Most explanations for Halloween jack-o’-lanterns start with a story. This story:
Jack is a mean bully of a blacksmith who tricks the devil out of capturing his soul time after time, until, at last, Jack finds himself to be a tired old man and dies. However, heaven won’t have him, and when Jack approaches the gates of hell, the devil bolts them shut, throws him a lump of burning coal, and tells him to get lost. Jack wanders forever in the dark with only this light to guide him. And there it is—Jack-of-the-lantern, or jack-o’-lantern.
There are just two problems: it has nothing to do with a pumpkin. Or Halloween. So how do we get from Jack-of-the-lantern, the crusty blacksmith with a hellfire lamp, to jack-o’-lantern, the Halloween icon?
The jack-o’-lantern erupted out of swamp gas, worked its way through religion and came out the other side into superstition, materialized as an early-nineteenth-century children’s prank in America, and landed on Halloween through the course of about five hundred years. Here’s how it happened.
“Unctuous Vapor, which the Night Condenses.”
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
The first jack-o’-lanterns were not carved pumpkins or lanterns of any kind. “Inflammable air,” wrote the science editors of the February 1832 issue of Atkinson’s Casket, “which is continually exhaling hydrogen gas, phosphorus, carbonic acid gas, and occasionally sulphurous vapours.” Jack-o’-lanterns were “marshy meteors” that flared up when they came in contact with electricity or heat generated by the decomposition of animal or vegetable materials. Or, more basely, according to the 1637 book Curiosities, or the Cabinet of Nature, an “[e]xhalation . . . bred near execution places, or Church Yards, or great Kitchens, where viscous and slimy matters and vapours abound in great quantity.”1 The Latin name given to the lights was ignis fatuus, which means foolish or false fire, but the phenomenon was called by many different names: Kit, Meg, Willy, Jenny, corpse candle, fairy light, spunkie or punkie, to name just a few. Will-o’-the-wisp and jack-o’-lantern are the two you’ve most likely heard of.
No matter how it was scientifically explained, and it was explained often (in magazines and newspapers but also in at least one book, titled, Edward Gorey-like, A Wonderful History of all the Storms, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, & etc., & lights that lead people out of their way at night, published in 1704), the bluish, first-you-see-‘em, now-you-don’t lights were pretty much viewed by everyone as eerie. It was sneaky, the way they seemed to drift out of another dimension to give us a fright. Seductive, the way they’d beckon like a lantern in a distant window, then vanish, not of this world, not of the next. As if they came from a place that could leak spirits like fireflies—purgatory.2
Early eighteenth-century foreign travelers to Ireland reported that the Irish believed the lights were linked to dead souls. Not surprising, given that Cluniac abbot Peter the Venerable (who we should thank for writing the very first collection of ghost stories) called the lights “lanterns of the dead” some seven hundred years before, in the twelfth century.3
The sight of a sudden, unexplainable fire instinctively strikes us as otherworldly. Tolkien felt it. Lights flicker above the Dead Marshes outside Mordor in The Two Towers, and Gollum warns Frodo and Sam, “Very carefully! Or Hobbits go down to join the Dead ones and light little candles. Follow Sméagol! Don’t look at the lights!” Contemporary author Poppy Z. Brite writes of their power in her short story “Lantern Marsh,” about a boy who is transfixed by the elusive lights floating above a beloved marshland and eventually slips away with them one Halloween night.4
Today, unexplainable lights set us wondering about visitors from another world, either extraterrestrial or from some unfinished historical past, like the restless spirits of Native Americans killed in battle that are featured in so many regional ghost stories. On the other hand, they are rumored to be markers for hidden treasure or even, in the case of the Marfa Lights in Texas, the phosphorescent fur of jackrabbits.
The Man with the Lantern
For centuries, people told each other stories to explain these lights, but increasingly they told a tale not about the light, but about the man who carried it. And if you’ve spent even ten minutes on the Internet searching “jack-o’-lantern,” you’ve seen the one that starts this chapter—the story of Jack, the devil, and his light from hell. Our Jack.
It’s usually described as an Irish folktale, and it is. It’s also Slavic, Russian, Chinese, Argentinean, and Norwegian, to just scratch the surface of how widespread this little tale is. It’s no big wonder the story travels; facing mortality and escaping hell are as riveting a plotline as you can get.
