The turnip at the National Museum of Ireland is made of plaster. Its carved face is the work of a museum artist, based on a lantern remembered from County Donegal.
In 1943, schoolteacher Róis Ní Braonáin, then working near Fintown, told the museum that this was the kind of lantern made locally around 1900. Museum artist Eileen Barnes created and painted the model, now catalogued as F1943.350. According to the museum, candles were placed inside hollowed turnips and the illuminated faces used to frighten people on October 31. The cast preserves a remembered custom, though it cannot tell us how far back that custom reached.
Before pumpkins came to dominate Halloween doorsteps in North America, carved roots served the same purpose in parts of Ireland and Scotland. Their history is documented in folklore manuscripts, historical descriptions and, in the Donegal case, an identified museum object. Finland has its own accounts of turnips used as lamps. Those accounts raise a different question: when does a hollowed vegetable become a Halloween lantern?
Faces in the turnip field
The Irish Schools’ Manuscript Collection gives the Donegal object useful company. Accounts collected in 1938 in Counties Cavan and Tipperary describe people scooping out turnips, cutting eyes and mouths into the remaining skin, placing candles inside and setting the results where they would startle passersby. Galway City Museum has published transcriptions of those recollections.
The same idea crossed into the recorded traditions of Scotland, where a turnip could be called a neep or tumshie. In her 1919 book The Book of Hallowe’en, American writer Ruth Edna Kelley described Scottish children carrying large turnips hollowed out and carved into frightening faces. A candle fixed inside made the expression visible after dark. Kelley compiled older customs rather than reporting a Scottish Halloween she had witnessed.
The carved faces were intended to frighten people after dark, whether carried along a road or placed where someone might pass. The name jack-o’-lantern has an older history: by the seventeenth century, it referred to wandering lights, also known as will-o’-the-wisps. Tales of a wandering figure called Jack later became associated with lanterns, but they cannot date the first face carved into a turnip.
When the pumpkin took the candle
Pumpkins offered North Americans a different material to work with, and illuminated pumpkin faces appear in the written record by the mid-nineteenth century. In his poem The Pumpkin, dated 1844, New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier recalled carving ugly faces in pumpkins and lighting them from within. The poem looks back on boyhood and Thanksgiving, so it is evidence of the carving practice rather than proof of a Halloween custom at that date.
The Halloween connection is clearer in Canada two decades later. Historian Nicholas Rogers cites a report published by the Kingston Daily News on November 1, 1866, describing the previous evening’s revelry and the use of pumpkins fashioned into illuminated heads.
An engraving printed in Harper’s Weekly on November 23, 1867 supplies another kind of evidence. Drawn by L. W. Atwater and titled The Pumpkin Effigy, it depicts the carved pumpkin as a recognizable object. Like Whittier’s poem, the illustration should not be assigned to Halloween without further evidence; it shows that the illuminated or carved pumpkin had a place in nineteenth-century North American culture beyond one holiday. By the time Kelley published her Halloween history in 1919, pumpkin jack-o’-lanterns were familiar features of American celebrations.
Irish and Scottish Halloween traditions certainly travelled across the Atlantic, and North Americans were carving pumpkins in the nineteenth century. The surviving evidence does not establish one moment when everyone put down their turnips and picked up pumpkins.
Finland’s turnip lamp
A June 2026 article in the Finnish newspaper Lempäälän-Vesilahden Sanomat, contributed by Riitta Mäkinen, points to a description published in Kotiseutu in 1913. The passage, attributed to E. Vihervaara and associated with Yläne in southwest Finland, explains how a turnip was hollowed and fitted with a stick, thread and melted tallow to make a lamp. Mäkinen also identified reports of turnip lamps in 1918, when lamp oil was difficult to obtain.
The 1913 account describes a practical light made from a root vegetable, with a fat-fed wick. As Mäkinen recounts it, the description does not mention a carved face, a ghost or a seasonal celebration.
Today, Finnish heritage organizations connect a turnip lantern called kitupiikki with Kekri, the traditional end-of-harvest celebration. In October 2026, Maa- ja kotitalousnaiset promoted lantern-making as a return to tradition, providing instructions that included carving faces or designs. The campaign documents how the organization presents Kekri today. The earlier accounts establish a turnip-lamp technique, but do not show that face-carved lanterns were used in historical Kekri observances.
Turku City Museum catalogues a metal oil lamp as a kitupiikki. That surviving object is neither a turnip nor a Halloween lantern. Mäkinen has raised the possibility that later writers applied an existing lamp name to the turnip version. Until an older folklore record securely connects the name, the vegetable and a particular seasonal use, that relationship remains uncertain.
In an early-eleventh-century poem, an Icelandic traveller describes being turned away from a farmhouse on a journey towards Sweden.