Pumpkin Person

The Kindly Ones: You? What are you?
Mervyn Pumpkinhead: Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare— a pumpkin with a gun.

— The Sandman (1989), "The Kindly Ones"

Several Halloween denizens are pumpkin-headed monsters with faces carved into them. This is most commonly used for the Headless Horseman, but a Jack-o'-Lantern man is very common.

In early Halloween celebrations of the late 1800s and early 1900s, People made up of pumpkins, squashes, and other harvest crops with carved faces were commonly featured in postcard's and decorations. If they weren't completely made out of pumpkins, then their torso and head were are most commonly two pumpkins.

There are two types of Pumpkin Person. One type (the mundane one) simply wears a mask of a Jack-o'-Lantern, while the other's head actually is a pumpkin. A lot of the time, the person's name actually is Jack.

While pumpkin persons found ground in Asian works in the 1980s and early 1990s, their heads tended to be green instead of orange. This is due to the Japanese pumpkin, known there and in the West as the kabocha, being the default pumpkin over there. In Japan, kabocha refers to both the green and the orange varieties, so that's where the mix-up came from. Nowadays, the Western pumpkin person is fully adopted and the Japanese kabocha person doesn't show up anymore.

Kabocha persons are easily confused with watermelon persons, which are an older youkai that gained new popularity in the 1980s. Before that time, watermelon persons had normal faces, but under influence of Western media, the carved face was adopted. The horror angle from pumpkin persons was easily integrated with Japan's pre-existing notions of horror: Summer is the season of horror and watermelons are the summer treat, not to mention the symbolism of a head as a watermelon when it's smashed into pieces. Nowadays, watermelon persons are rarer than pumpkin persons, but they do show up every so often and have made their way to the West to boot.

This trope has relation to Scary Scarecrows, who often have gourd heads, and Stingy Jack, who, of course, started the Jack-o'-Lantern. Often a Plant Person when the whole body (and likely its origin) is floral. Sub-Trope of Non-Human Head. Compare/contrast Skull for a Head.

This trope does not refer to Billy Corgan, James Iha, D'arcy Wretzky, or Jimmy Chamberlin.

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Examples of pumpkin and kabocha persons:

Advertising

• The horserider from the "Jacked O Lantern" Bones Coffee flavor wears a helm that resembles a jack o' lantern.

Anime & Manga

• Buster Keel!: Jack O Lanterns are a species of rare S-Class Monsters resembling humans with a large pumpkin mask. The mask is their real body and they will die if it's destroyed.
• Digimon Adventure: "Out on the Town" features Pumpkinmon, a digimon with a plush body and a pumpkin for a head. There's an axe lodged into said head. He and his friend Gotsumon are minions of Myotismon and were sent to find the Eighth Digidestined, but they ended up liking Earth so much they turned on him. They get imprisoned by Myotismon for their disobedience (or are outright killed by him in the original Japanese version).
• Fairy Tail: During the Grand Magic Games, Toma Fiore dons the identity of Mato, the official mascot and referee for its events. As Mato, he wears an emotive pumpkin as mask.
• Kabo from Midnight Horror School is a jack-o-lantern by day and a living pumpkin at night.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Zero's Journey has Jack ask a pumpkin-headed scarecrow if he's seen Zero.
• In episode 30 of GO-GO Tamagotchi!, a Halloween Episode, Mametchi, Memetchi, and Kuchipatchi meet a Tamagotchi in a ghost costume trying to scare anyone who visits his house. The Tamagotchi, named Jacktchi, is in reality a pumpkin-headed boy.
• Pumpkin Night: Has Naoko Kirino as the Titular Pumpkin night wearing Pumpkin mask after her face was disfigured After Naruto and his gang added firecrackers and sent her to Sae's clinic to be tortured.Later On Kazuya himself also takes on The Pumpkin Night out his love for Naoko after her presumed death.

Animation

• Happy Heroes: One of the inhabitants of the fantasy town in Season 8 has a pumpkin for a head. Episode 12 of that season reveals that he's a professional artist named Van Golf.

