Change is inevitable. Very few holiday traditions remain in their original form. One such tradition is the jack-o’-lantern. Simple. Artful. Practical. Fun. It is just as easy to imagine children on the Indiana frontier carving pumpkins two hundred years ago the same exact way as children do today. While it is true that people have been carving jack-o’-lanterns for centuries, not all of them were made from pumpkins.
And what about that pumpkin? Exactly what is it anyway? Is it a fruit? Is it a squash? Is it a gourd? The answer is yes to all of the above. A pumpkin is part of the Cucurbitaceae family, which includes almost 1,000 species including cucumbers, cantaloupes, honeydew, and more. However, if you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, a pumpkin is technically a berry, but so are watermelons, cucumbers, bananas, and tomatoes. Mind blown.
But THAT is a discussion for another article. We are here to talk about jack-o’-lanterns. And of course, the tradition generates from an ancient Irish legend brought to the United States by Irish immigrants. A jack-o’-lantern is the earthly reminder of an Irishman named “Stingy Jack,” a blacksmith of the lowest order who cheated the Devil twice and got away with it. The main character of the story goes by many names. Stingy Jack is variously known as Jack the Smith, Drunk Jack, Flaky Jack, and of course as the mascot of the holiday, Jack-o’-lantern.
As the story goes, in Ireland’s ancient times, there lived a drunkard known throughout the land as a liar, a cheat, and a grifter. One fateful night, Satan overheard the tale of Jack’s slick and shady ways. Jack was a two-faced, deceitful schemer who thrived on manipulating people. His selfish spirit possessed not a shred of humanity or kindness for anyone. Even the homeless beggars shunned him. Impressed by the stories, the devil determined to find out for himself whether Jack lived up to such a vile reputation. He found Jack drunk, aimlessly wandering the countryside. The devil lay in wait for the drunkard, his body blocking the cobblestone path.
As Jack stumbled forward, he could not believe his eyes. Here was a wicked-looking man, his head resting in the palm of his hand topping a crooked elbow, an eerie grimace on his face. Jack, the wayward product of a good Irish-Catholic family, knew instinctively that it was the devil himself. Satan had finally come to collect his malevolent soul. Jack fell to his knees and begged the devil for one last request. He asked the devil for one final trip to the local pub to drink ale before he whisked him off to Hell. Since alcohol was considered to be the “devil’s brew,” Lucifer saw no reason to deny Jack’s request.
Satan took Jack to the local pub where the two quickly got blotto drunk. When it came time to pay the tab, neither man had any money. Jack convinced the devil to turn himself into a silver coin with which to pay the bartender. Satan could then change back when the bartender wasn’t looking. Impressed by Jack’s quick-thinking nefarious tactics, the devil did so. Shrewdly, Jack quickly tucked the transmogrified coin into his pocket. The pocketed coin rested against Jack’s crucifix, prohibiting the devil from escaping his form. Jack then came up with the original “deal with the devil.” In exchange for Beelzebub’s freedom, the devil had to spare Jack’s soul for ten years.
A decade later, stumbling drunk once again, Jack encountered Satan in the same setting as before. This time, Jack knew what it meant and resigned his fate that now it was time to go to Hell for good. Jack asked the devil for one final wish; an apple to feed his starving belly. The apple had been a useful tool to Satan in the Garden of Eden, so why not? Foolishly, the devil agreed. As he climbed the branches of a nearby apple tree, Jack surrounded its base with crucifixes. Satan found himself hopelessly trapped again. This time, Jack demanded that his soul should never be banished to Hell. Impressed with his minion’s cunning, the devil agreed and was set free.
Stingy Jack continued his wicked ways and slowly drank himself to death. As Jack’s soul prepared to enter heaven through the gates of St. Peter, he was stopped. Unsurprisingly, God informed Jack that because of his sinful lifestyle of deceitfulness and drinking, he was not allowed into Heaven. Jack then went down to the Gates of Hell and begged for admission into the underworld. Satan reminded Jack that a deal is a deal after all and he could not take his soul into the nether regions either.
However, the devil gave his star pupil a parting gift in the form of one red-hot ember placed inside a turnip for Jack to light his way through purgatory. (I always knew turnips were sent by the devil!) Henceforth, Jack is doomed to roam the world for all eternity, trapped between Heaven and Hell, with only an ember inside a hollowed turnip to light his way. Whenever locals saw mysterious lights on the horizon, they would say, “That’s just Jack o’ the lantern.” And of course, it has an Irvington connection.
In Washington Irving’s two-century-old story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the Headless Horseman is most often depicted with a pumpkin or jack-o’-lantern in place of his severed head. Irving’s Headless Horseman is the “commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air,” the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been shot off by a stray cannonball during “some nameless battle” of the American Revolution. Irving’s villain “rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head.” However, in Irving’s original story, a shattered pumpkin is found next to Ichabod Crane’s lost hat the morning after the Yankee schoolmaster’s encounter with the spectral Horseman.
So, the tradition of the jack-o’-lantern comes from the allegorical phenomenon of Stingy Jack’s strange light flickering over the peat bogs of Ireland. These so-called will-o’-the-wisps, or ignis fatuus (“foolish fire”) for you Latin fans, remain as a seasonal warning to “trick-or-treaters” to do the right thing else you end up like Stingy Jack. In those Gaelic-speaking regions, jack-o’-lanterns were associated with the Celtic celebration marking the end of the summer harvest known as Samhain, a time when the souls of the dead walked the earth. Jack-o’-lanterns were said to ward off evil spirits, particularly vampires, when placed on windowsills and doorsteps to keep harmful spirits out of one’s home.
The idea of carving pumpkins in North America is first noted in 1834. The November 1, 1866 edition of the Daily News in Kingston, Ontario reports: “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 a tallow candle.”
The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, in his 1850 poem “The Pumpkin” notes, “Oh!—fruit loved of boyhood!—the old days recalling, When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling! When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, glaring out through the dark with a candle within!” In Indiana, the carved pumpkin was most associated with the harvest season in general, long before it became a symbol of Halloween. In Victorian times, proper Thanksgiving entertaining recommended a lit jack-o’-lantern as the centerpiece of every bountiful table.
The tradition continues in Ireland but is most often confined to carving turnips, beets, and rutabagas. Once Irish immigrants arrived in America, instead of carving these unpopular root vegetables, they used pumpkins. They were much larger and easier to carve and, more importantly, popular with children. Today, pumpkin carving has graduated to an art form, particularly in Irvington. Locals spend countless hours imagining, engineering, and implementing their personal version of the jack-o’-lantern. Yet, after all these generations, are mostly still rewarded only with an inglorious end; a smashed pile of orange rind on the streets of Irvington on All Saints Day morning.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
