![]() Curators made a cast of the “ghost turnip,” which dated to the turn of the 20th century and was close to disintegration. “The records we have for the lantern from Donegal show it was donated in 1943 by a schoolteacher in the village of Fintown, who said she was donating it because nobody was making this type of lantern anymore, though it was a tradition that was remembered in the area,” Clodagh Doyle, keeper of the National Museum of Ireland’s Irish Folklife Division, told CNS in 2017. “Over time people started to carve faces and designs to allow light to shine through the holes without extinguishing the ember.”Īccording to Sarah Mac Donald of Catholic News Service (CNS), the National Museum of Ireland-Country Life in County Mayo houses a plaster cast of a turnip carving “with pinched angry face” in its collections. “Metal lanterns were quite expensive, so people would hollow out root vegetables,” Nathan Mannion, a senior curator at EPIC: The Irish Migration Museum, told National Geographic’s Blane Bachelor last year. ![]() They believed leaving the spooky carvings outside their homes or carrying them as lanterns would protect them from harm’s way while offering a flicker of light that could cut through their dark surroundings. Celebrants placed lit candles inside the cavities, similar to the pumpkin jack-o’-lanterns of modern Halloween. Because of this, God banned him from heaven, and the devil banned him from hell, forcing him to “roam earth for eternity.”įor protection from Stingy Jack and other apparitions, people in the British Isles began carving faces into pieces of produce-particularly turnips, but in some cases potatoes, radishes and beets. A particularly ominous entity was Stingy Jack, who was believed to have “tricked the devil for his own monetary gain,” writes Cydney Grannan for Encyclopedia Britannica. During those two days, ancient Celts believed that the veil between life and death was at its narrowest, allowing spirits to roam freely between both realms.Ĭelts approached this turning point with both anticipation and dread, fearing that they would unknowingly cross paths with wayward fairies, monsters or ancestral spirits. (Samhain translates to “ summer’s end” in Gaelic.) Kicking off at sundown on October 31 and continuing through November 1, Samhain ushered in the transition from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice. The spooky tradition was part of Samhain, an ancient pagan festival that marked the end of summer and the beginning of the Celtic new year and long winter ahead. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, chiseling ghoulish grins into turnips was the more common practice (at least in Ireland and other Celtic nations). ![]() Today, carving pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns is ubiquitous with Halloween.
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