There’s the name, and there’s the gourd, and there’s the holiday. The name originally meant a night watchman, or the vaporous lights rising from swamps. At some point it was attached to an old, universal story about a man tricking the devil. In the Irish version he is Stingy Jack, who couldn’t enter heaven or hell when he died. His spirit went off into the night with only a burning coal to light his way. He placed the coal into a carved-out turnip and has roamed the Earth ever since. Boo! He is Jack-of-the-Lantern.

As for pumpkins, they are among the oldest New World crops, older than maize even. Carving one out was a kids’ prank in the 1820s along the lines of freeing a neighbor’s pigs or stuffing newspaper into their chimney and setting it on fire. A pumpkin, its spooky face glowing in the dark, could suddenly appear in a window or above a wall to scare whoever was around.

The holiday itself is the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice—the harvest’s end—a time when the Celts believed that the barrier between the physical and spirit worlds grew thin. New World Protestants held no truck with such superstition, and the old autumnal rituals about ghosts and devils were not practiced widely until the Irish arrived en masse in the mid-19th century.

The biggest mystery is how the name became attached to the gourd, which became attached to the holiday. Nobody is certain.

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Links:

• John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Pumpkin,” 1846 - Poetry Foundation

  
  

• The Real Reason People Carve Jack-O'-Lanterns for Halloween - Rachel E. Greenspan, TIME, October 26, 2018

  
  

• It's Halloween: The Jack-o'-Lantern Story: Uncut and Uncensored - Lesley Bannatyne, excerpted from Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America's Fright Night, 2018

  
  

• The Great Jack O'Lantern Blaze - Sleepy Hollow, NY

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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[1] The Colossus of Rhodes, a giant statue of the Greek sun god Helios, was erected in 280 BC and felled by an earthquake 54 years later. It was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_of_Rhodes