The Irish version was set in literary form by novelist William Carleton (1794-1869), who took what was already a popular tale in Ireland, fleshed it out, and published it as “The Three Wishes.”5 This is the story of Billy Duffy, a cretinous but quick-thinking, clever man. He worked as a blacksmith, but as little as possible, and he married a woman, Judy, in every way his equal. By chance, St. Moroky came to Billy’s blacksmith shop in disguise, and Billy offered him the warmth of his bellows. For this one act of kindness, Billy is granted three wishes. He wishes that anyone who picks up his sledgehammer won’t be able to put it down until he says so; anyone who sits in his chair will be stuck there until he lets them go; and no one can open Billy’s purse but he himself. Billy has tons of fun with his neighbors until, finally, no one will go near him, and he becomes so destitute he sells his soul to the devil.
Here’s where the cleverness comes in. Three times the devil comes for Billy’s soul, and three times Billy tricks him with the gifts from St. Moroky. In one particularly raucous scene, the devil tries to intervene in a fistfight between Judy and Bill, and Judy slams Old Nick into the magic chair. He’s trapped. Delighted, Judy and Bill heat up a pair of blacksmith’s tongs in the fire until they’re red hot, grab hold of the devil’s nose, and stretch it all the way through the house, over the hearth, and out the chimney. Ouch.
Needless to say, when Billy finally dies and makes his way to hell, the devil bangs the gate closed, grabs Bill’s nose through the bars and jams a hot coal up a nostril. Let that, says the devil, light your way, you miserable creep.
Carleton’s tale—used to explain the origin of the will-o’-the-wisp (from Billy, short for William)—is but one variation of a well-traveled tale.6 Bill Duffy is more widely known as Jack or John and St. Moroky as St. Peter, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary. In South America, he’s Juan Pobrezo from the pampas of Argentina; in Spain, he’s Pedro de Ordimalas. Sometimes the devil works alone, often he has his children with him (and in one American version, Elvis), and in Latin America or Italy, it’s not the devil, but death, a woman, who comes for our antihero.
This is one of the details, says the founder of the Journal of American Folklore, William Wells Newell, that indicates how old the tale is. Newell believes the story originated in medieval Britain, and he has found several versions (including one in which Death wears out seven hundred pairs of shoes pursuing his prey) that go as far back as 1551.7 Parts of the story are even older. The idea of being stuck to the chair, for example, can be found in stories from twelfth-century Irish saga literature or even further back in Hebrew tales. Tricking the devil into a bag goes back to tricking a demon into a bottle from Muslim legend, and the blacksmith can be seen as a direct descendent of the divine blacksmith of Celtic mythology, Lugh. Pulling the devil’s nose with hot tongs is found in the hagiography of St. Dunstan, tenth-century archbishop of Canterbury. Moreover, cheating death is the reason Sisyphus, of Greek mythology, was forced to roll a stone up a hill for eternity.8
So the tale we’ve got here is a Frankenstein’s monster. It’s made up of parts, some of which were sewn together in antiquity. It’s elegant to the extent that each storyteller has made it so, and is as travel-worn as the tellers who gave it legs.
“Bar the Door, Boys, Bar the Door.”
—Satan to his sons when he spies the blacksmith heading for the gates of hell in Richard Chase’s “Wicked John and the Devil”
The jack-o’-lantern in the early nineteenth century is both a character in a folktale and a fiery quirk of nature. In his fictional form, Jack is the kind of guy you’d expect to have an angry tattoo or to train his pit bull to attack. In its incarnation as a bluish flame, the jack-o’-lantern is either a light that comes out of the darkness and scares the bejeesus out of you, or one that seduces you into following, only to dart off and leave you sinking into the black water hidden under rotting sphagnum moss. Neither incarnation is Hallmark material.
