Jack-o’-lantern

“Jack with a lantern” was at first a name for the will-o’-the-wisp, the light seen over marshes at night. John Brand’s Popular Antiquities (1853 edition) gives “Will with a wisp, and Jack with a lanthorn” as names for it, because people believed the light was an evil spirit that led travellers into bogs where they died. Samuel Johnson explained Shakespeare’s “played the Jack with us” as “played Jack with a lantern”.

Irish schoolchildren who wrote down local folklore for the Schools’ Collection still told of Jack as that light. At Clonfinlough, Co. Offaly, Jack was refused by St Peter, turned away from purgatory, and met at the gates of hell by the devil, who left a red mark on his face: “the red mark is a light, and anyone who sees Jack and his light is sure to go astray.” At Lisheennaheltia, Co. Galway, he was “not good enough to go to heaven and was not bad enough to go to hell”, and “We often see Jack in the bog at night”.

The turnip lantern is older in Ireland than the pumpkin. In 1943 a schoolteacher near Fintown, Co. Donegal, sent the National Museum of Ireland a turnip lantern of the kind always made there around 1900; the museum keeps a painted plaster cast of it. Pamela O’Neill of the University of Sydney describes Gaelic lanterns lit with a smouldering peat or ember, and sometimes a candle, and gives two possible origins: the peat carried to light the way, or frightening off spirits before they could do harm.

In New England the pumpkin was carved before it was a Halloween lantern. John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Pumpkin” (1844), written in thanks for a Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, remembers boyhood autumns “When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, / Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!” Lisa Bitel, a historian at the University of Southern California, writes that carved turnips became jack-o’-lanterns in America because pumpkins were plentiful there and easier to carve.