Combining two days into one because…well, ywo days tend to combine into one for me sometimes…

Pumpkin-headed characters appear in many stories…so, of course, some pop up in the stories in Halloween. Here are some notes (taken from introductions to “Pumpkin Night” by Gary McMahon and Gary Braunbeck’s “Tessalations” explaining a bit about the archetype.

Literature’s most famous pumpkinhead may not be exactly as you’ve seen depicted or recall. In Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Ichabod Cranes sees “a horseman of large dimensions . . . mounted on a black horse of powerful frame,” and later sees “the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him.” The next morning “the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.” Despite the usual illustrations and depictions, Irving did not mention if the pumpkin had a faced carved into it.

The L. Frank Baum character mentioned in Braunbeck’s “Tessalations”, Jack Pumpkinhead, first appeared in The Marvelous Land of Oz, the immediate sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in 1904. A boy, Tip, makes the pumpkin-headed scarecrow in hopes of frightening the witch Mombi. Mombi, however, brings Jack to life. Although he appears in many of the Oz books—frequently replacing his ever-rotting head with a fresh pumpkin—he is featured in the twenty-third (the ninth penned by Ruth Plumly Thompson): Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929). There’s no direct connection between Baum’s Jack Pumpkinhead and Halloween, but similar figures have become firmly associated with the holiday. He may have inspired Tim Burton’s Jack Skellington, the “Pumpkin King” protagonist of the film The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).