Press to Return to Main Halloween Page

Jack 'O' Lantern is known by various names including will-o-the-wisp and corpse light.  The Jack 'O' Lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore.  As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree.  When he carved an image of a cross into the tree's trunk, he trapped the devil up the tree.  Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree. According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance into Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil.  Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness.  The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep glowing longer. The irish used turnips as their 'Jack's lanterns' originally.  But when the immigrants came to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips.  So the Jack 'O' Lantern in America was a hollowed-out pumpkin, lit with an ember.