Stingy Jack and the Lantern

Stingy Jack is the story usually told to explain the Halloween jack-o'-lantern: a man who outwits the Devil, is refused by both Heaven and Hell, and is left to wander with a light. The Irish record is different in three ways. The tale is catalogued internationally as type AT 330A, 'The Smith and the Devil', of which the National Folklore Collection holds 124 items and 208 recorded versions, and in the Irish tellings the hero is characteristically a blacksmith: in one taken down from William Cox in May 1935 he is Jem Slattery, and his light along the sea shore is a warning to sailors that stormy weather is coming. The name jack-o'-lantern is older than any carved vegetable, and dictionaries and antiquarian collections record it as a synonym for the will-o'-the-wisp, the light seen over bogs. Carving turnips is documented separately, by Irish schoolchildren in 1937-39, who describe scooping out a turnip skull and standing a lighted candle in it at Hallowe'en, and also at Christmas and on St Stephen's Day. The phrase Stingy Jack appears nowhere in that archive; its closest verified printed ancestor is a 1919 American book's mention of a stingy man named Jack.

Every October the same paragraph goes round: a crafty Irish drunkard called Stingy Jack traps the Devil in a coin, traps him again up an apple tree, is refused by both Heaven and Hell, and is sent off with a coal from the fire, which he puts inside a hollowed turnip — the first jack-o'-lantern, later replaced by the American pumpkin. It is a good story. It is also a modern splice, and the pieces have separate, documented histories. We went looking for each one. First: the name was a light, not a vegetable. In the antiquarian literature jack-o'-lantern is a synonym for the marsh light. Brand's Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, in the section headed "Will with a Wisp", opens flatly: "This phenomenon is called Will or Kitty with a wisp, or Jack with a lantern", adding Reginald Scot's "Kit of the canstick" and Milton's "wandering fire… Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends". Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1902) fixes it. Its entry reads: "JACK-A-LANTERN, sb. Sc. Irel. n.Cy. Nhb. Yks. Lan. Der. Not. Lin. Nhp. War. Shr. e.An. Hmp. I.W. Wil. Som. Dev. Cor." — and then sense 1: "Ignis fatuus or Will-o'-th'-Wisp." The supporting quotations run from John Mactaggart's Galloway encyclopaedia of 1824 ("Some fancy that Jack and the Lantern, alias Will o' the Wisp, has his habitation in the Quaking-quaw") to Croker's south of Ireland ("Maybe… you are only a Jacky lanthorn") and a Cornish charm: "Jack the lantern, Joan the Wad, / That tickled the maid and made her mad, / Light me home, the weather's bad." The carved vegetable is in Wright too — but as sense 3, and only for two English counties: "A hollowed turnip cut into the semblance of the human face and lighted within by a candle. Not. (J.H.B.), Hmp." The lantern meaning is secondary and local; the fen-light meaning is the one recorded from Scotland to Cornwall. Second: in Ireland the tale is about a wandering light, and it is a catalogued international type. The National Folklore Collection's own folktale index — built on the classification Seán Ó Súilleabháin published as A Handbook of Irish Folklore (1942) — lists the plot under AT 330A, "The Smith and the Devil (Death)": "The Savior and Peter; the three wishes. Sticking to the bench, to the apple tree, etc. The smith is admitted neither into heaven nor hell." Against that entry the Collection records 124 items and 208 stories. Read the items filed under it and the shape of the Irish tradition appears. Their titles are Seán an Laindéir (Jack o' the Lanthorn), Jack O' the Lantern, "Seán an Laindéir" agus an Diabhal, Liam an tSoip, Willie the Wisp, Will-o'-the-wisp. The hero is repeatedly a smith. In a telling taken down from William Cox in May 1935 the story begins with the light and works backwards to the man: "There used be a light seen going along the sea shore very often. 'Twas Jack O' the Lantern. 'Twas a warning for sailors that bad stormy weather was at hand. Well Jack O' the Lantern was once an ordinary man. His name was Jem Slattery. Jem Slattery was a blacksmith." The Devil walks into his forge and offers all the money he wants for a soul in five years. A summary written in February 1930 under the title "Willie the Wisp" gives the classic three wishes: Willie, a blacksmith's son who has drunk away everything but the forge, asks that whoever sits in his chair cannot rise, that whoever lifts his hammer cannot drop it, and that no money put in his purse can be taken out. "The angel reminded him that he had forgotten to ask for heaven and departed." The same idea reaches the schoolchildren of 1937-39 in one line of Irish, collected in Co. Kerry: "Deirtear gur fear é Jack o' the Lantern a bhí ró mhaith chun é a chur go h-Ifreann agus ró olc chun é a leigint isteach i bhFlaitheas Dé" — it is said Jack o' the Lantern was a man too good to be sent to Hell and too bad to be let into the Kingdom of God. But most of the seventy-six school transcripts that name him do not tell his story at all; they describe a light. Tomás Ó Murchadha wrote down from James Murphy, aged 52, of Ballymalis, Co. Kerry: "Jack o' the Lantern is supposed to be a person who goes abroad at night to put people astray. He carries with him a lighted lantern. When a person is coming towards his house, he mistakes the light from the lantern for the light from his own house." John Feighery, 55, of Killeen, Co. Clare, gave the same thing with the standard remedy: "He would turned his coat inside out and he found his way safely home." That the plot is a migratory type rather than an Irish invention is not folklore-buff opinion. Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani, analysing folktale distributions phylogenetically in Royal Society Open Science (2016), describe ATU 330 'The Smith and the Devil' as "stable throughout the Indo-European speaking world, from India to Scandinavia": a smith trades his soul for the power to weld anything, then uses it "to stick the villain to an immovable object (e.g. a tree)". Their contested conclusion is that the tale was already present in the last common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. Third: the carved turnip is real, well documented — and not only a Halloween thing. The best evidence is the Schools' Collection, folklore written down by Irish schoolchildren in 1937-39 and now digitised on dúchas.ie. R. Siberry, of Ballinorley school near Bellanurly, Co. Sligo, wrote: "I often made a turnip skull by getting a turnip about the size of a person's head, peeling it and scooping out the inside. Then I cut two holes in it for the eyes and a slit for the mouth. If you stand a lighted candle in it it looks awful." Kevin Feely, of Ballynaraw North, Co. Sligo, described a family evening: "One evening I went out to the garden and pulled a turnip. My father said he would make a ghost out of it… He went out on the road, and put the turnip standing on the fence. He lit the candle with a match, and stuck it up on the turnip. James Byrne was frightened with it that night." Fourteen transcripts tie the practice explicitly to the feast. Sandie Allen, of Three Trees, Co. Donegal: "At Hallow E'en, young people take a turnip and hollow it out and they make two eyes and a nose and a mouth in the turnip they put a lighted candle in it then they hang it up on a tree. This is done to frighten the people on Hallow E'en night." But Pat Browne of Collon, Co. Louth, is the corrective: "The turnip-man is made at Christmas Hallow E'en and St., Stephen's day." Three of these accounts are filed by the archive not under festivals but under toys. Fourth: in 1919 the three things were still three things. Ruth Edna Kelley's The Book of Hallowe'en (1919) contains all the ingredients — in different chapters. Ireland: "One version of the Jack-o'-lantern story comes from Ireland. A stingy man named Jack was for his inhospitality barred from all hope of heaven, and because of practical jokes on the Devil was locked out of hell. Until the Judgment Day he is condemned to walk the earth with a lantern to light his way." Scotland: children make "bogies", "carrying the largest turnips they can save from harvest, hollowed out and carved into the likeness of a fearsome face, with teeth and forehead blacked, and lighted by a candle fastened inside". America: "Jack-o'-lanterns, with which the room is lighted, are hollowed pumpkins with candles inside." Kelley's Jack has no coal, no turnip and no pumpkin. He is refused Heaven for inhospitality, not for a bargain. Nobody in 1919 was presenting these as one origin story.

