Before the Pumpkin, There Was the Turnip

Long before the grinning pumpkin became the face of Halloween, people in Ireland carved something considerably less cheerful. The story of the original jack-o'-lantern leads through dark country lanes, mischievous children, wandering souls, and a man whom neither Heaven nor Hell would take.

There is a face in the National Museum of Ireland that looks as though it has been dug out of a grave.

Its eyes are narrow and sunken. Its mouth is a crooked slit filled with small, uneven teeth. The skin appears pinched and discoloured, giving it the unpleasant look of a human head that has been left too long in the ground.

It is not a skull, nor an archaeological discovery. It is a model of a turnip, carved into a lantern for Halloween.

In 1943, a schoolteacher named Rois Ní Braonáin, who taught near Fintown in County Donegal, brought a turnip lantern to the National Museum of Ireland. She explained that lanterns of this kind had been commonly made in the area around 1900. The museum's artist, Eileen Barnes, created and painted a plaster cast to preserve its appearance.

Today, the object is known as the Ghost Turnip. Its accession number is F1943.350, an ordinary museum designation for a rather...extraordinary face.

It is easy to see why these lanterns frightened people. Unlike the generous orange pumpkin, with its broad surface and familiar triangular grin, a turnip offers very little room for expression. Its rough skin, irregular shape and cramped features make even a simple carving look unnervingly human.

This was once a perfectly respectable thing to do with a vegetable on the last night of October.

And there was a reason for it.

A Face for the Dark

In the Ireland of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Halloween was an occasion for feasting, games, disguises and considerable mischief. It was also a night on which people took the supernatural seriously.

Its customs drew upon the older festival of Samhain, which marked the beginning of winter in the traditional Irish calendar, as well as the Christian observances of All Saints and All Souls. The night of 31 October was known as Oíche Shamhna, Samhain Eve.

The dead were believed to return, and not every visitor was necessarily welcome. Spirits, fairies and other beings might travel the roads after sunset. Certain places, including fairy forts and ancient mounds, were best avoided.

A person had good reason to be careful when going outdoors.

The carved turnip belonged to this atmosphere of caution and excitement. A large root was hollowed out, openings were cut for eyes and a mouth, and a candle was placed inside. The finished lantern could be carried through the countryside or left glowing at a window, gate or roadside.

Some were intended to frighten away unwanted spirits. Others were intended to frighten the neighbours.

Fortunately for the neighbours, the two purposes were not always distinguishable.

The National Folklore Collection of Ireland preserves a remarkable account of how these customs were practised. During 1937 and 1938, tens of thousands of schoolchildren were encouraged to collect stories, traditions and recollections from their families and communities. Their contributions became the Schools' Collection, now accessible through the Dúchas folklore archive.

Among the records from Athboy, County Meath, is a list of Halloween tricks. Doors were tied shut with ropes. Gates were removed and carried away. Cabbage leaves were arranged to fall on unsuspecting visitors, and buckets of water were rigged to spill when doors opened.

In the middle of these practical jokes appears another custom: lighting a candle on a turnip carved into the shape of a face.

Elsewhere in the collection, an account from Edenagully describes scraping out the inside of a turnip, drawing a man's face upon it and placing a lighted candle within. The finished creation was left on a pier to frighten people.

These small accounts tell us something that grand explanations of ancient festivals often overlook. Halloween was not solely a solemn confrontation with the dead. People enjoyed making one another jump.

Imagine coming along an unlit road, hearing nothing but your own footsteps, and finding a glowing face waiting on a stone wall. There was no electric streetlight to reveal the trick, no illuminated house beyond it to soften the effect. For a few seconds, the face might have belonged to almost anything.

Then someone hiding nearby would begin to laugh.

Yet the lantern's name belongs to a much older and less cheerful sort of story.

The Man Who Could Not Enter Hell

Before a jack-o'-lantern was a carved vegetable, it was a name associated with a mysterious light.

In seventeenth-century Britain, the expression jack-o'-lantern could refer to a man carrying a lantern, such as a night watchman. It also became associated with the strange, wandering lights that people reported seeing over marshes and bogs. These lights were known by several names, including will-o'-the-wisp and ignis fatuus, or foolish fire.

Travellers described distant flickers that seemed to move across wet ground, sometimes receding as a person approached. Such lights acquired an ominous reputation. A traveller who followed one might stray from the road into dangerous marshland. Natural phenomena associated with bogs and decaying vegetation have been offered as explanations for these sightings, although the precise causes of historical reports are not always certain.

Folklore had its own explanation.

The light belonged to a man named Jack.

An Irish version of his story appeared in The Dublin Penny Journal on 16 January 1836, under the title "Jack o' the Lantern." Its narrator recalls an encounter with mysterious bog lights and an uncle who insists that they are the work of a condemned wanderer.

In the tale, Jack is a troublesome man who performs an unexpected act of kindness for an old stranger. The stranger proves to be an angel and offers him three wishes. Jack wastes them.

Rather than asking for salvation or some lasting good, he asks for powers that will allow him to trap people who touch his possessions. His chair, his tree and his tools become instruments of endless inconvenience.

When the Devil eventually comes to claim him, Jack puts his enchanted belongings to use and secures his release. But Jack has made a disastrous bargain with eternity.

At his death, Heaven will not accept him, and Hell cannot take him. He must remain on earth, walking without rest.

In the 1836 account, the uncle speaks of Jack with unexpected pity. He describes the wanderer as having nowhere to shelter, his feet blistered and bleeding, his clothes reduced to rags. It is a miserable existence, especially for a man who had once been so pleased with his own cleverness.

The tale survives in several forms.

In one familiar version, often told today under the name Stingy Jack, Jack persuades the Devil to turn himself into a coin so that he can pay for a drink. Instead of spending the money, he traps the Devil beside a cross and refuses to release him without a promise.

