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Hop-tu-Naa: The Isle of Man's Turnip Night

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-15

On the Isle of Man, 31 October is Hop-tu-Naa. Children still carve turnips and sing about Jinny the Witch, a song the BBC ties to a real woman punished for witchcraft. Whether the night was a Celtic New Year is a claim a historian has taken apart.

By C. V. Wooster

On one island the lantern is still a turnip. Hop-tu-Naa is celebrated on 31 October on the Isle of Man. The BBC, in a 2025 explainer credited in part to Culture Vannin, calls it the oldest unbroken Manx tradition, and the oldest unbroken tradition on the island. It marks the turn from summer to winter. James Franklin of Culture Vannin told the BBC that the date is when "the veil between this world and the other world is at its thinnest." That is a living custom, described by the island's own heritage body and by a public broadcaster. It is not, by itself, a proof that the night was the ancient Celtic New Year. Ronald Hutton's 2024 essay in Folklore is the argument on the other side, and it is aimed at a specific Manx sentence.

Turnips, songs, and a cake eaten in silence

The BBC's account of the night is domestic. Children hollow turnips, carve them, and carry the lanterns. Franklin says the fire in the lantern can be linked to a belief in protection against evil, and that a turnip is harder work than a pumpkin. During the evening, children go from house to house singing. The tunes of Hop-tu-Naa vary by district. One of the songs is about Jinny the Witch. A custom the BBC says is no longer followed had young women bake and eat a "dumb cake" in silence, then walk backwards to bed, in the hope of dreaming of a future husband. Culture Vannin publishes a leaflet on the custom. The BBC piece is the readable public summary of what the heritage body was willing to put its name to in 2025: turnips, songs, Jinny, and the dumb cake as a discontinued piece of fortune-telling.

The name itself is younger than the night. The BBC says Hop-tu-Naa is a relatively modern Manx name, adopted since the 1940s. Before that, people spoke of Hop-tu-Naa night, and before that of the night for singing Hop-tu-Naa. Franklin told the BBC that some take the words as a sound from the song, and others link them to fairies, trolls, and elves, and so to older Norse-era beliefs. That second reading is a "could," not a document. The pumpkin that replaced the turnip in North America is a different object, kept at the National Museum of Ireland as a plaster cast of a Donegal lantern. That museum piece is the ghost turnip. Hop-tu-Naa is the custom that did not make the switch.

Jinny, and the record the BBC gives for Joney Lowney

The songs need a person, and the BBC supplies one, as folklore tied to a prosecution. Tales of Jinny the Witch, it says, stem from Joney Lowney of Ballaglonney, who lived about three hundred years ago. She had six children. She asked for money, and bad luck was said to fall on people who refused her. She also gathered herbs and made potions, and farmers asked her to treat sick animals. The BBC's account of the charge is specific. She questioned the quality of flour the Bishop's miller was giving the poor. The mill machinery then stopped and could not be started again. She was arrested for practicing witchcraft, found guilty, and spent fourteen days in Peel Castle. She was fined £3 and ordered to stand in a white sheet at the market crosses of the four main towns, Castletown, Douglas, Ramsey, and Peel, with a sign that said "for practices in sorcery and witchcraft."

That is the BBC's story, given as the root of the song. It is not a transcript of the trial printed on this page. A heritage explainer can be right and still be a summary. The useful caution is the same one the island's own telling already uses: Jinny is a figure in a living song, and Joney Lowney is the woman the song is said to remember. The punishment, if the BBC's details hold, was public humiliation and a fine, not an execution. The song kept her. The Death Glossary is the place this site defines an interment. Hop-tu-Naa is not an interment. It is a night when the living sing at the doors about a woman the courts called a witch, and carry a light they say is for protection.

The New Year line, and where Hutton says it came from

Culture Vannin and the BBC both describe Hop-tu-Naa as the Celtic New Year, a harvest gathered and a winter prepared. Hutton does not treat that description as medieval evidence. Around 1808, John Kelly's Manx dictionary recorded mummers opening their Halloween play with "Tonight is New Year's Night." Hutton says Kelly seems to have been the first person to suggest, from that line, that this was the Celtic New Year, and that the dictionary was not published until 1858. Sir John Rhys found the reference later. By the time Rhys visited the island, the mummers were no longer using the line, though an old man still remembered a New Year sense of the night.

Hutton's objection is about the play, not about the turnips. The British mummers' play, he writes, is now dated to the mid-eighteenth century, often spread by printed texts, and it probably reached Man from England shortly before Kelly heard it. On the English mainland the season for that play was Christmas and New Year. The Manx performers preferred Halloween, and they may have brought a script that already said New Year. A local folklorist, inspired by Rhys, searched the island in 1896 for any tradition linking November to the New Year, and found none. None of the major collectors of Manx folklore who lived on the island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hutton adds, recorded such a tradition either.

So the night you can still watch is real. Children carve turnips and sing. The Celtic New Year label is a nineteenth-century reading of a line in a play that may have been imported, and Hutton thinks the evidence for it is indirect. He says the same of the wider feast-of-the-dead claim in Samhain and All Hallows: not conclusively disproved, and not something the medieval records actually show. Welsh Calan Gaeaf, the other spirit night in that week, has its own later folklore of a black sow and a bonfire, set out in Halloween bonfires. Hop-tu-Naa does not need that argument to be worth describing. It needs the argument if someone is about to say the turnip proves a Celtic funeral calendar. The turnip proves a Manx Halloween that never became a pumpkin.

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