The story that explains the jack-o’-lantern’s origin immigrated to America, met with tellers from Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond, and was retold in hybrid versions. The earliest I could locate, “Jacky-ma-lantern,” was put in the mouth of a well-known character created by Georgia newsman Joel Chandler Harris—Uncle Remus. The blacksmith is a lazy sot, much like the smith in previous tales. And the plot goes along much the same until the devil gets tempted by food and the prospect of stealing souls at a Fourth of July picnic. He stuffs Jacky into a bag. The smith escapes, leaves a bulldog in his place, and when the devil gets home and grandly opens the bag to show his kids, the bulldog bursts out, locks its jaws around their scrawny legs, and shakes them half to death. Jacky’s banished from hell for eternity so he “shines out” on dark nights, and the story explains the rootless light African Americans called jacky-ma-lantern.9
Once it hit Appalachia and the American South, the story was likely more often told aloud than read. It had to relate to the listening audience, and it took on the quirks and cadences of the teller. Richard Chase, who told the jack-o’-lantern story often, says, “No two individuals . . . ever tell the same story exactly alike; nor does the same man ever tell any one tale quite the same twice over.”10 Storytellers held onto “Jack and the Devil” so tightly and for so long that the patched-together tale hardened into a diamond of American folklore told repeatedly, published, and performed live at storytelling festivals well into the twentieth century.11
But we still have the same two problems. No pumpkins. And no Halloween.
Lanterns with Legs
You should smell the toasted pumpkin seeds you can buy on the street in Mexico City, or see the piles of pale calabazas sold in the markets of Guatemala. Pumpkin growing is not exclusive to the United States. And carving faces in food—say, turnips and beets—was part of many holiday celebrations in the Old World.12 But there came, between the Revolution and the Civil War, a perfect storm that created the uniquely American pumpkin jack-o’-lantern. It involved three things: darkness, a surfeit of pumpkins, and a generations-old tradition of hell-raising.
Imagine no electricity, no moon. You know about this time of year—people whisper that it’s when the night witches are out, when the spirits of the dead might rise out of their graves and hover behind that hedge, waiting for you. Overhead, the wind kicks up, and branches click like dried out finger bones. You make it home, run into the house, wedge a chair against the door, and strain to listen. Footsteps? Have you been followed? There’s a sudden rap at the window, and it’s leering at you—a glowing, disembodied head with a deep black hole where its mouth should be. You scream bloody murder. When you look again, it’s gone.
This carved pumpkin trick was one of an arsenal of nineteenth-century kids’ pranks that included anything from freeing a neighbor’s pigs to stuffing newspaper into their chimney and lighting it on fire. Cut the top off the pumpkin, scoop out the guts, carve a face, and wait for dark. Light the beast from the inside with the butt of a candle and then . . . Well, there were many delicious possibilities. You could hang it from the end of a stick in front of somebody’s window until they screamed, and then run away into the night. Or you could pop up from behind a wall and scare the daylights out of whoever was coming by. You could even mount the head on a stick, cover yourself up with a sheet, and go out terrorizing smaller kids.
The trick was common enough for John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) to memorialize it in his poem “The Pumpkin,” and it remained popular for nearly one hundred years afterwards.13 But why? Why pick a pumpkin, carve it, light it up, and take to the streets looking for victims?
First of all, a slight detour. Pumpkins have, since ancient times, been anthropomorphic. The pumpkin in a previous incarnation—the Roman melon—was seen as empty-headed, an idea that carried forward into Shakespeare’s time. In 16th century European painting, according to Cynthia Ott (Pumpkin. the Curious History of an American Icon, 2013) the big, fat pumpkin was used to imply promiscuity, lust, or the crude, untamed wilderness of North America. People who moved to New England, in fact, were called pumpkin-headed (misfits and outcasts).14 In the colonies, it stood for survival, as the pumpkin got many a settler through the winter in the first years of colonization. By the early 19th century, though, the nation had modernized farming, and the fat orange field pumpkin was a symbol of archaic rural life. Nineteenth-century literature is rich with pumpkin farmers and pumpkin-headed men (the version of Cinderella that first featured a pumpkin carriage was published in the U.S. in 1811; Peter Pumpkin Eater was added to Mother Goose in 1825; and Hawthorne’s story “Feathertop” (1852) features a charlatan with a pumpkin for a head). Tales also sprung up about how fast growing pumpkins were, how they seemed to move on their own. This is important for the evolution of the pumpkin trick into the modern jack-o-lantern.
The folklorist Newell theorized that the American pumpkin trick was derived from the carved, candlelit turnips associated with November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, in England.15 Other factors could be equally important. The early nineteenth century in American history is known as “The Era of Good Feelings” (ca. 1817-1825), which was a period of relative unity and prosperity. There were candle stubs to spare, pumpkins not needed for cattle feed or pies, and maybe even enough breathing room in the national consciousness to allow for humor and mischief. My guess is that pranksters concocted the pumpkin trick not just because their cousins may or may not have been doing something like it in Britain, but because they had the means (pumpkins and candles), the method (under cover of darkness), and the motive (really good fun). In addition, pumpkins were in the air at this time, literally and literarily. The story chronicling the mother of all pumpkin tricks, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”was an instant success when it was published in 1820.
