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The Ghost Turnip and Stingy Jack

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-28

The jack-o'-lantern in the National Museum of Ireland is a turnip, or rather a plaster cast of one, given in 1943 by a Donegal teacher who said that kind of lantern was already dying out around 1900. The name is older than the pumpkin. The story of Stingy Jack is a tale, not a date.

By C. V. Wooster

The scariest lantern in an Irish museum is not a pumpkin. In 1943 the National Museum of Ireland received a turnip lantern from Rois Ní Braonáin, a schoolteacher near Fintown, County Donegal. She said it was the type always made in that locality around 1900. The original was close to falling apart. What the museum put on display is a plaster-cast model, made and painted by the museum artist Eileen Barnes. The catalogue number on the museum's own page is F1943.350. Candles went inside. The lanterns were used to frighten people on the night of 31 October. The museum's sentence on the pumpkin is short: it is "an American development of this Irish tradition." That is an object with a donor, a parish, and a year. It is a better start than a legend.

What the museum is willing to say

The museum also gives the folktale, and it gives it as a folktale. The term jack-o'-lantern, it says, takes its name from the story of Jack, "welcome neither in Heaven or Hell," destined to wander the countryside with just a lantern to light the way. It points readers to dúchas.ie for more versions. It does not date the story, and it does not call it ancient. A plaster turnip and a wandering man are two different kinds of evidence, sitting on the same webpage, and the webpage does not confuse them. The turnip is accessioned. Jack is a name in a tale.

Encyclopaedia Britannica's Halloween entry tells one Irish version at length, and the verbs are the verbs of fiction. Jack invites the Devil for a drink and persuades him to turn into a coin to pay. Jack pockets the coin beside a silver cross, which traps him. The Devil is freed only after promising not to bother Jack for a year, and not to claim his soul. A year later Jack gets him up a tree for fruit and carves a cross in the trunk. He lets him down for a ten-year reprieve. When Jack dies, neither heaven nor hell will take him. He is given a glowing coal, puts it in a hollowed turnip, and becomes Jack of the Lantern. Britannica then says the carving of turnips, and later pumpkins, was believed to help guide or ward off wandering spirits. That last sentence is a belief about a practice. The plot before it is "the tale." There is no year of origin in the entry. Variants exist. Treating Stingy Jack as history would be a category error. The museum's turnip is the history.

On the Isle of Man the turnip never lost its night. Children still carve them for Hop-tu-Naa and sing at the doors. That living custom, and the argument about whether the night was a Celtic New Year, is Hop-tu-Naa. The Donegal lantern in Dublin is the museum's proof that the same vegetable was a Halloween light on the Irish mainland around 1900, in at least one district, and that a teacher thought it was worth saving because the practice was fading.

The word, before the vegetable

The name is older than either the museum's turnip or the American pumpkin, and it did not start as a face. Etymonline, citing the historical record of English, says "Jack with the lanthorn" in the 1650s was a name for the ignis fatuus, the will-o'-the-wisp, the marsh light. The shorter forms jack-o-lantern and jack-a-lantern are in use by 1750. The extension to a lantern made from a carved pumpkin is attested by 1828 in American English, as "Jack-o-lanthorn." So the spooky phrase named a light on a bog for more than a century and a half before it named a gourd on a porch. The Death Glossary is where this site defines an interment. A jack-o'-lantern is not an interment. It is a light the living carry. The bog light and the carved root share a name. They do not share a grave.

Britannica's Samhain entry is the place to read the origin claim at its weakest. It is possible, the entry says, that wearing masks and carving frightening faces into turnips, which became pumpkins in the United States, developed from Samhain customs. "It is possible" is the whole claim. The same entry says it is unclear what elements of Samhain survived in later Allhallowtide tradition, and that very little about ancient Samhain can be said with certainty because the evidence is sparse. Smithsonian and other popular tellings sometimes drop the "possible." The reference book does not. Hutton's case that the feast-of-the-dead story is a Victorian construction is the one already set out in Samhain and All Hallows. A Donegal turnip of about 1900 cannot settle a question about the Iron Age. It can settle the question of what a lantern looked like in Fintown within living memory of the woman who posted it to the museum.

A cast, a tale, and a porch

The object to trust is the cast: F1943.350, painted by Eileen Barnes, after a lantern Rois Ní Braonáin said was the local type around 1900, used with a candle to frighten people on 31 October. The tale to enjoy, and not to footnote as an event, is Stingy Jack, in the version Britannica prints and in the shorter version on the museum label. The word to date is the will-o'-the-wisp of the 1650s, and the carved pumpkin of 1828 American English. The Samhain link is a possibility Britannica will not upgrade. That is a complete account of a vegetable. The pumpkin on a modern porch is the American development the museum already named. The turnip is what the development developed from, in the only sense a catalogue can prove: a teacher in Donegal still knew how to make one, and she sent it to Dublin before it fell to dust.

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