Jack o'Lantern is the guy who got banned from heaven and hell dude, not a headless horseman. You're thinking of Dullahans. Source: I'm from Ireland and these are both Irish myths
Yeah, back when I made that post I may have taken slight liberties for the sake of cohesiveness. There’s a number of things I’m not super happy about with that post that I never got the chance to amend, most notably the order of events (Most importantly the bean stalk only makes sense after being barred from the afterlife).
That said, mythology isn’t monolithic. These stories change from telling to telling, just as Jack’s turnip later became a pumpkin. When I made the distinction between Stingy Jack and Jack O’ Lantern, it was primarily to separate the events of his life from the events of his death. In the US, the story of Jack O’ Lanterns is heavily tied up in The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, which featured a Dullahan known as The Headless Hessian who carried a Jack O’ Lantern as opposed to the rotted head as in Irish myth. While this story is obviously not the original, it’s by far the most well known one, and when it comes to stories the words will always sulk in the shadows of the pop culture
