Keene, New Hampshire, has hosted its Pumpkin Festival for nearly twenty years now.  It consists of not only pumpkins lined up along the streets...

...and rows of pumpkins set four-high on shelves further up the streets...

...but also two huge walls of pumpkins stacked nearly twenty high.  Why so many?  Well, partly because it’s a pumpkin festival, and partly because the organizers want to set a world record every year for the number of pumpkins lit at the same time.

A volunteer lights up the pumpkins.  The Keene Pumpkin Festival has set eight records to date in the Guinness Book of World Records, the last one being set in 2003.  At this 2009 festival, 29,762 pumpkins were lit - a festival record - but that did not top the current world record of 30,128, set in Boston in 2006.  With 2010 being Keene’ twentieth pumpkin festival, my guess is that enthusiasm will be high enough to bring the record back here.

Pumpkins painted and carved.

A bad hair day.

Evening falls on the Pumpkin Festival, and a tower of pumpkins is lit.  No, those aren’t ghosts hovering in front of the distant pumpkin tower; they’re just people wandering by during this long-time-exposure photograph.  Really.  No ghosts.

Now the fun begins: night photography at the Keene Pumpkin Festival.

While many pumpkins had the traditional face with triangle eyes and jagged teeth, some like this one had real artistry behind them.

A ghostly pumpking at the Keene Pumpkin Festival.

This one uses a pumpkin’s translucent properties to take pumpkin carving to a whole new level.  I can’t imagine how long it took to do this right.

A wonderful witch pumpkin at the Keene Pumpkin Festival.

Put a dozen or so of these at your front door and see how many kids come trick-or-treating on Halloween night.

Now that is one evil-looking pumpkin, true Halloween perfection.  The Pumpkin Festival in Keene, New Hampshire, is an all-day event held on a mid-October Saturday, complete with pumpkin carving, a pumpkin-pie-eating contest, a pumpkin-seed-spitting contest, and all the food and merchandise and kids events and entertainment one would expect from a fine New England festival.