Tag: Halloween history

  • Why Every Story in October 31 Happens on the Same Night

    Why Every Story in October 31 Happens on the Same Night

    Moonlit October valley connecting a medieval church, New England meetinghouse, farmhouse, and diner

    When I started October 31, I gave myself one rule: every story had to take place on the last night of October. Not the week of Halloween, and not “around the harvest.” The date, every time, printed at the top of the story like the heading on a field report.

    People have asked why. The short answer is that it’s a very old night, and it’s been a dangerous one for longer than anyone has called it Halloween.

    The night was busy long before the name

    In Ireland and Scotland, the night of October 31 opened Samhain, the turn from harvest into winter. It was understood as a hinge in the year, a night when the boundary between this world and the other one wore thin. Things crossed. People disguised themselves, kept fires, set food out, and thought hard about who they let through the door.

    The church laid its own calendar over the same days. November 1 became All Saints’ Day, or All Hallows. The night before it was All Hallows’ Eve, which is where Halloween comes from. November 2 is All Souls, the day for praying for the ordinary dead. For centuries, across Catholic Europe, the end of October was already the start of a season about the dead.

    Other things happened on that date too. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther is said to have posted his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg, and Protestant countries still keep it as Reformation Day. In Mexico, the Days of the Dead begin as October ends. Different traditions, different reasons, and yet everyone seems to agree that the end of October is when you turn to face the dead.

    What the rule forced

    Writing thirty-one stories on the same date did something I didn’t expect. The date is constant, so everything else has to change. The century, the country, the language, the danger. Every story has to answer the same question differently: what does this night mean here, to these people?

    In 1653, in a Puritan village in Massachusetts Bay, the answer is nothing, officially. The Puritans didn’t keep saints’ days, so it’s an ordinary weekday. But a meetinghouse bell is ringing that isn’t the Sabbath ring, and a girl has to decide whether to walk out and watch.

    In 1665 London it’s the plague year, and the date means only that the weekly bill of the dead has come around again.

    In the 1830s it’s a date pressed into a whaling captain’s private chart, one he has been sailing back toward for nine years.

    In 1996 it’s a Thursday on a South Texas ranch, and the only thing anyone cares about is the third dead goat.

    In a few stories the date is the whole point: the banshee, Stingy Jack, the carnival that only runs one night a year. In others, the characters don’t even notice it’s October 31 until something makes them. That was the fun of it. Sometimes the date is the danger, and sometimes it just shows up on the calendar in the kitchen.

    The warnings are the thread

    Samhain table with candles and autumn fruit

    What ties the stories together is the thing the whole There Be Monsters series is built on: the old warnings.

    The book opens with a page called “The Warning.” Part of it reads:

    > The old warnings were rarely elegant. Do not answer. Do not look. Leave before dark. Feed it first. Count them twice. Keep your hands where the house can see them.

    >

    > They survive because somebody, somewhere, came home frightened enough to tell the next person what had worked.

    Every story is about one of those rules and the person who has to decide whether it’s true. A country doctor who trained in Vienna and doesn’t believe in the valley’s precautions. A woman in a 1544 household who set the bowl down wrong. A trapper who knows his partner always made a point of being under a roof with a fire going before dark on the last night of October, and never asked why.

    On October 31 the rules are strictest, so it’s the best night to find out who breaks them.

    Why thirty-one, and why in order

    Thirty-one stories, one for every night of the month. You can read October 31 in any order you like. Every story stands alone. But the order isn’t random. The early stories are quieter and the pressure builds through the month. The last story is the title story, set in the present, in a small town, and it’s the one where all the warnings in the book begin sounding at once. It’s meant to be read on Halloween.

    That’s what the 31 Nights challenge is: read one story each night in October and finish on the thirty-first. There’s a free printable calendar with every night’s dateline, and I’ll post a companion piece here for each story covering the real history or folklore behind it. Get the calendar →

    The date is the same for everyone

    That’s what I like most about the rule. Every character in the book, from the 1400s stonecutter to the waitress in the diner tonight, is standing on the same night of the year. None of them know about each other. All of them are listening for something.

    This year you’ll be standing on it too.

    Get October 31 on Amazon → · Free with Kindle Unlimited

    T. P. Grimbard

    —

    Previous: The Banshee Doesn’t Scream, She Keens · Next: Witches’ Familiars: Cats, Courts, and Massachusetts Before Salem

  • Stingy Jack: The Real Irish Origin of the Jack-o’-Lantern

    Carved turnip lantern glowing on an Irish cottage windowsill above a misty lane

    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.

    —

    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.

    Take the 31 Nights challenge. One story a night through October, with a free printable calendar. Get the calendar →

    Next: The Banshee Doesn’t Scream, She Keens: The Real Irish Legend