From the storied cemetery in Sleepy Hollow to Headless Horseman Hayrides in Ulster Park and points north, Halloween-themed tourist attractions lure hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Hudson Valley each autumn. Arguably the most spectacular annual spook show is the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze held at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester County. Growing from modest roots as a local celebration in 2005, it now runs from mid-September to mid-November and features more than 7,000 carved pumpkins, artfully arranged into whimsical assemblages with a variety of themes. A major fundraising engine for the not-for-profit organization Historic Hudson Valley, the Blaze takes 30 to 45 minutes to walk through at a leisurely pace.
Remarkably, all the pumpkin-carving that goes into this massive visual extravaganza is done by a team of only five artists. While some of the jack o’ lanterns are foam “art pumpkins” that can be reused from year to year, the majority are the real thing – which means that they need regular replacement throughout the course of the event’s two-month run, especially when we’re having an unusually warm autumn (like right now).
“We have a team of carvers carving daily to refresh them,” explains Carmen Doyon, who commutes from her home in New Paltz to design, create, monitor and maintain the elaborate displays. “They implode. The heat kills us.”
Doyon has been working as part of the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze artistic team since 2019. After earning an MFA in Fine Arts Printmaking from SUNY New Paltz in 2011, the Washington State native spent the better part of the next decade working at Mohonk Mountain House. She started out teaching ice skating, and then “worked in the greenhouse in summer. I learned all about horticulture, and ended up designing their children’s garden.” She participated every year in the Hudson Valley Gingerbread Competition hosted at the grand hotel, made fanciful gelatin sculptures for D.R.A.W. of Kingston’s February Jell-O Jamboree and also was a regular prizewinner in the Night of 100 Pumpkins contest at The Bakery in New Paltz. “I was always trying to get better at pumpkin-carving,” Doyon says.
By 2019, she was strategizing a career move that would make optimal use of her unusually specialized food-art skills and allow her to create jack o’ lanterns that pushed the envelope of the traditional artform. “Mohonk looks for pretty and classical. Mine are more contemporary art,” she notes. So she started looking around, and literally found the gig at Historic Hudson Valley by using “pumpkin carvers” in her keyword search on Indeed.
She soon discovered to her satisfaction that HHV was looking not merely for garden-variety pumpkin carvers, but for serious sculptors, tattoo artists, people with experience in her own chosen field of printmaking. This was the opportunity Doyon had been waiting for. Fast-forward to 2025: “I do it year-round now. My job title is creative design supervisor. This is the first time that I’ve taken the helm.”
As soon as one year’s Blaze is over, she’s working on design ideas for the next one. Some of the displays, like the Headless Horseman diorama and Sleepy Hollow Bridge, are perennial, but new ones are added every year, with the design team brainstorming from February on. “The Wizard of Oz was my idea,” she notes. It features a glowing yellow brick road, Emerald City on the horizon and all the flying monkeys your heart might desire. Other new additions for 2025 include a tribute to classic videogames featuring “a giant Snorlax” that should delight Pokémon fans and a Hudson estuary “habitat” presided over by a giant pumpkin “Lifegourd on Duty.” (Doyon is a proud punster: “My goal is to get my co-workers to laugh at my ideas.”)
There are displays with moving elements, like a carousel of skeletal horses, a pumpkin Ferris wheel, a lighthouse with a sweeping beam and a turning windmill surrounded by tulips. Various scenes depict historical attractions from around New York State, including Dutch gravestones and the Statue of Liberty. There’s a Pumpkin Planetarium tunnel; a wagon loaded with pumpkins carved with Celtic knotwork patterns; an enormous, sprawling kraken; farm animals posing in a field of sunflowers; a circus train and sideshow exhibits; dinosaur skeletons and a fire-breathing sea serpent. Oblong pumpkins make great components for giant balloon animals and exquisitely detailed zodiac signs.
All in all, it’s a glorious, upbeat, family-friendly way to spend an evening during Halloween season, free of being pursued by actors wielding chainsaws. “There’s a lot of love and a lot of details put in. It provides perfect escapism in such a chaotic world. There’s something for everybody,” Doyon says.
The heaviest part of her work cycle is over now, the assembly of the displays having commenced in July and most of her activity during the actual show being alert maintenance. But she’s still carving pumpkins on weekends in her backyard, tucked away in a quiet off-street enclave in the Village of New Paltz. On a steep slope she has created a garden that she calls Whistlepig Terraces, full of odd ornamental plants and whimsical figurines. “I like to take things from the garden and work them into my pumpkin designs. It’s a great place to work out art problems,” she explains. “Sometimes the pumpkin talks to me.”
When we visited her in early October, she hadn’t yet decided what exactly her entry for the Night of 100 Pumpkins at The Bakery will be this year, other than that it will in some way reference current events in the news. Meanwhile, she’s beginning to think about projects for the post-Blaze season, when she has more downtime. “Wintertime is when I can focus on my own art. I’m a printmaker first,” says Doyon. “I have sketchbooks of ideas already.”
The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze runs nightly through October and on weekends after Halloween until November 16, with ticket prices beginning at $24 for nonmembers. Tickets must be purchased online in advance; some dates are already sold out. Van Cortlandt Manor is located at 525 South Riverside in Croton-on-Hudson. For more info, visit https://hudsonvalley.org/events/blaze
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