Comic Books

• Hack/Slash has Samhain, a potentially redeemable slasher with a Halloween theme who wears a pumpkin-like mask.
• The only character in Bob Byrne's Mister Amperduke that isn't an anthropomorphic dog or living Lego person is a human hospital orderly with a face like a carved jack-o'-lantern. This is never commented on.
• Jack Pumpkinhead (from the Land of Oz novels) is a major character in Oz (Caliber) comics, where he is one of the Freedom Fighters of Oz. Jack is killed during the company-wide crossover, Daemonstorm, after having been possessed by one of the demons.
• The Sandman (1989): Merv Pumpkinhead, the Dreaming's janitor, is an animated pumpkin-headed scarecrow. He's rather a Captain Ersatz for Land of Oz's Jack Pumpkinhead.
• Spider-Man: Jack O'Lantern, one of Spider-Man's foes, wears a green suit and a helmet shaped like a flaming pumpkin. He's one of several glider-riding rogues who throw pumpkin-based weaponry, alongside the more famous Green Goblin and Hobgoblin. The most notorious Jack O'Lantern actually took over the Hobgoblin mantle for a while, before being killed off by the original for besmirching the name.
  • Mysterio's cousin and protege Maguire Beck adopted the Jack O'Lantern costume but went the name Mad Jack.
• The Ultraverse: Lord Pumpkin. He was a pumpkin man animated by a wizard as a companion for a Royal Brat who tortured him to the point he became one of the world's most notorious villains.

Film — Animation

• In The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, the Sleepy Hollow segment portrays the Headless Horseman with a jack-o-lantern in place of his head similar to the one of the Scary Scarecrow that Brom Bones beheaded during his memorable, musical contribution to the scary stories sequence.
• In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington has a pumpkin on his head in his Pumpkin King costume.
• In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf - Moon Castle: The Space Adventure, one of the Bitter Gourd King's gourd minions is a pumpkin man who, fittingly enough, has a pumpkin for a head.

Film — Live-Action

• The Cabin in the Woods: A fire-breathing, pumpkin-headed creature appears alongside the various horror movie monsters the break loose from the facility's holding cages.
• Goosebumps (2015): A Pumpkin Person makes an appearance in a reference to the book Attack of the Jack-O' Lanterns.
• In Halloween III: Season of the Witch one of the Silver Shamrock masks is a pumpkin and unfortunately a cursed one which won't allow its yielder to live long enough to look the part.
• Lost Creek: Peter's Halloween costume is a black outfit with a paper-mache Jack-O-Lantern for a head.
• Pumpkinhead: Averted, despite the name. The eponymous monster is saddled with a Non-Indicative Name, until the very end where viewers get to see the place where Harley's corpse is buried, and is more of a Xenomorph Xerox.
• Pumpkins: The Pumpkin Man that the uncle is resurrected as has a pumpkin for a head.
• Trick 'r Treat: Sam has a pumpkin-like head under his mask. Notably, the face also shares some features with a skull.

Gamebooks

• Legend of the Shadow Warriors: The pumpkin-headed Haggworths (shown on the book's front cover) are a reoccurring enemy for the players to face. It goes without saying that their heads are the most vulnerable weak spot, and players can choose to aim for their craniums for massive STAMINA damage.

Literature

• The Hervoken in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Forever Autumn by Mike Morris are ten feet tall with pale, fleshy, lipless heads that somewhat resemble a jack o'lantern. In fact, in the Whoniverse, jack o'lanterns are the result of human race memory of the Hervoken.
• The first Franny K. Stein book Lunch Walks Among Us had Franny have to defend her school from a crab monster with a pumpkin for a head who wore gym shoes and chewed gum. The monster came into being because a kid had unwittingly disposed of unstable industrial waste into the same trash can where Franny threw away her lunch of crab ravioli with pumpkin sauce and two other kids had thrown away chewing gum and a pair of old gym shoes.
• After Dumbeldore leaves Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Luna says she heard a rumor that he'd left Cornelius Fudge in hospital with a pumpkin for a head. The Melofors spell actually does this in the Expanded Universe.
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: The Headless Horseman is sometimes depicted with a jack-o-lantern in place of his head.
• The Marvelous Land of Oz has a rare non-evil version with Jack Pumpkinhead, who shows up in several of the later Oz books (eventually getting one named after him [1]), as well as appearing as a character in Return to Oz. He is basically a wooden scarecrow brought to life by a magic powder. His pumpkin heads eventually rot, so he keeps a pumpkin patch to replenish them, and Ozma carves him a new face. The old heads are buried in a graveyard at his house.
• Sidekicks: Pumpkin Pete is a pumpkin-headed superhero who claims to have "all the powers of a pumpkin." Apparently, pumpkins are good runners.
• Norman Partridge's Dark Harvest revolves around a small Midwestern town's annual hunt on Halloween night for an entity called "The October Boy", a scarecrow-like creature with a carved pumpkin for a head and a body of green vines.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Geats: While most of the Riders wear animal masks, Kamen Rider PunkJack has one shaped like a jack-o'-lantern.
• In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the Pumpkin Rapper is a Monster of the Week who appears in two Halloween Episodes: "Trick or Treat" and "Zedd's Monster Mash", the latter courtesy of being one of Lord Zedd's favorite monsters. His jack-o'-lantern head is upside down and he uniquely is accompanied by pumpkin-headed Putties. The Pumpkin Rapper was destroyed by the Power Blaster the first time and died the second time fighting the White Tigerzord and the Thunder Megazord. He also showed up among the army in "Countdown to Destruction" and that didn't end any better for him.
• The Sandman: Merv Pumpkinhead, the janitor in the palace of the Dream Lord, is an animate scarecrow with a carved pumpkin for a head.

