I’ve lived in Westchester county for 3 years and I just found out about The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze this year. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a display of around 7,000 hand carved pumpkins at the Van Cortlandt Manor. Yes, I said 7,000. Around 1,000 of the pumpkins are real and they are re-carved each week for 7 weeks so they stay fresh.

 

Ben and I had the perfect evening to walk through the display.

The woods, house and all the pumpkins are all lit perfectly to show off the carvings.

Even the trees are filled with bats carved into pumpkins.

I’m a scardey-cat and even I could handle The Blaze. Some of the real little kids weren’t too fond of the scarier pumpkins, but really all ages were there.

The pumpkin arch was pretty sweet!

I got some really good ideas for ways to carve future pumpkins.

These were my favorite faces.

One tree had all carvings of butterflies.

These pumpkin carvings would be for the really advanced carvers.

There were also snakes slithering through. (Those pumpkins were real so the snakes and all that detail is carved every week!)

There  were also some dinosaurs roaming through.

Baby dinosaurs coming out of their pumpkin eggs.

These were probably the scariest of the pumpkins.

I kept calling the spider web a ferris wheel until we got closer and I realized I was just a little off.

Washington Irving lived in Tarrytown and based The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and his headless horseman on a fictional town called “Sleepy Hollow” along the Hudson River. In 1996 North Tarrytown was actually renamed “Sleepy Hollow.”

There’s even a pumpkin tunnel!

The circus also came to visit!

And yes, there were lions and tigers and bears : )

I liked the clown in this shot…. I thought he was cute, but the more I look at his face the creepier he gets.

That’s a jack o’lantern in a box and a wedding cake.

The pumpkin clock even worked. The jack o’lantern pendulum even swung.

The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze is sold out of tickets for this year, but I HIGHLY suggest going to see it next year. Check out the Historic Hudson Valley website for more information.

Happy Halloween!