Every October in the woods not far from Sleepy Hollow, and yes, it’s a real place, jack ‘o lanterns spring up from the ground to form a whirling carousel and a herd of dinosaurs; a complete circus train a towering bridge — all made entirely of 7,000 hand-carved pumpkins. For locals, it’s just another year at a festival nicknamed, “the Blaze”, but for those who stumble into the Headless Horseman’s personal carnival, it’s like a portal into another world…
We were driving upstate from New York City on a warm night when we saw something glowing in the distance, and turned off the road towards towards the the beckoning lights surrounding Van Cortland Manor, the 353 year old estate that hosts the great jack ‘o lantern blaze in Croton-on-Hudson every year. Whether or not the manor is haunted, is a story for another time; it was brutally ransacked by the British in the War for Independence, and left to crumble until the Rockefeller family saved it in 1953.
© vchm
©vchm
The result is the perfect kind of spooky, Colonial-era East Coast ambiance that the rest of America grows up hearing about, with displays that are both bone chilling and utterly, wonderfully ridiculous. On the scarier side? The seemingly endless chain of jack ‘o lanterns that crawls into the woods, lighting up and dimming down in tandem with the sounds of the Headless Horseman’s phantom steed charging towards you. It sound kinda hoaky, but in the pitch black night, it sends a shiver down your spine…
We continued on to find a pumpkin bridge that led us to a village of scarecrows, beneath a tree filled with skeleton vultures…
Eventually, we reached a twirling carousel and the pumpkin planetarium, whose shooting stars dart over your head and lead you into an even more whimsical area of hand-carved creatures, castles, and oddities…
There’s even an exact replica of the 1872 P.T. Barnum circus train, with all of its animals in tow. (This is the part where we add that the only animal circuses we’re interested in are of the cruelty-free pumpkin breed.)
And, lest you should forget you’re only an hour from Manhattan by car, there’s a huge Statue of Liberty:
“I imagined something much smaller, but this is huge” said a woman named Charlotte, 34, with whom we fittingly chatted in front of a giant spider web. She’d come all the way from North Carolina for the legendary Blaze, and wasn’t disappointed. Her favourite part? “The house, for sure,” she said about the estate reigning over the event, which lasts until late November.
Grab your tickets for the Great Jack O Lantern Blaze here, and head to Croton-onHudson (about an hour North of Sleepy Hollow) for your own night of cider sipping (as in yes, there’s food) and pumpkin gazing…