Music

• Helloween's Metal Band Mascot, Jack O. Lantern, is one of these. Well, what else would you expect from a band called Helloween?
• The UTAUloid Pumpking the Testloid is a 13-year-old boy with a wind-up Jack O'lantern for a head.

Music Videos

• The XTC song, "The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead" doesn't elaborate on why the character is called that but the video for the Crash Test Dummies cover has Harry from Dumb and Dumber accidentally foiling a bank robbery with a jack-o'-lantern on his head. By the end of the video, a religious cult of people wearing jack-o'-lantern masks has grown around him.
• "Kabocha no Oji-san" by Tetsuo Miyoshi is about a cranky pumpkin at the vegetable store that no one wants to buy. In the video, Kabocha no Oji-san is depicted as a pumpkin-headed man while all the other vegetables have their limbs directly attached to the vegetable.

Myths & Religion

• You're bound to see one of these on Halloween. Whether it's a costume, a decoration, or otherwise. Countless Halloween decorations will use these, such as Spirit Halloween's Pumpkin Nester.

Pro Wrestling

• CHIKARA: Hallowicked is an undead pumpkin demon complete with a stem on top of his mask. His Incoherence Tag Team partner Delirious even called him "Stem" when they were teaming (2006-2009). He drastically changed his image after Delirious used the Eye of Tyr on him at the 2014 Season Finale Tomorrow Never Dies on December 6th, 2014, though he still kept the stem.

Podcast

• Unwell Podcast: Referenced in one of the songs played in the Halloween Episode The Graveyard Shuffle.

Puppet Shows

• Téléchat has a Show Within a Show called "Leguman", a cheesy on purpose parody of Sentai series like Choudenshi Bioman. The titular character is made of several vegetables including a pumpkin for a head.

Tabletop Games

• Champions: Enemies: The Internal File includes a villain called Pumpkin Jack. Pumpkin Jack is a demon lord trapped on Earth (based on the legend of Stingy Jack) who looks like a Scary Scarecrow with a jack-o-lantern for a head.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Original D&D Supplement 1 Greyhawk. At the end of the book is an illustration of a bugbear monster that shows it with the head that looks like a carved jack-O'-lantern.
  • The 1st Edition Advanced D&D supplement Fiend Folio introduces the scarecrow monster, which is a humanoid made of sticks with a carved jack-o'-lantern for a head.
  • Ravenloft has its own variety of scarecrows, which unlike the golem-like above version are animated by evil spirits (most often the vengeful ghosts of deceased farmers) making its pumpkin head glow eerily.
• Pathfinder: Leshys are a type of small, plant-based humanoids artificially created by using various types of plant as bases. One variety is gourd leshys, which are grown from pumpkins and have a carved one for a head. The carved part is not an inherent part of their anatomy — their gourds are solid while the body is being grown, and need to be carved so that the leshy will be able to see and speak. This renders their heads fully hollow Jack o' Lanterns, and gourd leshies can "uncork" themselves to use their scooped-out craniums as storage space.
• RuneQuest. The Jack O'Bear is a hairy bear-like monster with an orange head that looks like a pumpkin.

Theme Parks

• Knotts Scary Farm's Trick or Treat House features the Pumpkin Twins, a pair of kids with Jack-O' Lantern masks that the Green Witch turned into minions. Notably, the actors don't have to wear the masks over their faces.
• Knotts Scary Farm's Pumpkin Eater attraction features the titular Pumpkin Eater, a more foul and realistic depiction of a "pumpkin person" with twisted roots, leaves, and shelled skin.
• Universal's Halloween Horror Nights has hosted some pumpkin people.

