It was so successful that after a couple of years the event was moved to a nearby park in order to accommodate the increasing crowds. With the help of family and friends, he put on his first jack-o’-lantern display in 1988 at the local elementary school. Months later Reckner was still talking about it and decided to create his own display in his home town of Oxford, Mass. “So we went up there, it was a beautiful landscape and it made an impression on me, in addition to the 500 jack-o’-lanterns that were on the mountain.” “I had read about a mountainside display in northern Vermont when my kids were young,” explained founder John Reckner. Reckner has been involved with the Spectacular since she was 7 years old and her father, a former mail carrier, started it after a family trip to Vermont. “You cannot describe it until you’ve been, and even then, it’s an indescribable event.”Īnd she would know. “It’s a mystical, magical art exhibit on pumpkins” said Kimberly Reckner, art director and manager of Passion for Pumpkins, the company that runs the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular. More than just a bunch of carved up gourds, the Spectacular is the Taj Mahal of displays, combining music with thousands of jack-o’-lanterns, including 130 artisan-crafted masterpieces, stretching for a quarter mile along the zoo’s wetlands trail.įrom high atop the treetops to seemingly floating on the water, there are illuminated pumpkins everywhere you look, and the effect is both ethereal and unworldly. are among the intricate, decorative designs on some 5,000 carved pumpkins, making them all stars of the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular, an illuminated, nighttime event held annually at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence. Not far away, a young Frank Sinatra smiles from beneath a fedora as an impish raccoon peeks out beside him.Īll these famous faces and figures are waiting in the back of a box truck with two large fans running continuously to keep them cool.Įven with the fans, chances are they’ll only last about week or so before rotting and requiring someone to bring them back to life.īrady, Sinatra and co. He’s parked between baseball legend Ted Williams and a snow leopard on the prowl. Muhammad Ali stands with his gloves at the ready while Tom Brady smirks from nearby.
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