Every October, millions of pumpkins are sold throughout the United States. These squashes are cut, scooped, and carved into faces both jocular and threatening to celebrate the yearly coming of the spooky season. Jack-o-lanterns, however, weren’t always made with pumpkins—they were originally carved from turnips in Ireland, where the folktale of Stingy Jack first gave rise to the eponymous gourds.
According to legend, Stingy Jack was a drunk and a curmudgeonly trickster. One night at a pub, he ran into the Devil, who, fed up with Jack’s shenanigans, had come to claim his soul. Startled but never cowed, Jack asked Old Nick to have one last drink before going to hell. The Devil graciously agreed, but Jack was strapped for cash. To pay for the drink, Satan agreed to turn himself into a coin and jumped into Jack’s pocket, only to realize he had fallen into a trap. A cross in Jack’s wallet stripped Satan of all his powers, and Jack only agreed to free him in exchange for a ten year hiatus from hell.
The Devil arrived quite punctually to collect Jack’s soul exactly ten years later. Jack, of course, had been expecting him, and he asked the Devil to pick him an apple to eat before he died. Seeing no harm in the request, Satan jumped into the nearest apple tree, which Jack proceeded to surround with crosses he had been hiding in his pocket. Finding himself trapped, Satan grudgingly agreed to relinquish his claim on Jack’s soul.
When the trickster finally died, his soul went up to heaven. Reputations travel faster than the dead, however, and Saint Paul refused to let Jack through heaven’s gates. Left with no other choice, Jack went to meet the only other person renting homes to the dearly departed. Unfortunately, Satan remembered his promise to never collect Jack’s soul, and he refused him entrance to hell. When Jack asked the Devil where to go, Satan simply told him that he would have to wander the world forever. As a final gesture, he threw Jack a flaming-hot coal and kicked him out onto the doorstep of hell. In the darkness of purgatory, Jack placed the coal into a turnip, turning it into a lantern.
The Irish believed that mysterious lights in the Irish marshes (which are actually produced by combustion of gasses) were a sign of Jack’s wandering spirit, or “Jack of the Lantern.” To protect themselves from this malevolent spirit, locals carved turnips with faces and placed them in their windows on Halloween. When Irish immigrants came to America, they replaced their turnips with pumpkins, creating the jack-o-lanterns that we know and love today.
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