Toys

• Fun World, the company behind the Ghostface mask, make the Pumpkin Slayer costume, which comes with a Pumpkin Mask, orange gloves, a fedora, and a cape. Fun World also make various cloaked pumpkin people as decorations. Notably, these are also examples of Dem Bones.
• The Grossery Gang has Space Jump Pumpkin, an evil cyborg pumpkin. He has vines for his non-mechanized limbs, and his face is made out of carvings, which are leaking his pumpkin guts.
• Living Dead Dolls: Pumpkin is a slasher-type hooligan with pumpkin face paint, and the Headless Horseman has a pumpkin-shaped head that can be removed.
• Playmobil Figures: Series 3 features a pumpkin-headed scarecrow.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: Jack, the Czar of Halloween, wears a pumpkin on his head. As of New Leaf, your town's villagers will dress up in similar costumes on Halloween, making it a bit trickier to identify Jack. New Horizons lets you dress up as Jack to scare the villagers.
• In Borderlands 2, the Halloween Episode DLC TK Baha's Bloody Harvest allowed the players to collect and wear pumpkin head swaps for all six vault hunters.
• Bug Fables has the Plumplings, big pumpkin-like variants of the Seedlings found in the Forsaken Lands. It's a bit ambiguous if they actually are pumpkins or if they're merely wearing pumpkins.
• Candies 'n Curses: Jack is a ghost with a pumpkin for a head. He is the boss of Botanical Ballroom and attacks with vines and exploding pumpkins.
• Kabocha jack o'lanterns hang in the trees of the haunted town level of Captain Silver. When Jim nears them, they let themselves fall and slide in his direction. In the MSX version, the final boss of this stage is a witch that stores kabocha jack o'lanterns under her skirt to throw at Jim.
• Castlevania
  • Castlevania: Lament of Innocence features the hidden character Pumpkin, who is basically a burlap sack fashioned into a humanoid shape with a pumpkin for a head. He fights much like Leon, only with a different (permanent) special weapon that's a combination of all of Leon's special weapons.
  • Pumpkin carries over into Castlevania: Curse of Darkness as one of the Innocent Devils. He's the hardest one to craft due to requiring a special weapon to do so. He's practically useless in battle and generally goes down in a single hit, but using him is probably the most effective way of boosting your Luck stat, although whether it's worth the effort is another question entirely.
• City of Heroes: The Fir Bolg have been transformed into humanoid vine monsters with pumpkin heads.
• Dead Realm: One of the playable ghosts in the game has a pumpkin for a head.
• Destiny: The Jackolyte item makes the guardians who use it an example of this trope.
• Digimon: The two pumpkin-headed Digimon are Pumpkinmon and NoblePumpkinmon, the latter the mega version of the former. They are both Puppet Digimon. Pumpkinmon has a plush body and a pumpkin for a head. There's an axe lodged into said head. The mischievous Pumpkinmon species comes from a random mutation to a computer virus developed during Halloween. NoblePumpkinmon was introduced in Digimon ReArise and compared to Pumpkinmon is tall, goes well-dressed, has wings, and is more pleasant company. NoblePumpkinmon is in the possession of a staff with which they can conjure up pumpkin dishes.
• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness has the Lantern monster class (with some higher tiers being named Scarecrow, Jack, and Halloween). They're believed to be pumpkins that transformed into demons. Their bodies are said to be filled with nutrients, so to defend themselves from attackers they became incredibly skilled with using knives. They made a return in Disgaea D2.
• Divinity: Original Sin II has a group of Jack-o'-lantern-headed undead scarecrows who, if spoken to, will be animated by the God King and attack. Their ability to inflict Terror makes them a surprisingly hard fight.
  Restless Scarecrow: Now I leave you to my children. They are many. They are impatient. They lack my gentle touch...
• EarthBound (1994) has the Trick or Trick Kid, a humanoid enemy wearing a pumpkin who appears in Threed during the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Starting Stage 47 of Energy Breaker, pumpkin-headed monsters known as bogeymen show up as enemies. They're pink humanoids with grass clothes. The pumpkin head itself is brown, yet when they attack these enemies let out a cry that summons a kabocha to fall on their target.
• Two mappemon types in Eternal Eyes are pumpkin- & kabocha-based. Mappemon no. 112 & no. 113 are Pumpkin Head and Head (Pumpkill in Japanese), which are respectively a pumpkin- and a kabocha-headed humanoid. They take off their heads to swing at opponents. Mappemon no. 114, no. 115, and no. 157 are Mad Pumpkin (Mad Pump in Japanese), Big Head, and Y.P.puppet (Typhoon in Japanese), which are respectively a large pumpkin, a large kabocha, and a large yellow pumpkin. They attack by jumping up and falling down on their opponents.
• Everybody Edits has the Pumpkin and the Lit Pumpkin smileys, which are Digital Avatars that appear as pumpkins with carved faces. As with the rest of the game's smileys, they just appear as heads and nothing more. They were both prizes for the 2011 Halloween contest.
• The first boss of Super Fantasy Zone, which also is depicted on the cover, is a giant kabocha jack o'lantern wearing a crown. Like all enemies, he's a member of the Dark Menon Force, an army comprised of revived souls.
• Final Fantasy XII: Pumpkin Head, a Mandragora species found in the Salikawood. Its stronger variant is the Pumpkin Star, one of the minibosses fought in the Sochen Cave Palace who later appears as a normal enemy in the Feywood.
• Five Nights at Freddy's 4: The Halloween update includes Jack-O Bonnie and Jack-O Chica, who may be examples of this as an Exaggerated Trope, as they are completely made of pumpkins.
• Ginger Beyond The Crystal: The Lord of The Miracle Manor is revealed to be one after Ginger gets rid of the pumpkins on his command.
• In Guild Wars, Mad King Thorn's head has been replaced by a jack-o'-lantern in the Underworld, as seen during his annual reappearances in Lion's Arch and Kamadan.
