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HISTORY

History of the jack-o'-lantern: from turnips to pumpkins

The name is older than the lantern: in the 1600s, "Jack with the lantern" meant a night watchman or the eerie marsh lights called will-o'-the-wisps. Carved turnip lanterns are documented in Ireland and Britain in the 1800s, and in the same century Americans began carving pumpkins, which by the 1890s were decorating Halloween parties.

Much of what gets repeated every October, especially the claim that jack-o'-lanterns go back thousands of years to Celtic rituals, runs ahead of the evidence. This page separates what is documented from what is folklore, and says which is which.

The short answer: documented vs. legend

ClaimWhat the evidence supports
The ancient Celts carved lanterns for Samhain.Unproven. The Celts left no written records of these rites. Carved vegetable lanterns appear in the record in the 1800s.
"Jack-o'-lantern" first meant a carved vegetable.No. It first meant a man with a lantern, a night watchman, or the will-o'-the-wisp. The carved-pumpkin meaning is attested in American English by 1828.
Stingy Jack is where the name comes from.Folklore. The tale explains the name, but the oldest known printed version dates from 1836, nearly two centuries after the name.
People in Ireland carved turnips at Halloween.Documented, at least for the late 1800s and early 1900s, including a museum example from County Donegal.
Irish immigrants switched to pumpkins in America.Broadly supported. Historians link the pumpkin lantern's rise to mid-1800s Irish migration, but no single moment of "switching" is recorded.
The Headless Horseman carries a jack-o'-lantern.Not in the original. Irving's 1820 story ends with a "shattered pumpkin," not a carved one.

Samhain and All Hallows' Eve

Samhain (roughly "summer's end" in Irish) was a Gaelic festival around October 31 and November 1 that marked the start of winter. Later traditions held that spirits and fairies were especially active at this time, and people kept customs such as bonfires, disguises, and visiting. The Christian feast of All Saints, or All Hallows, fell on November 1. Its eve, "All Hallows' even," was shortened in Scotland to the word we now use; the Online Etymology Dictionary dates Halloween to the 1500s and records "alle halwe eue" for October 31 around 1300.

That background explains why a night of spirits, tricks, and lights would attract a lantern with a face. It does not prove the lantern itself is ancient. As Smithsonian magazine notes, quoting a 2016 Mental Floss piece, the Celtic priests "didn't keep written records," so many of their practices "remain shrouded in mystery." Clemson University Extension is similarly careful: historians can't say when carving began, only that the related folktale is documented from the 1800s.

Where the word came from

"Jack" was a generic name for an ordinary man, and "Jack with the lantern" was exactly that: a man carrying a light.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 story "The Great Carbuncle" is often cited as an early literary use. A skeptic tells a poet that if he hides a glowing gem under his cloak, "it will gleam through the holes, and make thee look like a jack-o'-lantern!" Light shining through holes sounds like a carved lantern, but the story never mentions a pumpkin, and some writers read it as a nod to the marsh light instead. It is fair evidence that readers knew the word, not proof of what they pictured.

The Stingy Jack folktale

Folklore, not history. Stingy Jack is a story told to explain the lights and the name. There was no real Jack, and the tale exists in many versions.

In the version most often retold today, Jack is a drunkard or blacksmith who tricks the Devil for his own gain. When he dies, heaven won't take him and the Devil won't either. The Devil tosses him a coal from hell, and Jack carries it inside a hollowed turnip as he wanders forever: Jack of the lantern.

The oldest known printed version appeared in the Dublin Penny Journal on January 16, 1836, in a piece titled "Jack o' the Lantern," signed E. W. In it, the narrator watches lights flicker over an Irish bog. He insists they are only ignis fatuus, a "gaseous vapour arising from putrid vegetable bodies," while his superstitious uncle explains them as "that misguided traveler, Jack o' the Lantern," a man doomed to wander. Notice what that early version is about: the marsh light, not a carved vegetable. The turnip and the coal belong to other and later tellings.

The plot is much older than Jack. Folklorists group stories of a smith who bargains with and then outwits the Devil or Death under the tale type "The Smith and the Devil." A 2016 study by Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani used methods borrowed from evolutionary biology to estimate that this tale type may be about 6,000 years old. That is an estimate about the story pattern, not evidence that anyone carved lanterns in the Bronze Age.

Turnips, mangelwurzels, and other root lanterns

Before pumpkins, people in Ireland and Britain used what they grew. Turnips were the best known, but potatoes, beets, and in England mangelwurzels (large beets grown as cattle feed) were also hollowed out. Nathan Mannion, a curator at EPIC, the Irish emigration museum in Dublin, told National Geographic that metal lanterns were expensive, so people hollowed out root vegetables and, over time, carved faces and designs to let the light through.

A real example survives, in plaster. In 1943 the National Museum of Ireland received a turnip lantern from Rois Ní Braonáin, a schoolteacher near Fintown, County Donegal, who said it was the type always made there around 1900. The turnip itself couldn't last, so museum artist Eileen Barnes made a painted plaster cast of it (object F1943.350). The museum records that candles were placed inside such turnips and that they were used to frighten people on the night of October 31. The Smithsonian adds, quoting the museum's folklife keeper, that the teacher donated it because nobody made that kind of lantern anymore.

In Somerset, England, the village of Hinton St George still holds Punkie Night on the last Thursday of October, when children carry lanterns carved from mangelwurzels. Its origin story, about wives lighting their husbands home from a fair, is local legend.

How pumpkins took over in America

Pumpkins are native to the Americas and were unknown in Europe before the 1500s. In North America they were plentiful in autumn, large, hollow, and far easier to carve than a turnip. Several threads came together in the 1800s.

Timeline

Modern records

These are Guinness World Records listings as of September 2026. Giant-pumpkin weigh-offs happen every autumn, so check the Guinness pages for the latest.

Myths worth retiring

If your family carves every year, you are part of a tradition that is less than 200 years old in its pumpkin form, and it is still changing. Ideas for keeping yours: a pumpkin keepsake tradition. For the practical side, see how to carve a face into a pumpkin and how to carve a pumpkin from a photo.

Carve your own chapter from a photo

Sources