The Pumpkin Jack-o’-Lantern
You could thumb through the pages of newspapers as early as 1805 and find occasional science pieces on jack-o’-lantern light16 or the word “jack-o’-lantern” used metaphorically to mean something illusory or misleading.17 But starting around the 1840s, something new cropped up. Writers occasionally referred to the children’s’ carved pumpkin as a jack-o’-lantern. After all, it appeared suddenly out of the ink black night, glowed briefly, and then disappeared.18
Here is the start of the jack-o’-lantern we recognize. Once people began to use the name “jack-o’-lantern” to describe the pumpkin trick, we finally had a pumpkin jack-o’-lantern. Within a few short decades, this jack-o’-lantern would become better known as a stationary Halloween party decoration, grounded and tamed.
Be My Guest
The mayor of Atlanta and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Hemphill, threw a Halloween bash in 1892, notable especially for the inclusion of possum on the menu (before you blanch, consider that a standard seventeenth-century menu for All Hallows included marinated carp). The next day’s Atlanta Constitution described the decorations: “As the guests entered the hospitable mansion they were greeted by all manner of smiling lanterns made of pumpkins, cleverly carved with faces.”
These pumpkins weren’t popping out from behind a wall or riding on top of a stick. They were posed and smiling. It was the hostess that finally lopped the legs off our jack-o’-lantern.
Halloween parties became popular beginning late in the nineteenth century, and decorations were pulled from the outdoors to set a rustic atmosphere—cornstalks, apples, pumpkins, and even wild turkeys and pigs in crates. It wasn’t long before the rural jack-o’-lantern was co-opted by the imaginative party-giver, and then, eventually, American business, as jack-o’-lantern-themed party favors grew more and more popular.19
At last, the Halloween jack-o’-lantern! But now we have the opposite problem. His origin story—how Jack came to be a wandering light—is the origin story for the wrong jack-o’-lantern. Once “jack-o’-lantern” meant a carved pumpkin decoration instead of a rootless light, the tale of Jack and the devil no longer fit.20 Modern writers had to bend the tale to make it conform to what they knew about Halloween.
William H. Hooks (Mean Jake and the Devils, 1981) says he heard the story in North Carolina from his mom and aunt, who built tales for him, including one called “Jake-o-My-Lantern.” After Jake tricks the devil and is given a fireball and told to “go find a hell of your own,” he ends up imprisoned in the Great Dismal Swamp. In return for a day on dry land each Halloween, Jake leaves one half of his fireball in a pumpkin for the devil.
Contemporary witch Silver Ravenwolf puts the light in a turnip, not a pumpkin, Old World-style. Jack becomes a good-hearted, friendly sort with a “lop-sided smile and missing tooth,” but he cuts a bargain with you-know-who and begins the slippery slide into drink and sin. This Jack is banned from eternal rest unless he can find some poor soul to trade places with him—but it’s too dark to find someone. The devil throws Jack a coal, and Jack makes a lantern out of a turnip. “On Halloween night, when the veil between the worlds is thin, you kin see Jack and his little light, across the field and in the woods, roamin’ in the night, seachin’ for someone to take his place.”21
To make the jack-o’-lantern story relevant, writers fit a pumpkin around the light and set the story on October 31.
Soft Spots
For jack-o’-lantern faces
Are charms ’gainst things unseen
And they will keep their owners safe
The night of Hallowe’en.
—Solveig Paulson Russell, Halloween, Children’s Activities, October 1944.22
While jack-o’-lantern lights were used by adults to explain some pretty serious topics—souls stranded in purgatory or the restless dead—the jack-o’-lantern trick belonged to children. Even more, it belonged to country children. Anyone who’s grown a pumpkin knows it takes a lot of earth to nurture a vine, and it’s hard to imagine too many of them snaking up the crowded stoops of turn-of-the-century American tenements. Kids in Brooklyn, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere disguised themselves on Halloween and ran wild in the streets, begging for coins or sweets, and whacking people on the back with socks filled with flour or soot. It was mostly kids in America’s rural towns who terrorized with jack-o’-lanterns, and nobody really seemed to mind. The trick didn’t show up on police blotters the way other Halloween pranks did. It was portrayed—even in the very first mentions—as nostalgic, a trick for a young child, more charming than dangerous.
