Thousands of jack o’ lanterns are lighting a spooky half-mile path in Nassau County. It’s The RISE of the Jack o’Lanterns, the annual Halloween display at Old Westbury Gardens.
On certain October evenings, if you enter the Old Westbury Gardens, you will not need a flashlight.
Five thousand jack o’lanterns, each with a unique smile, scream, or mischievous face, greet you as you walk a half mile-long trail through the gardens.
As you walk down the path, you are surrounded by jack o’lantern structures at least twice an adult’s height. They are stacked and held together to form various characters: Spiderman, Frankenstein and grand structures like a 40-foot long dragon, with each pumpkin lit to give the beast a fiery orange and red glow. There is even a jack o’lantern kraken.
Each pumpkin is specifically carved and designed to match up with the next pumpkin, like a jigsaw puzzle.
“The jack o’lantern concept is really just any pumpkin with a light inside of it. And so what we like to do is, we like to see just how extreme we can get with the images placed on the pumpkin,” said Tom Olton, art director for The RISE.
Creative Developer Tucker Blandford says the thousands of spectators each day will always see fresh pumpkins since they are all replaced each week.
Olton says that for this year’s Long Island show, they have employed nearly 100 artists.
“The vast, vast majority of the people who work on the show are New York residents. And for a lot of the work on Long Island, most of them are Long Islanders.”
The exhibit runs every Thursday through Sunday evenings. Right now they have several sold-out time slots, and the very last day to see them will be their only Monday show, the day before Halloween.