Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Jack O'Lanterns and Sleepy Hollow

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

We launch our spooky October episodes with a little bit on Jack O' Lanterns and Sleepy Hollow. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and

yes, Dave is here in spirit. I don't think I even need to say it. Maybe next time I'll say it is when Dave's actually here. How about that? He's a disembodied spirit. That's right, Chuck, nicely done because this is a Halloween-esque, Halloween-ish, Halloween-y short stuff episode. Yeah. In October, we try and throw you a couple of bones from the skeleton dangling from behind you. That's right. Nicely done. So dumb. I think we explained Jack and Lance at some point. I know we did. We did a Halloween episode that we could either redo or re-release. That was a good one. Okay. Yeah, but we definitely talked about jack-o-lanterns and that one, I think. Well, we're going to do it again. Okay. Yeah,

because I don't really recall this story, but the whole idea of jack-o-lanterns is that they're based on an Irish legend of a man named Stingy Jack who's fascinating, but you probably wouldn't have wanted to be friends with him. No, not Stingy Jack, which is how I read it in my head four times. Until just now when I said Stingy? No, I finally figured it out because it's pretty obvious where he gets that name, but I was still very thick-headed and saying Stingy Jack in my head. But why was he Stingy? Well, he was Stingy because his legend has it. Stingy Jack was hanging around, said the devil comes walking by and he says, hey, devil, let's go have a cool one. You could use that. And the devil said, sure, let's do it. So Stingy Jack at the end of this little drinking

sesh says, I'm a little light, devil. I forgot my wallet. If you could help me out here, turn yourself into a coin so we can pay and get out of here. So the devil's like, all right, no harm, no foul. I'll turn myself into a coin. And then Jack says, aha, I've got you. I'm going to put you in my pocket and I'm going to put you next to that silver cross and you are just going to stay there as a little coin. Sorry, devil. Yeah, no word on how he got away without paying the drinks in the first place, but he got his drinks and he got to keep the devil coin. And then finally the devil's like, come on, dude, I have things to do. Please let me out of your pocket. And Stingy Jack said, okay, I'll let you out, but you have to promise not to bug me for a full year.

And the devil said, fine, whatever, I don't care. And the devil said, you invited me for drinks. Right. He said, well, I didn't realize you were going to bother me. So the devil, being a fine upstanding devil, said I will honor that agreement and left Jack alone. Sometime around the next year Jack got in touch with his old friend devil, who by this time had forgotten that Jack had kept him trapped as a coin in his pocket, said, hey, you want to hang again? The devil said, sure. And I guess somehow Stingy Jack got it in the devil's head that the devil should climb a tree and pick him a piece of fruit. And that didn't go according to plan as far as the devil's concern, though, did it? No, it didn't, because the devil climbs up the tree and Jack's like,

I got you again, devil. Look, I've carved the sign of the cross into the tree bark, so you can't come down. And how about this, don't bother me for 10 years. And not only that, if I die, you can't take my soul. And the devil's like, good Lord, this guy really drives a hard bargain. But okay, fine, I'll agree to all these terms. And not only will I agree to him being the devil, a fine upstanding devil that I am, I will honor these terms. I will not go back on my word. And he didn't. He didn't because Stingy Jack died. And the devil didn't try to take his soul as a matter of fact, wouldn't let him in hell. And God wouldn't let him in heaven. So Stingy Jack was left to roam the earth.

That's right. And if you're wondering what all this rigamarole has to do with jack-o-lanterns, he was sent off in the dark, had, like you said, couldn't go to heaven, couldn't go to hell, stuck in between, and had a burning coal to light his way. And he put that coal into a carved-out turnip. And he was known by the Irish as Jack of the Lantern. Yes, but the Irish never said the word of in their entire lives, the entire history of the Irish. So that's where we get jack-o-lantern. That's right. And that turnip, depending on where you were in the world and this legend moved around, that turnip might become a potato. It might become a beet if you're in England. Or if you're in the United States, one thing we have a lot of is pumpkins.

Yes. So when you're carving a jack-o-lantern, you're paying homage to a double-dealing Satan advantage-taking Irish guy named Stingy Jack. I love it. So there's part one. We're going to take a break and we're going to mix it up just a little bit and go tangentially, tangentially. That's absolutely right. Jack-o-lantern related right after this. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general,

can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it.

