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But before Old Scratch touched ground, Jack froze the devil in his tracks by caring a cross in the tree, making Satan swear never to claim his soul. Satan complied.
Years later, after Jack died and his soul wandered up to heaven, he was locked out because he had been such a gross guy in real life. Dejected, Jack went to Satan and inquired about accommodations in hell. Still smarting over the apple tree high-jinks, Satan told Jack to go to heaven. Jack complained that heaven wouldn't let him in.
"Take this and get out of my face," replied Satan, tossing Jack a hot glowing coal fresh from the oven. Jack bobbled the thing and placed it inside a huge turnip he'd only half-eaten. By light of his vegetable torch, Jack then embarked on an eternal and futile quest to find a place to crash.
At the risk of sounding oxymoronic, this is a real legend. Hence, the origin of the term jack-o-lantern.
Maybe.
Another theory credits the Druids, a pagan religious order that once dominated ancient Ireland, Britain and France. This theory traces jack-o-lantern imagery to the Druid practice of burning human sacrifices alive inside wicker cages.
Strange things, these Halloween origins. Like so many other traditions grounded in antiquity, explanations are often contradictory or rent with holes.
We don't know, for instance, exactly when the first Halloween was observed. But we can establish, with a reasonable degree of confidence, that Druid kids were unlikely to have uttered "Trick or Treat, smell our feet, we want something good to eat. Because The Folklore of American Holidays, edited by Hennig Cohen and Tristan Potter Coffin, insists that trick-or-treating is a contemporary American phenomenon.
To get a line on trick-or-treating, you have to go back maybe 3,000 years, to the summer's-end Gaelic festival of Samhain. Samhain marked not only the end of the pagan harvest, but an official pause to commune with those who died during the year. Poor folks were given cakes to eat, so long as they promised to pray for a good harvest the following year.
When the Romans rolled through the present-day British Isles, they looked with ill humor upon the Druids' religious activities -- blood sacrifice to purge the sins from the souls of the departed. So the Romans put an end to bloodletting. Ritual bloodletting, anyway.
But when Rome converted to Christianity, its leaders figured they needed to accommodate at least a few of the indigenous pagan rites in order to appear relevant. Thus, in the eighth century, Pope Gregory III proclaimed Nov. 1 as All Saints' Day, or All-Hallows Day, to honor all the Catholic saints and martyrs yet to be sanctified. The actual celebration kicked off the evening before, on "All-HallowsE'en."
But since All Saints' Day tended to be largely exclusionary, the Church made a broader concession to pagan tradition in the tenth century by establishing All-Souls Day on Nov. 2 to honor all those dead souls who weren't lucky enough to be saints, souls who needed prayers from the living for purification.
The Church of England eventually banned All-Souls Day, but the tradition lives on in many parts of the Christian world.
As the centuries passed and the Samhain tradition of sharing the harvest became more archaic, modern-day trick-or-treating got its first clear antecedent with a custom called English Plough Day. Now begging for gifts and food instead of expecting communal handouts, English farmers threatened to destroy the land with their plows unless they got respect.
So that's where trick-or-treat came from. Sort of, more or less. Unless you're, say, a Zuni Indian in New Mexico.
The Zunis take All-Souls Day quite seriously by bringing candles and food to the graves of the dead, but they claim the tradition is aboriginal and predates Catholic influences. Early, almost as if rising from the loam of the collective unconscious, Zuni children go door-to-door chanting, "Let's pray, let's pray, we are little angels, from heaven we come. If you don't give to us, your doors and windows we will break."
Naturally, this sort of implicit blackmail (albeit delivered by so-called little angels), was bound to ignite another sort of uniquely American Halloween tradition - reactionary sadism from the "treat" end: rumors of razor-blade apples, strychnine-laced cookies, all that sinister faceless stuff that has parents bemoaning the breakdown of society.
Oddly enough, however, two California State University professors published a study in 1985 concluding that Halloween sadism was overblown, if not downright bogus.
After scouring newspapers from 1959 through 1984, the researchers could identify only 76 cases of candy tampering, resulting in only 20 injuries, all of them minor. There were two deaths. One child ate heroin hidden in candy at his uncle's house; another child was poisoned by his father, who spiked some candy with cyanide to make it look like the work of a Halloween sadist.
Another Halloween tradition Americanized into grandiose proportions deals with that Beavis and Butthead favorite -- fire. The Druids originally built bonfires on Samhain because they were thought to rejuvenate the sun and banish evil spirits. Lately, in Detroit, Halloween has simply rejuvenated arsonists: they call it Devil's Night. The trade journal Firefighting has referred to Devil's Night in the Motor City as "the Super Bowl of firefighting."
So that's fire. But where did costumes come from?
Rewind once more to pagan rites in the British Isles. Some historians contend that, after celebrating, toasting, and feting the dead, villagers dressed up in colorful attire, formed parades, and led the spirits to the outskirts of town. After all, the event was also called Mischief Night. Spirits who didn't leave often wore out their welcome by curdling milk and riding horses into exhaustion. When Christianity took hold, the villagers continued to wear costumes, only, they justified their pleasures by contending they were merely dressing like saints.
Black cats? Broomsticks? Witches?
Several thousand years back, when the Romans were busily eradicating pagan societies, few distinctions were drawn between the Druids and another nature-worshipping culture, the witches.
Like the Druids, witches made a big production of Samhain. Unlike the Druids, according to Palm Bay's Jacque Zaleski, witches never conducted human or animal sacrifices to their principal deity, the Mother Goddess. But the Romans weren't all that discriminating in their contempt for paganism, and the ancient stigma continues to bedevil witches - known formally as Wiccans - today. Great Britain, for instance, didn't repeal its anti-witch laws until 1951.
Zaleski is the priestess for a Palm Bay Wiccan coven called Church of the Iron Oak. Halloween, or Samhain, is still the main event on the Wiccan calendar. But instead of Druidism, Wicca is often confused with Satan worship; in fact, Anton LaVey, author of The Satanic Bible, calls Halloween the most important day of the year for the Church of Satan.
"The spirits we attempt to contact are those of our loved ones, perhaps for messages or for reassurance," Zaleski says. "Anton LaVey summons demon spirits to do the bidding of man; we believe mankind is here to do the bidding of the deity."
At any rate, Zaleski says those often sinister stereotypes of witches have prosaic explanations.
The broom, for instance, is a ceremonial device employed to sweep away negativity -- not to mention dirt -- before harvest rites. During the spring, adherents would straddle their brooms and jump high to indicate how tall the corn would grow.
The pointed, wide-brimmed hats traditionally associated with witches were common garb for rural heathens -- those who lived on the heath, far away from the Christian-dominated urban centers -- to keep the sun and rain out of their faces.
Black capes and hoods? "It's not all that warm in Europe," Zaleski says. "Ancient man didn't have a lot of choice about dyes in that part of the world. Dark wool doesn't show much dirt, and it keeps you warmer."
Cauldrons? "If you're out 'til midnight during observances, you tend to get hungry. So you make up a bit pot of soup. That's all."
Following today's patterns, men in pagan societies tended to die earlier than women. Zaleski says widows were often left to rely on pets - namely cats - for companionship.
"And that's one of the ways the church used to identify Satan-worshipers," Zaleski says. "If they found a woman talking to an animal, they said she was really talking to the devil, and they had her executed. But that's how black cats got linked to Halloween."
Incidentally, Zaleski's son has a black cat, Morganna. But her own favorite pet is Superchicken, a banty rooster.
Says Zaleski, "I talk to Superchicken all the time."