Jacakalantan
"Oh, look over there at that floating light. Nothing strange about that at all, let's go check it out!" says Jess as she runs off into the darkness towards the dot of light. Further and further into the night, into the wilderness, she followed it and just when she had almost caught up with the strange anomaly it vanished.
"What? Where did it go?" She looks around and only sees darkness staring back at her. She was lost now, with no idea of how to get back home. Blindly she stumbles around in the dark to no end. Poor Jess, she became a victim of the Jacakalantan.
The Jacakalantan in Trinidad and Tobago folklore is said to be a mysterious light that appears and leads people astray, far from their intended destinations. Leaving them lost and isolated in the wilderness. When I first came across this character, it immediately made me think about the Jack O' Lantern that is used during Halloween. They may have derived from the same Irish folklore of "Stingy Jack" but they developed into different characters. From my understanding, the Jack O' Lantern is used to ward off evil spirits but the Jacakalantan itself is evil and even though it doesn't harm persons directly, it is still puts them in a life threatening situation.
This folklore, along with many others, came from the Irish folklore of Stingy Jack. A man who had tricked the devil into making a deal not to take his soul to hell and trapped the devil twice to extend his life. When Jack died he couldn't go to heaven because of his actions and the Devil had to keep his promise not to take his soul to hell, so instead he gave Jack a burning coal in a turnip and left him to wander the darkness for all eternity. Irish people had come to know him as Jack of the Lantern then as Jack O' Lantern. In Ireland and Scotland people began to create their own versions of the ghostly figure and carved scary faces into turnips, potatoes and beets in order to scare Stingy Jack and other evil spirits away.