Something was happening to the jack-o’-lantern and Halloween as the twentieth century unfolded. A general sweetness washed over our culture when it came to children, and Halloween celebrations were focused more and more around them. The jack-o’-lantern softened. (Take a look at the Halloween postcards of the early twentieth century and you’ll see how adorable, how childlike they became—plump, almost rosy-cheeked.) In fact, within fifty years of its debut as a Halloween symbol, the jack-o’-lantern had become a comfort rather than a fright. Once it became porch-bound and legless, the jack-o’-lantern lost its menace. Certainly, the marketing of whimsical jack-o’-lantern favors and cards had something to do with it, as did the trends of the times. But truth to tell, the kids themselves eventually jettisoned trick in favor of treat. There just wasn’t time to sneak around, trying to scare the little kids with a pumpkin when there were parties and parades and—eventually—house after house with bowls of Mars bars inside. Not only did the jack-o’-lantern become a ubiquitous decoration, but it was now stationed on private property, moving from instrument of terror to object of vandalism. Ironic, yes. But priorities had changed. Jack bought the severance package and retired to the front steps.
Or did he?
Postmodern Jack
“The eyes had sagged, although the slitted pupils were still narrow and mean. The nose was bubbling with some vile mucus. . . . In the orange light that streamed out between them, the hooked fangs appeared to have been transformed from points of pumpkin rind into hard, sharp protuberances of bone.”
—Dean Koontz, “The Black Pumpkin,” October Dreams
The original trailer of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) went like this: medium shot of a smiling jack-o’-lantern next to bold letters spelling “Halloween.” Midway through is a shot of the same jack-o’-lantern, grinning happily on a nightstand next to a bed where a body lies murdered. Final image is the jack-o’-lantern, the boldface “Halloween,” and that creepy, 5/4-time theme music that gets under your skin. Halloween took what had become the most innocuous of symbols, the most childlike and innocent, and subverted it to horrify. If the suburbs—symbolized by the lit pumpkin—could breed unmitigated evil, if jack-o’-lanterns could seem monstrous, even by association, was anything safe anymore? Halloween played on the same sense of fear that the myth of the psycho who puts razor blades in apples did—something dangerous and evil is lurking under the ordinary.23
But let’s go back even farther, to 1963, when Marvel comics introduced a new enemy for Spider-Man. Flames licked out of the cut features in his pumpkin head. His body was lizard green, his fingers ended in creepy-looking tendrils. Dubbed Jack O’Lantern, he was a killer for hire, and he’s been lobbing flaming pumpkins at Spider-Man for more than forty years now. He’s a second-tier villain and he knows it. This Jack’s got attitude. He’s not confined to Halloween or to a porch for that matter.
All along, it was the jack-o’-lantern’s unpredictability that made it scary. That it could suddenly appear out of nowhere gave it a certain sort of fearsomeness; that you weren’t sure what it was, what it could do, or where it came from made it unsettling.24 And remember that Jack, the character, was always a bit of a thug; he does a deal with the devil for goodness sake.
Right next to the friendly jack-o’-lantern that graces children’s books and party napkins has reemerged the jack-o’-lantern that can terrorize, hurt, confuse, or chase you. Jack-o’-lanterns, says much of our contemporary iconography, are not as innocent as you think, and they never were.
—end—
1. John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: A New Edition with the Additions of Sir Henry Ellis (1900), p. 803
2. Not only wandering lights, but lanterns and candle flames were associated in Europe and the British Isles with All Soul’s Day and purgatory; so too, the idea of using a light to remember the familial dead or to keep away the evil dead is a common one. Obiwan’s UFO-Free Paranormal Page is an excellent source of both historical documents explaining lights and contemporary reports of encounters with them, www.ghosts.org/ghostlights/ghostlights.html (accessed 13 December 2009).
3. Peter the Venerable wrote De Miraculis (Book of Miracles) while he was abbot of Cluny (1122-56). The volume is a collection of sixty tales, ten of which involve apparitions of the dead. Irish beliefs about the lights being souls of the dead were recorded in The Comical Pilgrim’s Pilgrimage into Ireland (1723) found in Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities, p. 800, or online, see fn. 1.
4. Poppy Z. Brite, “Lantern Marsh,” in October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween (Baltimore: Cemetery Dance Publications, 2000).
