Anyone who drives down Clifton Street in Mount Holly during the month of October may stop in their tracks when they pass a certain house.
"I just drove by yesterday and I almost had to stop the car. It was just unbelievable what I was seeing. It was out of this world,” says Elinor Broadbent of Westampton.
What Broadbent saw was the home of Richard Denisar and his wife Deanna and the 900 jack-o’-lanterns that are on display on their front lawn. The family has been holding the local pumpkin festival for the last 16 years.
"We had just the 25 on the wall here and the next year it was 50 so it fit a little bit more. And it's just grown exponentially,” says Denisar.
But the couple doesn’t carve the pumpkins themselves. It is a community effort and a dayslong festival of carving pumpkins in the community.
"It truly is a community coming together and it's not necessarily just Mount Holly. It's families that are coming together,” Denisar says.
Denisar says that the best part about the festival is that some families have made it their own annual tradition.
"We’ve watched some kids come here, very little, and they're now going to college or some of them are getting out of college and they come here and they say, ‘We grew up coming to the festival.’ That's just an incredible feeling to us that a family thought that it was that important,” he says.
And while he's thankful for them. The feeling is mutual.
“Somebody with that big of a heart that's willing to do something for kids today, they deserve as much credit as anybody,” says Broadbent.
The family says that they had people from as far away as Massachusetts make the trip to carve a pumpkin to put on the wall. Halloween was the last day to see the display. The pumpkins will then be taken down and donated to a farm for animals to eat.