In another episode, Jack tricks the Devil into climbing a tree and prevents him from descending by carving a cross into its trunk. Eventually, the Devil promises not to claim Jack's soul. When Jack dies, he discovers that the promise has not brought him the security he expected.

He is refused entry to Heaven for his behaviour, and the Devil honours his bargain by refusing to admit him to Hell.

Jack begs for some light to guide him through the darkness. The Devil gives him a burning ember, which Jack places inside a hollowed-out turnip. Carrying his little lantern, he sets off into the night, where he must wander until the end of time.

The disturbing part of the story is not that Jack encounters the Devil. Folktales are full of people who bargain with supernatural beings and escape through cleverness.

It is that Jack succeeds.

He tricks the Devil, wins the promise he demands, and nevertheless suffers a fate worse than the one he feared. He has outwitted his enemy without understanding what he was bargaining for.

His punishment is to keep walking.

There is an important distinction between this legend and the history of Halloween carving. The 1836 story describes Jack's lantern, but does not identify it as a carved turnip. That detail appears in other tellings.

Nor can we establish that everyone who carved a turnip on Halloween did so because of Jack. The practice could serve several purposes, and different communities maintained different explanations.

But the association is an understandable one. A flickering light moving through the dark could be an ordinary traveller, a mischievous child, or a soul that had lost its way. In Jack's story, it was all too easy to mistake one for another.

The Pumpkin Takes Over

When the custom crossed the Atlantic, the lantern got a brand new body.

Irish and other European migrants brought their seasonal traditions to North America during the nineteenth century. Among them were Halloween games, disguises, frightening tales and the practice of making lanterns from vegetables. There they encountered the pumpkin.

Native to the Americas, pumpkins were already familiar features of the North American harvest. They were plentiful in autumn, could grow to an impressive size, and were considerably easier to hollow out than a hard turnip.

For anyone intending to carve a face, the advantage was obvious.

A pumpkin provided enough space for enormous eyes, elaborate mouths and, eventually, all manner of decorative designs. Its orange flesh also produced an attractive glow when illuminated from within.

The pumpkin did not, however, arrive at Halloween as a completely blank object waiting for Irish tradition to give it meaning. Americans were already carving pumpkins and using them for amusement. Children discovered that a hollowed pumpkin with a candle inside could be used to startle people, just as a turnip lantern could across the Atlantic.

The emerging Halloween pumpkin was therefore shaped by several customs meeting one another. Immigrant traditions, American harvest culture and a taste for practical jokes all contributed.

In 1850, the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier published "The Pumpkin", a nostalgic poem recalling the joys of childhood. Among its remembered pleasures were pumpkins carved into ugly faces, glowing with candles in the dark.

The poem was concerned with harvest memories rather than Halloween, but it shows that the illuminated pumpkin face was already familiar in nineteenth-century America.

An especially revealing image appeared on the front page of Harper's Weekly on 23 November 1867. The engraving, accompanying a piece called "The Pumpkin Effigy", shows how a carved pumpkin could be used to frighten unsuspecting people. The article treats the practice as a mischievous pastime, not as a Halloween religious observance. It even laments that the younger generation was abandoning the custom.

One is tempted to wonder what the writer would have made of today's Halloween displays.

By the late nineteenth century, the pumpkin lantern had become closely associated with the holiday. Its old European name, jack-o'-lantern, suited it perfectly, although the precise path by which the name settled upon the carved pumpkin remains uncertain.

The American transformation also attracted other stories. Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published in 1820, famously features a Headless Horseman and a pumpkin. Yet the original tale does not describe the Horseman riding about with a glowing jack-o'-lantern for a head. That familiar image belongs largely to later depictions.

The pumpkin had become a remarkably accommodating symbol. It could be a joke, a warning, a ghostly head, a decoration, or a character in its own right.

The turnip, by comparison, was slowly disappearing from the Halloween scene.

An Old Face, Remembered

The change was not immediate or universal. In Ireland, Scotland and parts of England, people continued to carve turnips and other root vegetables. In Somerset, the related custom of Punkie Night preserved the use of lanterns made from mangelwurzels, large root vegetables traditionally grown for animal feed.

The custom is still celebrated in places such as Hinton St George, where carved lanterns are carried in procession.

But as the twentieth century progressed, the pumpkin increasingly became Halloween's most recognisable face, helped by American popular culture and the convenience of a vegetable that could be carved without quite so much effort.

The old turnip lantern belonged to a smaller, rougher tradition. Its features were not designed from printed templates. Its teeth were seldom symmetrical. Each one depended on the shape of the root and the patience of whoever held the knife.

There is something rather wonderful about the fact that we know so much about one of these faces because a schoolteacher thought it worth saving.

By 1943, when Rois Ní Braonáin brought her lantern to the National Museum of Ireland, the kind she remembered from Donegal was already falling out of use. The museum preserved its appearance in plaster, and with it a little evidence of what Halloween had looked like before the pumpkin became almost unavoidable.

The Ghost Turnip is a reminder that folklore survives through ordinary people performing ordinary acts: a child carving a face, a neighbour telling a story, a teacher carrying an old object to a museum.

For centuries, people have made faces to greet the dark. Their materials change. Their explanations change. The custom moves from one country to another and gathers new meanings along the way.

Today, most of us place a pumpkin by the door without giving much thought to the man who was refused shelter in both worlds, or to the children who once left glowing turnips along unlit roads.

Perhaps that is just as well.

But if you want to know what the original Halloween lantern looked like, find a large turnip, hollow it out, and cut a face into its hard, uneven skin. Put a light inside.

It will be easy enough to understand why someone thought it might frighten a ghost. And considerably easier to understand why it frightened the neighbours.