next to a silver cross, and the Devil can’t change back.
Jack lets him go on one condition: the Devil leaves him alone for a year. (In some versions it’s ten.) When the Devil comes back to collect, Jack talks him into climbing an apple tree for one last piece of fruit, then carves a cross into the bark so the Devil can’t climb down. This time the price of freedom is bigger. The Devil has to promise never to take Jack’s soul.
Then Jack dies.
Heaven won’t have him. He was exactly the man everyone said he was. He goes down to hell, and the Devil, who keeps his bargains even when he’d rather not, refuses him too. He turns Jack back into the dark with nothing but a single coal from the fires of hell to see by. Jack puts the ember in a hollowed turnip and walks.
He’s still walking. That light you see out on the bog at night, the one that moves when you look at it: that’s Jack of the Lantern. Jack-o’-Lantern.
Two meanings, one name
The name was in English before the carving was. By the 1600s, “jack-o’-lantern” meant a man carrying a lantern, a night watchman, and it also meant the strange lights that hang over marshes and bogs after dark. English folklore calls those lights will-o’-the-wisp; scholars call them ignis fatuus, “foolish fire.” Every culture that has wetlands seems to have a story about them, and almost every story says the same thing: don’t follow the light.
The Stingy Jack tale explains the light. The carved lantern came later and borrowed the name. Somewhere along the way the story and the object met. The face on the turnip became Jack’s face, or a face meant to scare Jack and anything else wandering on the last night of October.
What Samhain has to do with it (and what it doesn’t)
October 31 was already a serious night in Ireland long before anyone carved anything. Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the turn toward winter, and it was understood as a night when the boundary between the living and everything else wore thin. People went guising, in disguise, going door to door. They kept fires. They were careful about who they let in.
You’ll read that the carved lantern goes back to the ancient Celts. Be skeptical of that. The written evidence for carved turnip lanterns in Ireland and Scotland is mostly from the 1800s, told by people who remembered doing it as children. The custom is old, but “ancient” is a guess. The honest version is more interesting anyway. The lantern is a folk practice that grew up around an older night, and it stuck because it did a job.
The job was the warning. A face in the window, lit from inside, facing the road.
Jack’s cousins around the world
The lights Jack is blamed for show up almost everywhere people live near wetlands, and nearly every culture gave them a person.
In England they were will-o’-the-wisp, Jack-o’-lantern, Hob-and-his-lantern, and Peg-a-lantern, a whole family of names for the same small moving flame. In Wales the canwyll corff, the corpse candle, was a light seen moving along the road a funeral would later take. In Scandinavia and Germany the lights were often the souls of people who had moved boundary stones in life and were condemned to walk the fields they had cheated. In parts of the American South the same lights were called jack-ma-lanterns and were said to lead travelers into the swamp until they drowned.
The details change, and the core stays the same. The light belongs to someone who can’t rest. It wants company. Don’t follow it.
Stingy Jack’s version is unusual because the soul isn’t punished for violence or murder. He’s punished for being clever. He beat the Devil twice and won exactly what he asked for, which was to be left alone. The joke of the story is that he got it.
How to carve it the old way
If you want to try the original, a turnip works, and a rutabaga (what the Scots and Irish often mean by “turnip”) works better because it’s bigger.
- Cut the top off and keep it as a lid.
- Hollow it with a sturdy spoon and a paring knife. This takes much longer than a pumpkin. The flesh is dense, and your wrist will know about it.
- Leave the walls thick, about half an inch, or the face will split.
- Carve the face small and mean. The old ones weren’t cute. Narrow eyes, a slit of a mouth.
- Use a tealight, not an ember, and punch a small hole in the lid for the smoke.
It will shrivel within a few days and start to look like a shrunken head, which, honestly, is the point.
Across the Atlantic
Irish and Scottish emigrants carried the custom to North America, and the great wave of Irish emigration during and after the Famine of the 1840s carried a lot of it. In America they found the pumpkin. Pumpkins are native to the Americas, they’re bigger than any turnip, and you can carve one in a quarter of the time. By the late 1800s the pumpkin lantern was a fixture of American Halloween, and the turnip was something your grandmother talked about.
What didn’t travel as well was the story. Most people who carve a pumpkin this year won’t know there was ever a Jack, or that the face was supposed to be his.
The story in October 31
“Stingy Jack’s Lantern” is the fourteenth story in October 31, and its dateline doesn’t give a year:
> October 31st — a porch in the Irish countryside, and long before that.
It opens on an old man named Cormac with a pumpkin between his knees and the good knife in his hand, the one his late wife Maeve used to say would take his thumb off one day if age didn’t get there first. Age got there first, at least to Maeve. The knife remains undefeated.
That’s all I’ll say about where it goes. The dateline tells you there are two times in this story, and the second one is much older than the porch. Knowing the legend above won’t tell you how it ends.
Why the old version is scarier
The modern jack-o’-lantern is decoration. The old one was a stance. It said: I know what walks tonight. I know the rules. Keep going.
That’s what every story in October 31 is built on. The warnings came from people who had a reason for them. The turnip in the window wasn’t there to be admired. It was there because someone, once, had needed it.
Carve your pumpkin this year. Put it where the road can see it.
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Stingy Jack’s Lantern is Night 14 of 31 in October 31, thirty-one folk horror stories set on Halloween night across six centuries. Read it on Amazon → · Free with Kindle Unlimited.
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Next: The Banshee Doesn’t Scream, She Keens: The Real Irish Legend