Stingy Jack: The Man Behind the Jack-o’-Lantern

Before the jack-o’-lantern grew in popularity throughout the United States and became what it is today, the name described something very different.

It’s related to the strange lights sighted over marshes and lonely roads. 

Science would eventually explain many of these sightings as natural phenomena associated with wetlands. 

But before that, folklore supplied other explanations. 

In Britain and Ireland, wandering lights accumulated names such as will-o’-the-wisp, corpse candle, friar’s lantern, and—Jack-o’-lantern.

One family of stories gave “Jack” a biography. He was a drinker, a miser, a blacksmith, and simply a man clever enough to trick the Devil and foolish enough to believe there would be no price.

In this case file

  1. The legend of Stingy Jack
  2. What Jack carried
  3. How old is the story?
  4. The custom before the legend
  5. From turnip to pumpkin
  6. What the legend explains

The legend of Stingy Jack

Many different legends exist. 

In the familiar modern version, Stingy Jack invites the Devil to drink with him and then avoids paying by persuading the Devil to transform into a coin. Jack traps him beside a cross and releases him only after securing a promise.

Later, Jack tricks the Devil again—often by asking him to climb a tree for fruit, then carving a cross into the trunk. Once more, Jack bargains for his freedom.

However, his victories do not save him. 

When Jack dies, Heaven refuses him because of the life he led. 

Hell also refuses him because of the Devil’s promise. 

Consequently, Jack is left between destinations, condemned to wander the earth.

What Jack carries

The Devil gives Jack a burning coal to light his road. Jack places it inside a hollowed root vegetable—usually a turnip in Irish stories—and carries it into the night. 

The wandering figure becomes “Jack of the lantern,” shortened to Jack-o’-lantern.

The earliest Jack-o’-lantern was recorded in 1658 as the wandering light called a will-o’-the-wisp—an eerie flame imagined as “Jack with a lantern.” 

During the nineteenth century, the name became attached to carved vegetable lanterns, including pumpkins with faces. Later, artists would turn the lantern itself into a character’s head. Pumpkin-headed figures appeared in popular imagery around the turn of the twentieth century, including L. Frank Baum’s Jack Pumpkinhead in 1904 and later appearing in the 23rd book in the official Oz series in 1929. 

How old is the story?

The relationship between wandering lights and names such as Jack-o’-lantern is old. The exact biography now told about “Stingy Jack,” however, is harder to pin to a single ancient source. 

Popular histories often describe it confidently as an old Irish folktale, but the story survives in multiple forms and modern summaries frequently repeat one another.

That doesn’t make it false lore. Variation is one of folklore’s normal conditions. It does mean we should distinguish between a documented custom, an old term, and a neatly packaged origin story.

The Library of Congress summarizes the familiar tradition: Irish people carved turnips, the legend concerned a man who trapped the Devil, and Jack was forced to wander with a coal inside a hollowed turnip. That is good evidence for the tradition as it is now remembered. It is not proof that every detail belongs to one ancient, unchanged tale—or that the story single-handedly created the jack-o’-lantern.

Souling

Historian Nicholas Rogers traces English souling—the practice of traveling from house to house in exchange for food or soul cakes—to the late medieval and early modern periods. Later forms of the custom included lanterns made from hollowed turnips.

The candle could represent a soul suspended in purgatory: a small light carried through the darkness while prayers and food passed between the living and the dead.

Rogers also records Punky or Spunky Night in Somerset, where turnip lanterns were carved into grotesque faces representing imps or goblins. 

These traditions give us overlapping customs involving wandering lights, the dead, seasonal begging, frightening faces, and hollowed roots.

This changes the way we should tell Jack’s story. 

Stingy Jack is best understood as a wonderfully effective explanation attached to an existing cluster of names, beliefs, and practices. 

From turnip to pumpkin

By the nineteenth century, people in Ireland and Scotland were hollowing out turnips and other root vegetables to make lanterns, sometimes carving them with grotesque faces and carrying them during Halloween activities. 

The transformation to our modern-day pumpkin was already visible in nineteenth-century North America. 

Rogers quotes an 1866 report from Kingston, Ontario, describing a “great sacrifice of pumpkins” used to make illuminated “heads and faces” with short tallow candles inside. 

The language reveals the change. These were no longer lanterns. They were glowing heads.

By the early twentieth century, the glowing pumpkin was firmly established as an American Halloween symbol. 

What the legend explains

Stingy Jack operates as an explanatory story for four things:

  1. A strange light
  2. A seasonal custom
  3. A carved lantern
  4. A moral warning. 

That is the first step in the history of the pumpkin-headed monster—not a monster with a vegetable skull, but a human being reduced to a light and a name.

Continue exploring the archive with the Headless Horseman, then meet Jack Pumpkinhead. The complete visual history appears in Before Stranger Things: The Strange History of the Pumpkin-Headed Monster.

Sources and further reading

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