Halloween's glowing face wasn't always a pumpkin.
In Ireland, Scotland and parts of England, people hollowed out turnips and other roots, cut a face into them and put a candle inside.
Before pumpkins, there were turnips.
The National Museum of Ireland has one, or a cast of one: a carved "ghost turnip". In 1943, a schoolteacher near Fintown, Co. Donegal, gave the museum the original, saying it was the type always made there around 1900.
In the late 1930s, Irish schoolchildren recording local customs described how it was done. Take a large turnip the night before Hallowe'en, scoop out the inside, cut holes for the eyes and mouth, and fit a candle. Folklorists record the same custom in Britain, carved from turnips and swedes.
The ancient part is harder to prove.
Halloween falls at the start of winter, the time of the old Gaelic festival of Samhain, and the lanterns are often said to go back that far. But the written evidence we found for carved turnip lanterns comes from the 1800s and early 1900s.
Even the name is older than the carving. In 1600s England, a "jack-o'-lantern" was a man carrying a lantern, such as a night watchman. The name was also given to the eerie lights seen over marshes. An Irish folktale later linked to the lantern tells of Jack, who tricked the devil and was left to wander with only an ember to light his way. How the name reached carved vegetables is still unclear.
So where did the pumpkin come in?
America was already carving pumpkins.
Pumpkins are native to the Americas, and Americans carved them at harvest time. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, born in Massachusetts in 1807, remembered "wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, / Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!" His poem, dated 1844, is about Thanksgiving. It never mentions Halloween.
Then, in the mid-1800s, large numbers of Irish people arrived, many fleeing famine, and Halloween customs spread. The historian Cindy Ott says the old Halloween traditions and the American pumpkin came together in the 19th century.
A pumpkin also has an obvious physical advantage: it's bigger, and its middle is already a hollow of seeds and pulp, where a turnip has to be dug out of solid flesh. No early source we found says that's why people chose it.
The jack-o'-lantern didn't simply swap vegetables. A Halloween lantern from Ireland and Britain met an American harvest custom.
The turnip lantern crossed the Atlantic. The pumpkin was already waiting.
Sources checked 1 November 2026·6 sources ↓