So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, we're back and we're talking about, now, nothing that has to do with Chuck. Well, I guess a little bit, like you said, tangentially. One of the better, well, not better, one of the

first ghost stories in American history. I think one of the, I mean, there's of course been a lot of great ghost stories since, but The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is great. It is great. But if you've read other Washington Irving short stories, it's actually written much scarier stuff than that. That's a little more tongue-in-cheek than some of the other scarier stuff he's written. All right, fair enough. It's fine, though. So The Legend of Sleepy Hollow concerns the Headless Horseman. And I think if you're a kid, even if all you ever saw was that Disney cartoon, the idea of the Headless Horseman is utterly terrifying. Yes, totally, absolutely. One of the more terrifying figures in American history, American lore. Agreed. And it takes

place in the real Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County, New York. And it is about a new man in town, the sort of lanky, goofy, schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, who is in love with and courts Katrina, or thinks he's in love, with Katrina Von Tossel. And when he is rebuffed at a party by Katrina, that Headless Horseman appears seemingly out of nowhere and chases him down and he vanishes. Yeah, Ichabod Crane is never found or heard from again. That's right. There's that jack-o-lantern because, you know, he throws that flaming jack-o-lantern in the cartoon. Right. Well, in this story, the Headless Horseman throws his head and connects with Ichabod Crane's head and knocks him off of his horse. And all that's found near that spot the next day is a smashed

pumpkin. So it's not entirely clear whether it was a Headless Horseman or somebody playing a prank or whatever. But if it was all in Ichabod Crane's imagination, but the upshot is, is that he was never heard from again, which is pretty mysterious. The thing that's so cool about the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, though, and what makes it so interesting is that Washington Irving like kind of interwoven fact and fiction to come up with this tale. Quite brilliantly, actually. I think that's one of the reasons why it is so, so creepy is because you hear like, wait, there's a real town called Sleepy Hollow in New York, stuff like that, you know? I wonder if you go to Sleepy Hollow if there's any sort of touristy things you can do. Oh, I would guess so. I wonder what they do.

I don't know, but I guarantee there's a... Headless Horseman. Yeah, and I'm not sure if it's a thriving tourist industry, but I'll bet it's a pretty respectable tourist industry they got going on there, especially this time of year. Yeah, but you're right. He wove a lot of real things in there, real locations, the Old Dutch Church, the churchyard, Major Andre's Tree. There may have been a real Ichabod Crane. I mean, there was, we just don't know if there was any connection. I think the New York Times said there was a Colonel Ichabod B. Crane who was alive at the same time as Irving, who was a Marine, enlisted in 1809 and served for 45 years in the Marines, but they really don't know if they met each other or if that name was just sort of a weird coincidence. I don't think

it was a coincidence. Apparently, Washington Irving was a bit of a collector of weird Yankee names. Yeah. In one of his stories, he mentions an actual New Yorker named Preserved Fish, but I think they would have pronounced it Preserved Fish, but it's Preserved Fish when you see it written down. The other kind of bit of info that connects them is that they were both stationed at Fort Pike, I believe, around the same time. They may not have ever met, but Washington Irving probably did find the name. It was like, I am using that at some point. Yeah. There have been stories of headless horsemen through the years. I think the Grim Brothers, which we did a pretty great episode on quite a few years ago, was that a two-parter? Well, one was on the Grim Brothers,

the other was on Folk Tales in general, I think. Yeah. They wrote about headless horsemen, other riders in other countries, I think in Holland and I think in Ireland. There were other legends of headless horsemen. It's definitely something that he had as influences. He was also a friend of Sir Walter Scott. In 1796, Sir Walter Scott wrote The Chase, which was really just sort of an adaptation of a German poem, The Wild Huntsman, by Gottfried Birger. I think there was a headless horseman in that, too, right? Yes, he was chased around by the hounds of hell for all eternity, basically. It wasn't an entirely new thing. One of the other things that makes it so creepy is that Washington Irving took a piece of actual history

of upstate New York history and used that as the basis for his headless horsemen. He said it was a Hessian mercenary. There were Hessian mercenaries fighting in the Revolutionary War alongside the English. Wasn't it the English they were fighting with? I think it was. Yeah. Well, actually, they were probably fighting on either side because they were mercenaries and they didn't really care, but in this case, there was a Hessian mercenary who, at the Battle of White Plains around Halloween in 1776, got his head taken off by a cannonball. It was such a remarkable, unlikely event that people wrote down in their journals about this. I can imagine the entire battle stopped and everybody went over and looked because that was just such a nut-so thing that happened, but that was an

actual event, and Washington Irving used that as the basis for his headless horsemen. That's right, and all of this to say is that maybe one reason why it was so popular to begin with, because he was weaving in these stories of folklore that other people had known, all these real places from the region that people knew were real places, and that probably made it just a bit more interesting than your average ghost story for the time. Definitely. And it is a great ghost story, everybody, so go read it, okay? Okay. Are you asking me? Yeah. Okay. I'm looking for some support here. Yeah, everybody, go read it. Do what Josh says already. So, since Chuck said that, everybody, short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,

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