will-o'-the-wisp

The first installment of Halloween Heart, a serialized essay collection released via Substack about all things Halloween.

When my parents moved our family to Excelsior, Minnesota, much of the land was still undeveloped. You could easily tell that our house had once been farmland. Even now, there is one lone apple tree in the backyard, a vestige from the orchard, and about half a mile away, there is a large home built from the bones of what had been the barn. That first fall after we moved in, we drove past a pumpkin patch every time we turned into our neighborhood. One particularly spectacular day, we spotted an artist perched amid the pumpkins, painting the golden and glowing light falling across the patch.

Photo by Ricardo Soria on Unsplash

The tradition of carving pumpkins started as early as the mid 1600s in Ireland, and actually began as carving turnips, not pumpkins. There is an old Irish folktale about a devious man named Stingy Jack. Some accounts refer to him as Flaky Jack, Drunkard Jack, Jack the Smith, and Jack o’ the Lantern, but most often he is known as Stingy Jack. Not only was he stingy, he was tricky. The story goes that one night, Satan rolled into Stingy Jack’s village, and, among other manipulations, Jack tricked Satan into turning into a coin to pay for their beers (of which they had many). Jack then snatched the Satan-turned-coin and stuffed him in his wallet, which was also tricked out with a crucifix, limiting Satan’s power. Later, Jack made a deal with Satan that he should never collect his soul. Jack rode out the rest of his days chock full of tomfoolery and sin, and when he died, he found himself trapped: he had been too sinful to go to heaven, but he couldn’t enter hell, either, because of his deal with the devil. Jack was condemned to remain in the dark space between heaven and hell, life and death. Surrounded by the dark unknown, Jack asked how he could possibly find a resting place if he couldn’t see. Satan, laughing, tossed him an ember. Jack took his favorite food, the turnip, and carved out its middle, placing the ember inside. For the rest of time, Jack holds the lighted turnip aloft and walks the world over in its dim light, trying to find a place to put his soul to rest.

This little creeper is a plaster cast of a “ghost turnip” carving from Donegal, Ireland. You can go see him at the National Museum of Ireland!

People carved turnips, rutabagas, and sometimes large beets with scary faces around Halloween-time, either to represent spirits, or to frighten off the evil spirits that returned to earth for All Hallow’s Eve. Especially in England, people also related jack-o’-lanterns to will-o’-the-wisps, or “ignis fatuus” (foolish fire), ghostly lights appearing across swamps, marshes, and bogs, spotted by late night travelers.

Engraving of a “will-o’-the-wisp” by T.W. Cook

When the Irish and Scottish immigrated to America in the 1800s, Halloween became a major holiday in the United States. Instead of carving turnips, people in America carved pumpkins, which are native to America and grow in abundance during the harvest season. (They are, coincidentally, much easier to carve than a turnip.) At first, the carved pumpkins were associated with harvest in general and often appeared on Thanksgiving tables, but eventually, the practice zeroed in on Halloween time and people took knife to pumpkin and let the eerie recesses of their minds carve scary creations. 

Now, pumpkin-carving contests and elaborate installations of the temporary artworks spring up all around the country in October. The tradition has become a staple of fall-time activities, along with visiting apple orchards or going for hayrides. Every year, my mother, brother, and I would shop for pumpkins at local garden centers or even in the enormous cardboard containers that showed up in Cub Foods parking lots every fall. Selecting pumpkins was an important business. I always wanted to find the perfectly large, round, “pumpkin”-shaped pumpkins, but overtime, I learned to appreciate the less-than-perfect pumpkins. A long and skinny guy could be carved with a tall smile, full of coffin-shaped teeth. A short and wide one could sport a sly Cheshire cat smile. 

Photo by Miguel Teirlinck on Unsplash

The first time my brother was old enough to carve a pumpkin, he was shocked. After I sliced a lid on the pumpkin and twisted it off, my mother handed him a large metal spoon. “Now we dig it out,” she explained. My brother, who frequently stuffed toads in his pockets that my mother would have to fish out before doing laundry, reached in with a bare hand. His face twisted in surprise and disgust as he lifted out a handful of slimy, seed-studded, stringy orange goop. Usually fearless, clad always in his leather jacket and cowboy boots (even in 100-degree-weather), my baby brother just could not get over how something as firm and stolid as a pumpkin could be filled with so much soft flesh. We scooped and scraped the insides hollow, dug out eyes and toothy smiles. Then we put the jack-o’-lanterns on our front steps, placed tea lights behind their teeth, and lit them up with small flames. My jack-o’-lantern’s smile never turned out as well as I’d envisioned, but no matter its design, the glowing orange pumpkin signaled to all that it was time for candy and howling winds and costumes and screams. It was time for Halloween.

The pumpkin patch at the edge of my neighborhood is long gone now. In its place, three enormous houses cast giant blocks of shadow on their small backyards. But sometimes, when I turn into the neighborhood on a fall day during golden hour, I can roll the windows down and breathe in that autumn smell of dead-leaves and sun-warmed earth, of air turning crisper and colder with every breath, and if I squint my eyes, I can just barely see the old pumpkin patch again, a will-o’-the-wisp in the oncoming dark.

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Thank you for reading Halloween Heart, a section of Kaia Preus’s Substack With Love From My Kitchen Table. New essays, reading reviews, and listicles drop each week, with an uptick in Halloween Heart-focused material during the autumn months. Please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription. If you know of someone who might enjoy this essay, please forward the email to them and encourage them to sign up for more! Thank you so much for being here. Until next time…Boo!👻