5. Carleton first published “The Three Wishes” in Dublin University Magazine in 1839 and later included it in his book Tales and Sketches, Illustrating the Character, Usages, Traditions, Sports, and Pastimes of the Irish Peasantry (Dublin: James Duffy, 1845). Tales and Sketches went through fifty editions with different tales added and removed, but “The Three Wishes” was rarely printed and not published in an American edition until the twentieth century. Its audience of readers grew exponentially, though, when W. B. Yeats, who thought Carleton the greatest Irish novelist of the century, included “The Three Wishes” in his Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 1888). The story then reached a readership on both sides of the Atlantic, coming as it did at the time when people were clamoring for folktales and the public was newly fascinated with Ireland.
6. In folklore studies, this story is referred to as the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 330, “the smith outwits the devil.” The Aarne-Thompson system catalogues several thousand folk tales from around the world and organizes them into motifs and types. Richard Dorson, in Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), reports that the Irish Folklore Commission has 359 texts of this story, the Finnish Folklore Archive has 146, and there are 200 German versions (p. 429). The story exists in collections of folklore in Shropshire, Corsica, France, Wilshire, North Dorset, and in the famous Kinder und Hausmärchen (Folk Tales for Children and the Home), by the Brothers Grimm, in two versions, although neither explains the wandering light.
7. Newell’s article, “The Ignis Fatuus, Its Character and Legendary Origins,” (Journal of American Folklore 17 [1904]: 39-60) traces the story of the jack-o’-lantern from medieval sources through several modern American versions. It also explains a huge amount of folklore, worldwide, about the lights, their spiritual meanings, and how they relate to death and the soul. Interestingly, Newell points out that those most likely to get lost in bogs following lights were inebriated, which led to tales that describe the ghost—Jack of the jack-o’-lantern—as a drunk (p. 49).
8. In the medieval Irish tale, the heroic Fians were supernaturally stuck to chairs and only a drop of royal blood could free them. (Patrick Kennedy, “How Fann Mac Cuil and His Men Were Bewitched,” in Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts, 1866, 208. Stith Thompson talks about similarities in older Hebrew tales in The Folktale,1977, 45-46). The Fisherman of Arabian tales tricks a Genii into a bottle by suggesting that the Genii was incapable of making himself so small, much like the smith traps the devil in a purse (W. A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformation [Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002], 191). Storyteller and folklorist Joseph Daniel Sobol points out the smith is a direct descendant of Lugh (“‘Whistlin’ Towards the Devil’s House’: Poetic Transformations and Natural Metaphysics in an Appalachian Folktale Performance,” Oral Tradition 21, no. 1 [March 2006], 5. eOT = http://journal.oraltradition.org/articles/show/7/, accessed 1 January 2010). St. Dunstan was a goldsmith, and when the devil takes the form of a woman to seduce him, he grabs the devil’s nose with hot tongs just as Jack did (William Hone, “St. Dunstan,” in The Every-Day Book, ed. Kyle Grimes, University of Alabama e-text, www.uab.edu/english/hone/etexts/edb/day-pages/139-may19.html, accessed 1 January 2010). As for Sisyphus, he cheats death twice: first, he tricks Hades into handcuffs and second, Sisyphus instructs his kin not to bury him or place a coin beneath his tongue. Without a proper burial, Sisyphus argues, he cannot be dead. When Hades does catch up with him, Sisyphus’s penance is the basest of hard labor. He must push a boulder up a steep hill and watch as it tumbles back down, for all eternity.
9. Harris published two versions of the blacksmith story. He writes that the first, “Jacky-My-Lantern” (Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings [1880; reprint, University of Virginia American Studies Program 2003-2004, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Harris2/ch32.html, accessed 11 October 2010]) was popular in the South and that there were several versions in circulation. In the second, “Impty-Umpty and the Blacksmith” (Uncle Remus Returns [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918]), Uncle Remus tells his young friend that he got the story wrong when he told it to the boy’s daddy. The smith in this story bests Impty-Umpty (that’s Satan, who in this version is club-footed, double-jointed, and laughs so hard smoke comes out of his nose) by daring him to turn himself into a black cat, which he then bags. The last line of “Impty-Umpty” remains in most American versions: “Go git ‘im a chunk er fier an’ let ‘im start a sinner fact’ry er his own.” In 1935, Zora Neale Hurston published “How Jack-o’-lanterns Came to Be” in Mules and Men (reprint, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), her collection of Negro folklore gathered from stories told by the people of Eatonville, Florida. She records a story different from Harris’s, but with a similar last line: “You ain’t comin’ in here,” says the Devil’s widow. “Here, take dis hot coal and g’wan off and start you a hell uh yo’ own.” The story become “Wicked John and the Devil” in Richard Chase’s American Folk Tales and Songs (New York: New American Library, 1956) to distinguish the smith from a heroic trickster named Jack who appears in other American folktales. Chase’s version, which he says he got from a Mrs. Yowell in Virginia, is more akin to the Irish/British story (with the substitution of a prickly fire bush for the purse—again, ouch). However, he took his last line from Hurston: “Here, take dis hot coal and g’wan off and start you a hell uh yo’ own.”