• The first boss in Residence of King, or the seventh boss overall, in Heavenly Guardian is Pumpkin King, who has a kabocha for a head, a cape as body, and floating gloves as hands. He summons kabocha bombs of varying sizes to harm Sayuki. Prior to Pumpkin King is his army of smaller pumpkin monsters. They're of similar design to the king, just with blue capes instead of a red one and they are armed with lanterns from which they can summon fireballs.
• Gun Witch: The "walking pumpkins" in the Dark Forest are pumpkin-headed thin monsters that are taller than the protagonist.
• Just Dance: There are ostensibly two separate pumpkin persons in the series.
  • "Profesor Pumplestickle" is a song and dance routine performed by two men: a green-skinned magician and a pumpkin-headed man with pumpkin-colored skin. They debuted in the second game's DLC.
  • A pumpkin person appears in "This is Halloween" starting the third game. Here, he's accompanied by a green skeleton, a vampire, and a witch.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby's Dream Land: Mr. P Umpkin is an Airborne Mook that appears as a pumpkin with a carved face, following Kirby around. He only appears in Castle Lololo on the Extra Mode.
  • Kirby's Epic Yarn: Squashini is a pumpkin-headed ghost magician.
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: The first dungeon boss, Pumpkin Head, resembles a humanoid with a jack-o'-lantern for a head. It's actually a small spirit inhabiting the pumpkin and controlling the rest of the body.
• Medievil 2 has various pumpkin-based hazards in the Kew Gardens level, such as giant pumpkins that roll around the landscape trying to crush Dan, ordinary-sized ones that bounce around and explode on contact, and pumpkin men that reproduce by implanting their seeds into the level's inhabitants.
• Megaman 7: A giant pumpkin-shaped robot serves as a miniboss during Shade Man's stage (which has a strong horror/Halloween theme).
• In Minecraft:
  • Pumpkins can be worn as helmets, giving the appearance of this trope. While they obscure vision and don't protect from damage, they can prevent endermen from becoming hostile — they turn aggressive when your vision crosshairs fall on them, and wearing the helmet keeps the pumpkin directly in front of these — and keep undead mobs from burning in sunlight.
  • Snow Golems are living snowmen with pumpkins for heads.
• Monster Force: Many of the enemies are pumpkin-headed creatures.
• Monster Party: One of the bosses in the first level is a creature wearing a white ghost sheet with a pumpkin for a head.
• One of the racers you can pick from in the low-budget kart racer Myth Makers: Super Kart GP is a pumpkin-headed kid named Zeek.
• Night Creatures: One of the bosses is a scarecrow with the telling name Pumpkinhead. He starts off as a pumpkin that rolls towards the protagonist and then grows an immobile body on the spot. His pumpkin head, which regenerates, is used as ammo and can spawn several tiny jack o'lanterns.
• Ogre Battle: Pumpkinheads are monsters created by the experiments of Deneb the witch.
• Overwatch: In the Halloween event, Reaper has a skin called "Pumpkin", which gives him a Jack O'Lantern with glowing eyes and a mouth for a head.
• Pokémon: Pumpkaboo is essentially a floating pumpkin with a shadowy cat/batlike head. It even has the ability to shine light out of the carved holes in its body. Its evolution, Gourgeist, now has a carved face on its lower body, though its head gives its body shape a more gourdlike appearance. Both apparently are created from spirits that inhabit a pumpkin.
• Pumkin Land: The titular Pumkins are Walking Head pumpkins.
• Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale: The Samhain boss has a pumpkin for a head.
• Silhouette Mirage: The Spectres are kabocha-headed common enemies. Their main attack is to pluck off their own head, which instantly regenerates, and use it as ammunition. They are also capable of damaging screams and carry mallets for close combat. If a Spectre is severely damaged but only just not destroyed, the top of their head is knocked off to reveal there was a candle inside the kabocha.
• After Tina joins the party in Secret of the Stars, the new enemies encountered include the Echo Cat and the Pumpking. The Pumpking is a short, corpulent fellow with a kabocha jack o'lantern for a head. Its English name "Pumpking" is a freeform translation of "カボチャ大王" or "(Great) King Kabocha". Echo Cats have the ability to summon Pumpkings either as aid or to fuse with. The fused form replaces the Echo Cat's head with the kabocha head to form King Cat, in Japanese "ドラネコ大王" or "(Great) King Tabby Cat".
• Shin Megami Tensei: Pyro Jack, a persona that appears throughout the series, has a Jack-O-Lantern head.
• In Sonic Adventure 2, you can give Chao pumpkins to wear on their heads.
• Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog: These appear in Hang Castle/Mystic Mansion and Cryptic Castle, respectively. They seem to be nothing more than robotic puppets.
• Super Mario Bros.
  • New Super Mario Bros.: Splunkins are basically waddling pumpkins that take two stomps to defeat.
  • Super Mario Galaxy: Jack-O-Goombas are Goombas that wear Jack-O-Lantern masks, which protect them from being stomped on. A spin will smash the mask, and a Ground Pound will take out the mask and Goomba.
• Team Fortress 2 has the Horseless Headless Horsemann, a skeleton with a Jack-O' Lantern for a head. The mercenaries can also achieve this trope with the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Head, won by beating the HHH.
• Terraria:
  • The Headless Horseman, an enemy in the Pumpkin Moon event who appears riding a black horse and wearing a pumpkin as a head. It has a chance to drop a Jack-O-Lantern mask so that you can wear a pumpkin in your head too.
  • There's also Pumpking, one of the two mini-bosses during the Pumpkin Moon event. He appears as a giant, floating wraith wearing only a cloak and a pumpkin as his head, that rotates alternating among three different faces.
• Trials of Mana: Mispolm, Benevodon of the Woods, takes the form of a giant jack-o-lantern sat atop a mass of roots.
• Um Jammer Lammy: Teriyaki Yoko's agent is a pumpkin-headed man named Jack Smash.
• Warframe has a seasonal "Dullahan Mask" cosmetic that replaces the head of a Warframe equipped with it with a Jack O' Lantern.
• Zombie Playground: You can choose to have your child wear a Jack-o-lantern mask.

