Ever Wonder Who Jack-o’-Lantern Really was?

Every Halloween, we grab a big, round, orange pumpkin, slice off the top like a witch’s hat, scoop out its gooey guts, and carve a grinning face. With a flickering candle inside, the pumpkin transforms into the ultimate Halloween icon, the jack-o’-lantern. But who exactly is Jack behind that eerie glow?

Long before pumpkins ruled porches, people in Ireland and Britain carved creepy faces into turnips, potatoes, and beets to keep evil spirits away. The custom traces back to the ghostly legend of Stingy Jack, a trickster who outwitted the Devil but paid a chilling price. Barred from both heaven and hell, Jack was doomed to wander the earth with only a burning coal for light. He placed the ember inside a hollowed-out turnip, thus creating the very first Jack’s lantern.

It’s fitting that a character trapped in an earthly purgatory should become the lasting symbol of Halloween, a time when people are as wont to offer a “trick” as a “treat”. The character of Jack, a figure who doesn’t fit into heaven or hell, is unusually complex for a figure from a folk tale.

Villagers soon followed suit, carving their own terrifying turnip heads to scare off Jack’s wandering soul and any other ghouls lurking on Halloween night. When Irish immigrants brought the tradition to America, they found pumpkins bigger, brighter, and easier to carve; it was the perfect stand-in for the old-world turnip.

Metal lanterns were quite expensive, so people would hollow out root vegetables. Over time people started to carve faces and designs to allow light to shine through the holes without extinguishing the ember. -source: National Geographic

By 1837, “jack-o’-lantern” was part of American Halloween vocabulary, and by 1866, newspapers were already describing glowing pumpkin heads lighting up the night. Since then, no haunted doorstep has felt complete without that grinning, candlelit guardian warding off spirits and welcoming trick-or-treaters.