10. Richard Chase, The Jack Tales (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943), x.
11. “Wicked John and the Devil” was a signature tale of Ray Hicks, known since 1973 as the unofficial heart of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Hicks used the story to explain a phenomenon called the Brown Mountain Lights, an occurrence near his Beech Mountain, North Carolina, home. Sobol’s “‘Whistlin’ Towards the Devil’s House” includes many details of twentieth-century versions of the tale and the transcript of a telling by Hicks.
12. The October 31, 1866, edition of the New York Times reports on a Halloween parade in Scotland where “the boys form themselves into long processions, each bearing hollowed turnips with devices marked on the shell and illuminated by candles, while the girls form in the same manner, bearing tall ‘kail’ stalks [curly cabbages] having candles burning in the centres of the heads.” In an 1890 Harper’s Magazine story by William Black, “A Halloween Wraith,” children with turnip lanterns carved with faces frighten a traveler on Halloween night. Children in Somerset, England, carved turnips on both Halloween and on “Punkie Night” as recorded in the early twentieth century (Kingsley Palmer, The Folklore of Somerset [New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976], 105). American folklorist Jack Santino found carved turnips used on St. Bridget’s Day as well as Halloween in Northern Ireland from the late 1800s through today (The Hallowed Eve, 39, 49, 80, 126). Harper’s Weekly reports that turnip heads on sticks were still carried on Guy Fawkes Day in nineteenth-century Britain (“The Pumpkin Effigy,” November 23, 1867, 1), and British historian Ronald Hutton reports carved turnip lanterns to be common in Ireland and some areas of England in the late nineteenth century at Halloween (The Stations of the Sun, 382-83). Carved beet lanterns are still part of Christmas Eve processions in northern France. Some—Hutton is one—have noted that reports of carved lanterns on Halloween are few and far between in the major published folklore collections until the early twentieth century. I’d agree; although many sources describe them as a medieval custom, I’ve been unable to find any primary record of Halloween (or All Hallows) carved lanterns before the early nineteenth century.
13. Whittier’s poem, although published in 1850, was set in his youth, real or imagined, some thirty-odd years before. The lines that apply are as follows: “When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin / Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!” (The Poetical Works, 1894).
14. Cynthia Ott, Pumpkin. The Curious Story of an American Icon (University of Washington Press, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books), 2012.
15. This trick done with the turnip was well enough known in England of 1820 to be part of a political cartoon showing a parson terrified by three boys holding a turnip lantern draped in ghostly white cloth. An illustration of the cartoon, captioned “The Village Retort—or Ghost of Small Tythes,” can be found in Caricatures vii. 21. #14087, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. x, 1820-1827.
16. According to Forrester’s Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine and Fireside Companion, all you need do is “put a small amount of phosphorus in a retort, filled with a moderately strong solution of caustie potash”—heat to boiling and bam! (“Will-o’-the-Wisp” or “Jack-o’-lantern,” April 1, 1856, 133). For adults, there were pieces like “Observations on Ignis Fatuus,” by Rev. John Mitchell, which explained the lights’ motion as an optical illusion (American Journal of Science and Arts, January 3, 1929, 246).
17. A toast given at the Federal Republican Young Gentleman’s meeting recorded in 1810 in Walpole, New Hampshire: “The President of the United States; instead of following the Jack-o’-lantern of Jefferson, may be guided by the polar star of Washington.” (The Farmer’s Museum, July 9, 1810, 2-3).