Visual Novels

• Grotesquely subverted in Pumpkin Eater, in which following having his head crushed by a car, the protagonist's brother has a jack-o-lantern put on his corpse by her mother after being driven mad by grief, forcing the family to play along and pretend he's still alive.

Webcomics

• Cucumber Quest: Thebestmaster has a dark greenish jack-o-lantern for a head. Fittingly, his modus operandi revolves around scaring people. Unfortunately, he's not very good at it.
• One of the main characters of Third Shift Society, which can be read here, is an Occult Detective named Ichabod who appears to be a thin man in a suit, save for his jack-o-lantern head which he can't change the expression of.
• Twistwood Tales: The Pumpkin Kid is this alongside the Fairy Gourd Mother, a pumpkin being that every Halloween gives a candle to all the good pumpkin kids, and seemingly takes the heads of all the bad pumpkin kids and locks them inside a cage.
• Zack Jack: Stingy Jack appears as a disembodied, talking jack-o-lantern.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-2331 ("SCRAVECROW"). SCP-2331 is a scarecrow with a pumpkin head that has a fluorescent blue glow inside it. He creates raves and acts as a DJ at them.
• There is a whole web site dedicated to "Pumpkinoids". It is unknown if Pastor Tommy McMurtry visits this site. He may or may not be sexually attracted to pumpkins.

Web Videos

• Ross's Game Dungeon: In the Wolfenstein (2009) episode (which was released on April Fool's Day), Ross replaces the head of every NPC with a pumpkin. The video is otherwise a completely normal Game Dungeon episode, and Ross does not acknowledge the pumpkin heads at all, except for repeated remarks about the game having extremely satisfying headshots for some reason he can't put his finger on.
• Sr. Pelo's Spooky Month series has Pump, a human child who loves Halloween alongside his skeleton-themed bestie Skid. Pump is seen 99% of the time wearing a pumpkin mask on his head.

