We all love pumpkins on Halloween.  I’m sure many of our readers have a pumpkin or two displayed this year with a lit candle inside. We carve them, paint them and display them around the house and on the lawn   But do you know the history of that Jack-’O-Lantern?

The Jack-O’-Lantern is one of Halloween’s most beloved icons, instantly recognizable and deeply symbolic. Yet behind its flickering smile lies a story far older and stranger than most realize, a tale that began not in America’s pumpkin patches, but in the misty folklore of Ireland, with a trickster named Stingy Jack.

The origins of the Jack-O’-Lantern can be traced to an old Irish folktale about a man known as Stingy Jack, a notorious rogue and drunkard who was clever enough to trick the Devil himself. 

According to legend, Jack invited the Devil for a drink but refused to pay for it. Instead, he convinced the Devil to turn into a coin so Jack could use it to buy their drinks. But instead of spending the coin, Jack slipped it into his pocket beside a silver cross, trapping the Devil in coin form.

Eventually, Jack freed the Devil, but only after making him promise not to claim Jack’s soul when he died. True to his name, Jack lived a wicked life and when he finally died, he was turned away from heaven for his sins. But the Devil, remembering his promise, also refused to let Jack into hell. Instead, the Devil mockingly tossed him a single burning coal from the fires of hell to light his way through the eternal darkness. Jack placed the coal inside a hollowed-out turnip to use as a lantern and wandered off into the night, condemned to roam the earth forever as “Jack of the Lantern,” or “Jack-O’-Lantern.”

This eerie tale was told around peat fires in Ireland and Scotland for centuries, warning children about the dangers of deceit, drunkenness and deals with dark forces. Over time, people began carving their own “Jack’s lanterns” to represent his lost spirit, grotesque faces etched into turnips, beets or potatoes, with small embers placed inside to ward off wandering souls. The carvings were both a tribute to the tale and a form of protection from evil on All Hallows’ Eve, when the boundary between the living and the dead was said to be at its thinnest.

To understand how the Jack-O’-Lantern became a Halloween symbol, we need to look back even further, to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-in). Celebrated around November 1, Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of the cold, dark winter, a season often associated with death. The Celts believed that on the night before Samhain, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin, allowing spirits to cross over into the mortal realm.

People would light bonfires to guide friendly spirits home and to ward off malicious ones. Offerings of food and drink were left outside homes to appease wandering ghosts. To further protect themselves, people disguised their faces with masks made of animal hides and carved vegetables, often turnips or rutabagas—into grotesque faces illuminated by candles. These early lanterns were thought to either confuse or frighten evil spirits away.

In other words, the Jack-O’-Lantern was born not from a desire to decorate, but from a need to survive a night filled with restless spirits. What began as a pagan ritual of protection gradually evolved into folklore, and eventually, into the Halloween tradition we recognize today.

When Irish and Scottish immigrants came to North America in the 19th century, they brought with them their Halloween customs, among them, the tale of Stingy Jack and the tradition of carving lanterns. But they soon discovered that the New World offered a new kind of vegetable, one far superior to the hard, knobby turnip. The pumpkin, native to North America and cultivated by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, was larger, softer and easier to carve. It also had a naturally hollow interior and a vibrant orange color that made it perfect for lantern-making. Immigrants quickly adopted it as their new canvas. What had been a grim symbol of a wandering spirit became a cheerful, glowing emblem of Halloween celebration.

By the late 1800s, American communities began holding fall festivals that featured pumpkin carving contests, games and parades. Newspapers and magazines published illustrations of grinning pumpkins, and the Jack-O’-Lantern began to shed its eerie folklore roots in favor of something more playful. Halloween itself transformed from a night of superstition and ghostly fears to a community celebration filled with costumes, laughter and creativity.

In early colonial America, Halloween was not widely celebrated due to strict Protestant beliefs. But as Irish and Scottish immigrants arrived in large numbers during the mid-1800s, particularly during the Irish Potato Famine, their customs spread across the country. The pumpkin’s rise coincided with the growing popularity of Halloween festivities, especially in cities with large immigrant populations.