18. Children’s magazines helped teach what jack-o’-lanterns were and how to make them by embedding information into stories. Take, for example, “Cooking a Ghost,” by Sophie May in Merry’s Museum and Wordsworth’s Cabinet (January 1, 1867), where little Jennie is terrified by a lit jack-o’-lantern and her cousins confess, “‘’Twas only us, just we two! And this thing is nothing but a jack-o’-lantern,’ they continued, holding up a hollow pumpkin with a candle inside.” In “The Jack O’ Lantern” (the Youth’s Companion, February 19, 1840) there is an entire how-to: “He prepared to make his Jack-o’-Lantern. He got a knife, cut off the top, and scraped out all the inside, and made another hole in the bottom, put a candle in, and another in the top, to let the smoke out. He then cut, on the several sides of the pumpkin, the outline of three faces, with their eyes, noses and teeth.” The magazine must have liked the idea, because it’s repeated in another story two years later, with even more tips. “Then with the knife you must cut in deep, all around where I have marked, and then the cap will come off if you pull by the handle. Then you must dig it all out inside, until the shell is only as thick as your hand.” (“The Cow and the Jack o’ Lantern,” Youth’s Companion, March 18, 1842.) The jack-o’-lantern returns again in its July, 1873, issue (“A Lark”), and appears in several other magazines for both children and adults, notably Harper’s Weekly (in December 1, 1865, “Farmer Bell’s Thanksgiving,” and again in the November 23, 1867, issue, “The Pumpkin Effigy”).
19. Halloween how-to articles and books starting in the 1890s and continuing through to October 2010’s Martha Stewart Holiday nudged the jack-o’-lantern from trick toward party decoration. Manufacturing companies created decorations with a pumpkin face for Halloween parties (and, initially, for Thanksgiving parties as well, where jack-o’-lanterns were occasionally part of decor as late as 1900). Called happy john, pumpkin head, pumpkin face, john pumpkin head, pumpkin jack, and finally jack-o’-lantern, lanterns, candy containers, decorations, masks, and greeting cards featuring pumpkins with faces were created for a market eager to celebrate Halloween in America. According to Halloween collectibles author Mark Ledenbach, the jack-o’-lantern was the most popular image on Halloween ephemera. Then came cats, witches, skeletons, and owls. The most rare were ghosts, veggie people, bats, and, the rarest of all, devils. For details and images of these objects see Mark B. Ledenbach, Vintage Halloween Collectibles (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2003), or Ben Truwe, The Halloween Catalog Collection. 55 Catalogs from the Golden Age of Halloween (Medford, OR: Talky Tina Press, 2003).
20. The first reference I could find to a Halloween-specific carved pumpkin is this: “A flood of light began to pour in on the subject, illuminating their craniums as a tallow candle lights up the interior of a hallow-e’en pumpkin” (Laramie Boomerang, “That’s All Right. An Interesting Story from the Wild West,” Macon (GA) Telegraph, 20 January 1884, 1). The date may move earlier as more and more archives and materials become digitalized and searchable.
21. Silver Ravenwolf, Halloween (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1999), 38-41.
22. Quoted in Truwe, The Halloween Catalog Collection, fn. 55, xx.
23. Setting the movie on Halloween was key to its success, according to film historian Adam Rockoff. “In retrospect, the element most integral to Halloween’s success may have been its title. The singularity of the name ‘Halloween’ seemed to strike a collective chord within the consciousness of American moviegoers, conjuring up haunting images of ghouls, mystery, death, and most importantly, evil. It’s hard to imagine The Babysitter Murders [Halloween’s original title] or some derivation of, eliciting the same response” (Going to Pieces. The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986 [Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Company,2002],53).
24. The angry pumpkin may be part of a greater fear of nature, as our consciousness awakens to what we’re doing to the planet. Mikita Brottman theorizes that movies like The Ruins (2008) and The Happening (2008) are a backlash against the green movement or, more likely, a projection of “green guilt.” She writes, “We cultivate plants solely in order to eat them, or to cut them off in their prime and enjoy the way they smell as they slowly die. With no Parliament of Trees to defend their rights, perhaps we can’t help but unconsciously imagine plants to be, at some level, voiceless, resentful, and oppressed.” (“When Good Plants Go Bad,” The Chronicle Review, December 12, 2008, B12-13). And in another twist on the postmodern pumpkin, in October 2008, pro-Kremlin youth in Moscow used jack-o’-lanterns carved with the names of war victims to protest what they saw as America’s responsibility for the war in Georgia.