The Last Lantern on the Street

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Notes from the Society archive, Halloween week

On Halloween night, if you walk a street long enough, you notice it: the one lantern still burning when the rest have guttered out. Houses gone dark, bowls emptied, children called in, and somewhere down the row a single carved face holds its light past midnight. The Society's own archive carries an unsigned note on this, in a hand none of us can place to a member, that the last lantern burns for whoever is still on their way home.

I cannot date the note and I am wary of the romance in it, but it sits comfortably enough beside what is actually known of the jack-o'-lantern, which is Irish, and which began as a warning dressed as a story.

The tale, told across Munster and beyond with the usual local variations, concerns a man remembered as Stingy Jack, mean with his money and his welcome. He tricked the devil, twice by most tellings, over a drink, a coin, a trapped shape caught in a tree, the detail changes but the bargain holds: the devil agrees never to claim Jack's soul. When Jack dies, heaven will not take a man of his character, and hell is barred to him by his own trick. Left between the two, he is given a single coal from the devil's fire to light his way through the dark between worlds. He hollows out a turnip to carry it, and walks on still. In Ireland he became Jack of the Lantern, and in the bogs and back fields he is one face of the will-o'-the-wisp, the drifting light no one trusts to lead a traveller anywhere good.

Against Jack, and against whatever else might be abroad, Irish and Scottish households carved their own lanterns, turnips, swedes, mangel-wurzels, faced and hollowed and set in windows or by the door on Samhain night, when the boundary between the living and the dead was said to thin. Somerset kept its own version in the punkie lanterns once carried through Hinton St George, and Worcestershire its hoberdy's lantern, different names on the same old habit of a carved light against the dark. The face was ward as much as welcome. Meanwhile the household door was sometimes left on the latch, a place kept at the table, for the dead who were kin and known and wanted back for the one night only.

The pumpkin came later, with Irish emigration to North America, where it proved larger, softer under the knife, and far more willing to hold a candle than any turnip. The face carried over unchanged, grinning or grimacing, depending on the carver. Victorian naturalists, who catalogued everything from ferns to sea monsters on specimen plates with Latin names and cool engraved lines, would have made short work of the jack-o'-lantern too, had they thought it worth the ink: one more curious growth of the season, name uncertain, habitat the windowsill.

What the street's last lantern has to do with any of this, properly, I cannot swear to. The archive note may be nothing older than one member's habit of leaving a porch light on past the final trick-or-treater, dressed up afterward in older language. But the instinct behind it is not invented. A light kept burning on the one night the roads are said to run uncertain, for whoever is still out on them, turns up again and again this time of year, in Samhain's bonfires, in the lit graves of Día de Muertos, in the remembered dead of Dziady. Halloween keeps the habit too, mostly without noticing it does.

So where you find one jack-o'-lantern outlasting its street, I would leave it be. It may only be a thrifty candle. It may be keeping a much older promise.

Cormac Deane is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. Passage tombs, place-names, and the long argument between them; a habit of reading the landscape through the Irish in it, and of pointing out where a translation has quietly invented a story the original never told.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.