A Short History of the Jack-o'-Lantern

The carved, candle-lit pumpkin is one of Halloween's most recognizable images, and it starts with a folktale, not a pumpkin at all.

The tale of Stingy Jack

Irish folklore tells of "Stingy Jack," a miserly, trickster figure who supposedly tricked the Devil on more than one occasion — and, as a result of the deals he'd struck, ended up barred from both Heaven and Hell after he died. Doomed to wander the earth in darkness, the story goes that the Devil tossed him a single burning coal to light his way, which Jack placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to serve as a lantern — earning him the nickname "Jack of the Lantern," shortened over time to jack-o'-lantern.

Turnips before pumpkins

Long before pumpkins entered the picture, people across Ireland, Scotland, and England carved turnips, beets, and potatoes into crude faces and set candles inside them, placing the finished lanterns in windows or by doorways on Samhain and Halloween night specifically to ward off Stingy Jack's wandering spirit and other unwelcome visitors during the thin-veil night — a direct, practical extension of the same protective logic behind bonfires and disguises.

The pumpkin swap

When Irish and Scottish immigrants brought the tradition to North America in the 19th century, they found a vegetable that turnips back home couldn't compete with: pumpkins, native to the Americas, are larger, softer, and dramatically easier to hollow out and carve than a turnip. The swap happened quickly and thoroughly enough that most people today have never seen a traditional turnip jack-o'-lantern at all (they're genuinely unsettling — worth an image search if you're curious what the original version looked like).

From ward to decoration

As Halloween secularized over the 20th century, the jack-o'-lantern shifted from an explicitly protective object into mainly a decorative and creative one — elaborate and competitive carving is now its own hobby, with organized contests and record-sized pumpkins grown specifically for the purpose. But the protective framing hasn't disappeared entirely: plenty of practitioners still light a jack-o'-lantern on Samhain night with the original warding intention in mind, alongside its role as, simply, a fun thing to carve with kids.