It was said that ‘beyond moving up and down, and a little way backward and forward, there was no sign of advancing towards the road on the part of the extraordinary carrier of the peculiar light.’ He attempted to call to them, but the only reply he received was his own voice eerily echoing around the hills and mountains. It was while walking through the old pit, with a lantern in-hand to illuminate the way, that he ‘happened to gaze into the trees and bushes… and he fancied he saw a light in the midst of the trees.’ Assuming it was another person also carrying a lantern, he paused to see if his fellow traveller would be walking in the same direction, but they came no closer. The press reported that a local man from Llantwit Fardre, who occupied a ‘responsible position’, did solemnly declare that on two nights in succession he had seen the ‘dreaded ghost’. In one such case from near Pontypridd in 1898, an ‘extraordinary moving light’ was causing ‘considerable alarm’ in the vicinity of an out-of-use colliery. Much like fellow folkloric omens of doom the toili (phantom funerals) and the canwyll corff (corpse candles), the Jack y Lantern was said to have a mind of its own and would lurk the darkness at night, where to encounter one was a sure sign of something very bad indeed. If the stories are to be believed, the Welsh Jack y Lantern (or Jac y Lantern) wasn’t solely an inanimate object with which to decorate the home. The practice is said to have been just as prevalent in Wales, where it was the more readily-available swede which was chopped into a menacing gaze ahead of Nos Calan Gaeaf, the night which marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter, and when the veil between Annwn – the Otherworld – and our own was at its thinnest. The Celtic people of Scotland and Ireland, who are credited with exporting the trend across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, would traditionally cut up a turnip with which to repel evil spirits on October 31, Much like the pumpkin into which it is sculpted, the glowing eyes and grinning grimace have been well and truly hacked into the holiday itself, thanks in large part to its association with Hollywood horror films and the tradition of trick or treating.ĭespite being popularised in America, however, the origins of this sinister-looking fruit can be traced back to the root vegetables of Britain and Ireland. Nothing quite encapsulates the spirit of Halloween like the flickering face of a finely-carved jack-o’-lantern.
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