Western Animation

• Bugs Bunny: In "Rabbit Rampage", Bugs, as part of his torture from an off-screen animator, has his head erased and replaced by a jack-o-lantern. Bugs is not amused.
  Bugs: [fuming] Okay, buddy, you've had your fun. Now, what about a rabbit's head?!
  [the animator simply paints a pair of rabbit ears on top of the pumpkin]
  Bugs: Okay, you comic book Rembrandt, make with the eraser!
• ChalkZone features Jacko, a Jack-O' Lantern singer who falls in love with Rudy's Jill-O' Lantern, a non-living example of this trope.
• The Fanboy and Chum Chum Halloween Episode "There Will Be Shrieks" has Fanboy and Chum Chum encounter a pumpkin-headed man named Mr. Trick.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy features Jack, a trickster who was decapitated. After a deal with Grim (Returning his scythe in exchange for immortality), Grim cut off his head. He then replaced it with a Jack-O' Lantern.
• It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown features Charlie Brown being asked to model for a Halloween Party. By this, we mean Violet drew a Jack-O' Lantern face on the back of his head for reference.
  • This pumpkin motif would follow poor Charlie Brown in other situations. In Youre A Good Sport Charlie Brown, he loses his helmet in a motocross incident, and Linus and Sally replace his helmet with the top half of a pumpkin. In Youre The Greatest Charlie Brown, one of the rivals calls him "Pumpkinhead".
• Michael Jackson's Halloween features a pumpkin-headed scarecrow named Hay Man.
• Moville Mysteries: One episode has a Headless Horseman with a flaming pumpkin head who was able to cut other people's heads off and replace them with a Jack-O' Lantern.
• Played With in Over the Garden Wall. The residents of Pottsfield wear pumpkins and vines over their whole bodies for their harvest festival, but they're not actually Plant People. They're skeletons. In the original pilot "Tome of The Unknown" there actually were vegetable people.
• Phineas and Ferb had a Halloween episode, "That's the Spirit!", which featured a Pumpkin-headed monster chasing them throughout a haunted house- only the Pumpkin-head was a robot, and the haunted house was a prank being put on by the neighbors.
• One of the monster characters featured in the Random! Cartoons short "6 Monsters" is a pumpkin-headed girl named Cathy.
• The Real Ghostbusters: Samhain is an evil spirit with a pumpkin head.
• Rugrats: In Hiccups", Angelica creates a "scream machine" to scare Tommy's hiccups away. The "machine" has a humanoid shape and a Jack-O' Lantern decoration forming the head.
• In Scooby-Doo! and the Goblin King, Jack O'Lantern, a sentient pumpkin, is worn as the head of the Headless Horseman. He's not exactly pleased with the ordeal.
• The Simpsons: In "Treehouse of Horror XIX", Milhouse brings the Grand Pumpkin to life. He then proceeds to eat at least three people as revenge for them carving and eating pumpkins. However, the Grand Pumpkin doesn't care if humans carve yellow pumpkins (apparently, pumpkin people are racist).
• Tiny Toon Adventures Night Ghoulery: The opening credits have the Pumpkin Guy, a parody of Jack Skellington with a pumpkin for a head.
• In the Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) episode "Halloween Night at the Museum", Morgan la Fay transforms a museum guard into a pumpkin person resembling the comic-book Spidey villain Jack O'Lantern.

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Examples of melon persons:

Anime & Manga

• In Chapter 23 of Gakkou Kaidan by Yōsuke Takahashi, titled "Watermelon Monster", Yamagishi wakes up buried up to his neck on the beach. He is then approached by a group of carved-out watermelon-headed figures that he desperately hopes are his friends and teacher trying to scare him. They are and they are also not, which becomes clear when they go suikawari on his head. As the watermelon monsters feast on Yamagishi's blood and brains, they become regular people eating a regular watermelon. They realize they left Yamagishi buried and run over to free him, but they only find a slightly bloody watermelon jack o'lantern with a crack on top. For a moment, the watermelon being eaten turns back into Yamagishi's head. It's left up to the reader what's going on.

Film — Live-Action

• The first Gakkou no Kaidan movie opens with a retelling of the Mary-san Urban Legend. Only instead of a doll, it's a floating watermelon jack o'lantern. (Get it? Mary the Melon!). And instead of her previous owner, she stalks and kills a school janitor.
• Played with in Return to Oz. When meeting Jack Pumpkinhead, Billina questions whether he's a man or a melon. Jack corrects her that he is a pumpkin.

Folklore

• The oldest documentation of a melon monster in Japan is the 18th Century Buson yōkai emaki. It is a scroll by Yosa Buson that depicts eight youkai with minimal annotation. The leading theory behind the scroll's creation is that it was created in the 1750s to practice painting and that the youkai included came from stories he heard about during his travels. Two of the youkai are the suika no bakemono of Kizu (a former village in Osaka) and the makuwauri no bakemono of Yamashiro (a former region in Kyoto), respectively a watermelon-headed humanoid and an oriental melon-headed humanoid. The scroll is the only remaining evidence of those folkloric youkai.

Live-Action TV

• Shimura Ken was a comedian with a special talent for fast-eating watermelon. As such, two of his sketches involve the consequences of eating lots of watermelon and not spitting out the seeds, which according to urban legend will result in watermelon vines sprouting from your body.
  • The first horror episode of the comedy series THE DETECTIVE STORY is about Shimura eating too many slices of watermelon and being turned into a zombie-like watermelon man due to all the seeds lodged in his body. By spitting seeds onto others, he turns humans (and one dog) into watermelon-headed monsters too. They, in turn, go on to infect more people. An attempt to kill the watermelon men by blowing up the heads goes fruitless because the pieces just reassemble. On the other hand, they loathe shrimp tempura and can't resist salt. Katō and a female doctor use salt to lure Shimura to a tempura-rich exorcism, and by returning him to normal all melon men are returned to normal.
  • In Shimura Ken no Baka-tonosama, Shimura's character eats so much watermelon that vines start growing from his behind. They overtake him and turn him into a watermelon man.

