The origin of the tradition of disemboweling and mutilating pumpkins every Halloween?
Well, wonder no longer! We got it from an old Irish ghost story - The Legend of Stingy Jack.
The story of the jack-o-lantern starts, as all great stories do, with a drunk Irishman. He was known in his small village as Stingy Jack, and paying his tab at the pub was his least favorite activity.
Jack wasn’t exactly well-liked in his community, and the townsfolk were known to gossip about him in private. One evening, Satan himself caught wind of Jack’s antics and decided he needed to take his soul.
Jack wasn’t just stingy, though - he was also cunning.
When Satan appeared to Stingy Jack and told him it was his last call, Jack asked to have one for the road. He wanted to go out doing the one thing he loved - drinking!
The pair shuffled over to Jack’s favorite pub and ordered a pint. The barman demanded payment, but Jack had no money. The stingy drunk hashed out a plan.
Jack suggested that Satan use his powers to turn himself into a silver coin to pay the tab. Satan, for some reason, agreed.
Satan shrunk himself into a shiny silver coin. Stingy Jack promptly pocketed the coin. In that pocket, he had something else - a crucifix.
The Devil was stuck in coin form, unable to transform back due to the power of the cross. Now, Jack had total power over Satan.
Jack demanded that Satan leave him alone for ten more years. Satan had no choice but to accept. Jack released Satan from his woolen prison, and the two parted ways.
Precisely ten years later, Satan returned to Jack’s small Irish village to collect Jack’s filthy soul. Jack knew what was up, but he wanted a little snack before he went to the underworld.
Stingy Jack spotted an apple tree and asked that Satan climb the tree and snag an apple for him. I can’t tell you why, but the Devil played along.
Once Satan was in the tree, Jack quickly carved a cross into the stump. For the second time, Satan was stuck and at Stingy Jack’s mercy.
This time, Jack was more demanding. He didn’t like the idea of the underworld, presumably because it didn’t have booze. Stingy Jack demanded that Satan never take his soul.
Once again, the Devil reluctantly accepted.
Years later, Stingy Jack’s body gave out and his soul began the great journey into the afterlife. He first met St. Peter but was turned away from the Pearly Gates because he wasn’t exactly a godly man.
Jack went down to Hades, but he was turned away there because Satan swore he’d never take his soul.
Thus, Stingy Jack was condemned to spend eternity as a shade in the world of the living.
The Devil delighted in his adversary’s grim fate and threw him a coal of hellfire just to rub it in. Jack, ever clever, carved up a turnip and put the coal inside, creating a lantern.
From then on, Jack’s soul has wandered the realm of the living with his turnip lantern lighting his way.
Just like that, from the ashes of Stingy Jack rose Jack of the Lantern - Jack O’ Lantern for short.
The tale of Stingy Jack was created to explain strange flickering lights that people would sometimes see hovering over peat bogs.
Legend has it that when you see one of those lights, it’s Stingy Jack’s spirit wandering around. Sometimes he’d lead a person home, sometimes to their death.
Today, we’re pretty sure it’s a natural phenomenon caused by combusting swamp gasses, but I’ll let the science folk explain that.
Across Ireland and Scotland, people started carving their own versions of Jack’s lantern. They carved spooky faces into turnips or potatoes to ward off evil spirits.
The tradition traveled to England where large beets were commonly used in the same way.
Immigrants from all over Ireland, Scotland, and England carried that tradition across the Atlantic when they began settling in North America.
Now instead of carving turnips or beets, they used pumpkins. They were much larger and easier to carve, especially for children.
The Irish Potato Famine in the mid-1800s led to a massive wave of Irish immigrants in North America. That event likely made jack-o-lanterns even more common.
By 1866, jack-o-lanterns had become a staple of Halloween celebrations. An Ontario newspaper noted on November 1 of that year:
The old time custom of keeping up Hallowe’en was not forgotten last night by the youngsters of the city. They had their maskings and their merry-makings, and perambulated the streets after dark in a way which was no doubt amusing to themselves. There was a great sacrifice of pumpkins from which to make transparent heads and face, lighted up by the unfailing two inches of tallow candle.
When you’re carving your next jack-o-lantern, just remember that you’re memorializing a drunk Irish jerk who outwitted the Devil himself on two separate occasions.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!