Arrive Magazine - September/October, 2009

Perhaps the best part of the day is hearing master storyteller Jonathan Kruk recite the entire original Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

“The story is timeless and fascinating to hear all year, but it has special resonance in the fall, as Halloween approaches,” Kruk says.

Want more ghostly goings-on? You’ll find pirates, a phantom fiddler, a haunted boat and The White Lady of Raven Rock, who, in another Irving story, perished in the snow waiting for her lover to return from the Revolutionary War. The kids will enjoy the witches’ coven, where they can play basketball with a skull and help make witches’ brews. And, if you’re lucky, you might see Rip Van Winkle—awake this time.

Visitors are encouraged to come in costume and to enjoy hot cocoa, apple cider, popcorn and hot dogs from the snack bar. If you’re too afraid of the nighttime, there is also a daytime program offering pumpkin carving, a magician, storytellers and more.

“fish” hung in an undersea kingdom. He also likes the skeleton progression that starts as fingers poking up from the ground and gets progressively larger as hands, arms and then the full skeleton emerges. “It’s not scary,” he insists. “It’s beautiful.”

This year, playing on the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery

of the river and valley that bear his name, Natiello and his crew are creating a one-third-scale pumpkin replica of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, complete with the explorer and his crew.

“Every year we think, what can we do that hasn’t been done before,” he says. “We always try to push the envelope of pumpkin carving.”

Ablaze at Van Cortlandt Manor

Another 10 miles upriver, in Croton, stands Van Cortlandt Manor and its annual Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, featuring a dazzling display of more than 5,000 hand-carved pumpkins that cast a creepy orange glow over the landscape.

Michael Natiello, the local sculptor and painter who created the Blaze, admits that he never thought his preferred medium would be a fruit. ( Yes, pumpkins are fruits, like tomatoes.) However, his background in large installation artworks made him the perfect choice for the project when it began six years ago. He plans the installation, creates the designs of both the individ-al pumpkins and the larger pumpkin sculptures, and even does some carving. “We also have a lot of volunteers to help scoop the guts out,” he says, gratefully.

Here you meander through a dark woodland manor among dinosaurs, snakes, giant spider webs, ghosts, fish, mushrooms, flowers and clowns—all made of pumpkins. In recent years the setting has been professionally lighted, and appropriately spooky music has been added to enhance the experience.

Natiello’s favorites include the
aquarium with hundreds of pumpkin

A bevy of Jack O’Lanterns at Philipsburg Manor.

Who is Jack O’Lantern?

The tradition of pumpkin carving began in Ireland, where people carved scary faces into turnips on All Hallows’ Eve. But why are these creepy carvings called jack-o’-lanterns?

Well, dear reader, therein lies a tale … the tale of Stingy Jack. The Irish say that Stingy Jack was a drunk and a trickster. He even fooled the devil— more than once—to save his dark soul from eternal damnation. Indeed, one time Jack tricked the devil, who was about to take Jack to the netherworld,

into climbing a tree to pick him an apple—a last meal, if you will. While the devil was up the tree, Jack placed crosses around it so the devil could not come down until he promised not to carry Jack off to hell.

When Jack died, his wicked ways caused St. Peter to send him away from the gates of heaven. The devil, however, kept his word and prevented Jack’s entrance into hell. Instead, he sent Jack off to roam the earth for eternity, with only a glowing coal ember placed inside a

carved-out turnip to light his way. He became known as Jack of the Lantern, and then Jack O’Lantern.

Throughout Ireland, and then Scotland and England, people carved their own lanterns to keep Stingy Jack away on All Hallows’ Eve, when the dead walk among us. They used homegrown produce such as turnips, potatoes and beets. When they came to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, they found a better canvas for Jack’s lantern—the pumpkin.