The Great Pumpkin Massacre

For those readers out there that have a fondness for the Pumpkins-on-a-Fence display at the corner of Strong Place and Kane Street in Cobble Hill, I have some sobering news. There has been a massacre.

For years now, the owner of the house at the corner has, every Halloween, carved a good hundred small Jack-O-Lanterns and skewered them one-by-one on the pikes of her wrought-iron fence. It's a spectacle many in the neighborhood enjoy, on Halloween and well after.

Only about a third of the pumpkins remain as of Sunday. Some hooligan, or hooligans, has made sport of the poor vegetables, dashing them to the pavement, the sidewalk, the grass. There are Jack-O-Lantern corpses everything. It's not pretty. Is a police detail necessary here?