Theatre

• Puppet Theater Tomte has a bunraku play titled Suika Dorobou (Melon Thief). The head of a village that farms watermelons acquires the aid of a watermelon ghost, a Bedsheet Ghost with a carved-out watermelon head.

Video Games

• A summer event in 2017 of Avabel Online made it possible for players to acquire melon-themed articles of clothing, notably watermelon masks. The event started by purchasing a skill ring, after which players could go hunting for watermelons to smash to earn the clothing. The three sets include a regular watermelon mask and suit, a gold watermelon mask and suit, and an uncarved red box-shaped watermelon and suit.
• Battle Chronicle: One of the event bosses encountered consists of a hulking humanoid with a pumpkin for a head.
• Among the very first enemies in Community POM are both carved pumpkins and carved watermelons. Watermelons face forward and roll towards Lulu. Pumpkins, which may also be kabocha as the color scheme is both green and orange, face backwards and spawn feet to become mobile for battle. The forest's boss is a giant watermelon that is carved and animated by a giant worm. It attacks by using its vines as whips and spitting seeds.
• King Watermelon Boulder is one of the boss monsters in Dragon Quest Walk. He's a giant boulder-looking watermelon with a moustache and a crown. Once defeated, he falls apart in melon slices.
• In Linkle Liver Story, watermelon jack o'lanterns are the main enemies in Helene Ridge. They are near-immobile but act like gun turrets filled with watermelon seeds. They jump on the spot in-between rounds.
• There's a scarecrow UMA in Little King's Story who commands the meloncholies. The meloncholies are effectively melons with bodies and carved-out smiling faces. They are a mirror image to King Korobo's subjects much like the scarecrow is a mirror image to King Korobo himself. Which, looking at their sorrowful name yet happy appearance, gives reason for pause.
• Melonhead of the 2019 Summer Struck Series of Monster Strike is a watermelon with a carved-out face and an invisible body except for where he's dressed. In reference to the Smashing Watermelons game, he's armed with a wooden sword and wears a bandana around his head. His evolution is Beach Guardian Melonhead and his ascension is Melonhead of the Tropics. In the latter form, his head is turned into a drink.
• A summer event in 2019 of Mo Siang Online called Fruit Party caused monsters to drop green watermelon seeds and golden watermelon seeds. These could be used to spawn Small Green Water Melon monsters, Large Green Water Melon monsters, Small Golden Water Melon monsters, and Large Golden Water Melon monsters, all of which watermelon jack o'lanterns with limbs. Defeating them yielded various stat-boosting fruits.
• Starting July 2012, Priston Tale has held a summer event in which players were to fight watermelon monsters. These creatures came to be when Big Bad Igorlanos enchanted all watermelons around, turning them into watermelon-print Bedsheet Ghosts with carved-out watermelon heads with a straw in them. They fight with giant watermelon slices.
• One of the playable characters in Redungeon is Creep A. Crow, a scarecrow with a watermelon as its head. Its abilities are Cobweb Immunity, which means cobwebs won't trap it, Boo!, which scares or kills mobs, and Bridger, which makes jumping over voids safe.
• One of the playable characters since 2015 in Road To Dragons is the (Great) King Watermelon Uribou, "西瓜王ウリボウ". He is a plump, regally dressed figure with a carved-out watermelon hat. His true form is that of a giant watermelon with an X across his forehead, a scar over his left eye, and the top of the melon carved open into a crown so that the edible red underneath is visible almost like a brain. Uribou's story is that he was raised and named by a boy who passed away from illness and ever since then Uribou has lived to fulfill the boy's wish that there'd be enough watermelons for everyone. To acquire Uribou, the Watermelon Festival event has to be active, during which players have to battle regular watermelon jack o'lanterns, watermelon-themed weapons, and eventually defeat Uribou himself.

Western Animation

• In the episode "Sozin's Comet, Part 1: The Phoenix King" of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sokka creates a scarecrow with a watermelon head to substitute for the Fire Lord during training. He dubs it the Melon Lord and assigns Toph as its actor. She happily takes the role.
• Summerween is a summer variant of Halloween in Gravity Falls and tradition dictates jack o'lanterns carved out of watermelons, which are called jack o'melons. The Summerween Trickster, a monster composed of unwanted candy, disguises itself as a human by wearing a mask with a picture of a jack o'melon on it.
• Steven Universe has Steven Universe, whose spit allows him to animate plants of various types. He creates watermelons, called "Watermelon Stevens", who eventually build a society on an island. They eventually have a variety of watermelon creatures alongside them: watermelon dogs, watermelon chickens, watermelon birds, and even watermelon sharks living in the ocean.

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