A miserly trickster who outwits the Devil twice, then wanders the earth forever with only a burning coal to light his way — the folk origin of the jack-o'lantern.
Stingy Jack is a folk tale, first collected in Ireland in the 19th century, telling of a cunning but miserly man who twice tricks the Devil out of taking his soul — once by convincing him to turn into a coin to pay off a bar tab, then trapping the transformed Devil in his pocket next to a silver cross, and once by getting him stuck up a tree behind a carved cross. In exchange for freeing him, the Devil agrees never to claim Jack's soul. When Jack eventually dies, Heaven will not have so unrepentant a man, and the Devil, bound by his earlier promise, refuses to take him either. Cast out into the dark, Jack is given only a single burning coal to light his way; he sets it inside a hollowed-out turnip, and is doomed to wander the earth with his lantern (thus becoming "Jack of the Lantern," or Jack O'Lantern) until Judgment Day. In Ireland and Scotland, people carved frightening faces into turnips and potatoes at Samhain to ward off Jack and other wandering spirits — a tradition that emigrants carried to North America, where the far larger native pumpkin replaced the turnip and gave the modern jack-o'lantern its familiar form. Like the banshee, púca, and other folk figures, the tale survives through oral tradition and folklore collection rather than any single medieval manuscript, so there is no one canonical source text for it.