By the turn of the 20th century, the Jack-O’-Lantern had become a staple of Halloween decorations. However, it was during the early to mid-1900s that the pumpkin lantern truly became the face of Halloween, thanks in part to popular culture.

Artists like Charles Addams and illustrators from magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post featured Jack-O’-Lanterns in their Halloween covers. In the 1940s and 1950s, Halloween-themed movies, cartoons, and advertisements cemented the pumpkin’s place as the holiday’s most enduring symbol. Walt Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949) even linked the image of a flaming pumpkin to the Headless Horseman, reinforcing the association between pumpkins, fright, and fun.

Today, carving pumpkins is one of the most beloved Halloween traditions, enjoyed by families around the world. But the tone has shifted dramatically since Stingy Jack’s grim tale. Modern Jack-O’-Lanterns can be spooky, silly or stunning works of art. Entire festivals are dedicated to pumpkin carving, such as the Keene Pumpkin Festival in New Hampshire, which once set a world record for the most lit Jack-O’-Lanterns, over 30,000 glowing faces lighting up the night.

Pumpkin carving has become a form of artistic expression, with intricate designs that go far beyond the traditional triangle eyes and jagged grin. Artists use specialized tools to create detailed portraits, scenes, and even three-dimensional sculptures out of pumpkins. The once simple lantern of folklore has become a canvas for creativity, community spirit and seasonal joy.

Despite its modern cheer, the Jack-O’-Lantern still carries echoes of its ancient symbolism. The flickering candle within represents more than mere decoration; it’s a symbol of light in darkness, of human warmth defying the long night of autumn. In a sense, it connects us to our ancestors who used fire and creativity to ward off the unknown.

Some historians also see the Jack-O’-Lantern as a metaphor for transformation. The humble pumpkin, harvested at the end of the season, is given new life and meaning when it’s carved and illuminated. It’s a reminder that even as nature fades in the fall, there is beauty, humor, and art to be found in the process.

Moreover, the act of carving, cutting into a living thing and hollowing it out carries symbolic weight. It’s a ritual of letting go of summer, of facing mortality with creativity rather than fear. The smiling pumpkin, in its quiet glow, tells us: yes, the days are shorter and colder, but light endures.

Few symbols have had as wide a cultural impact as the Jack-O’-Lantern. It appears everywhere, from literature and art to film and advertising. In American media, it’s often used to instantly evoke Halloween. Movies like Halloween (1978) used the glowing pumpkin as a chilling emblem of suspense. Children’s stories and animated specials, from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown to Hocus Pocus, celebrate it as a beacon of nostalgia and seasonal magic.

Even beyond Halloween, the Jack-O’-Lantern has become a shorthand for autumn itself, a symbol of harvest, creativity, and community. It bridges the sacred and the silly, the ancient and the modern. Few other icons can boast such a journey from a ghostly turnip in Ireland to a worldwide emblem of fall festivity.

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that, in some ways, the spirit of Stingy Jack still lingers in every carved pumpkin. His story of cleverness, rebellion, and wandering echoes in the playful faces that line our porches each October. We may not believe in lost souls with lanterns anymore, but we still light candles against the dark, celebrating the same themes our ancestors did: life, death, mischief, and the thin line that separates them.

And perhaps that’s why the Jack-O’-Lantern endures. It reminds us that folklore and faith, art and superstition, fear and fun are all part of the same human impulse Whether it’s a turnip in a haunted Irish village or a pumpkin glowing on an American porch, that same flickering flame connects us across time and continents.

So next Halloween when you carve a pumpkin and place a candle inside, remember Stingy Jack, wandering with his turnip lantern. Remember the Celts, guarding their homes from spirits. Remember the immigrants who brought the custom to new shores, and the generations who turned it into joy. That small flame in the hollow of a pumpkin is more than decoration; it’s the echo of a thousand years of human ingenuity and hope.

And that, truly, is the story of the Jack-O’-Lantern: a legend that refuses to go dark.