There is no house, crossroads or grave to visit: Jack is a tale type, not a person. But three things behind this file are real places you can walk into, and one of them is free from your sofa. The archive, online and free. Everything quoted above from Irish informants comes from dúchas.ie, the digitisation of the National Folklore Collection run jointly by University College Dublin and Dublin City University since December 2013. It carries 781,805 manuscript pages, and it is searchable in English and Irish: type turnip, or Jack o' the Lantern, and you get the schoolchildren's own handwriting alongside the transcription. The folktale index at `duchas.ie/en/aath` lets you browse by international tale type — AT 330A is the one that matters here. Material is under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0. The archive, in person. The National Folklore Collection reading room at UCD is open to members of the public by appointment, Monday to Friday, 10:00-16:30. It is the place to consult the material that has not yet been transcribed — which, in the case of AT 330A, is most of the 124 items. Púca Festival, Co. Meath, 29 October - 1 November 2026. Ireland's official Halloween festival runs over four nights across two sites, Trim and Athboy, with music, comedy, cabaret, fire performance, a harvest market and a Púca Procession through the streets of Trim, which is free; the headline concerts are ticketed. There are pages on travel and accessibility on the festival site, and the programme is published in six languages, Spanish among them. Book accommodation early: these are small Meath towns. Rathcroghan, Co. Roscommon — Samhain rather than Halloween. The Rathcroghan Visitor Centre at Tulsk, Castlerea, Co. Roscommon, F45 HH51 (+353 71 963 9268) interprets Cruachan Aí, the royal complex of Connacht, and runs Samhain-themed tours and Halloween events. It is open all year, Monday to Saturday, 09:15-17:00; last admission to the museum is 16:30 and the Táin Café closes at 16:00. Guided tours run year-round Monday to Friday at 11:30 and last about two and a half hours; Saturdays and Sundays by appointment only. From 1 May to 31 August there is an extra tour at 14:00 that goes into Oweynagat cave — if the cave is why you are going, you must travel in summer and book. The centre has off-street car and coach parking, full wheelchair and disability access, baby-changing, free Wi-Fi, café and bookshop; the monuments themselves are on working farmland, so mud, livestock and closed gates are part of the deal. One honest warning. No site anywhere is the home of "Stingy Jack", and any tour that says otherwise is selling the internet version. What you can genuinely see is the archive that contains the real tradition, and the modern Irish festivals that celebrate Samhain rather than the legend.