Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular: Pumpkins On Display Through Nov. 5

CRANSTON, RI—The Wetlands trail will be glowing Thursday night when the Roger Williams Park Zoo welcomes visitors to its 2017 Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular. Some 5,000 carved pumpkins will be on display. On Wednesday night, the carvers were still busy making their creations, all from locally grown pumpkins. This year's theme is traveling through time, starting with the dinosaurs.

"Then we moved on to the Ice Age," laughed John Reckner, who designed the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular. Reckner said he never thought he would still be working on shows 30 years later. His original inspiration was a Jack-O-Lantern display on a mountainside in northern Vermont. It was beautiful, he said. One night, he was walking his dog in the woods when he thought about a different setting for the Jack-O-Lanterns. How about the woods? he wondered. With music playing?

His first show happened in Oxford, Massachusetts. It was two or three days long. He carved all the pumpkins himself. There were only 10 or 12 of them.

But the show got bigger and bigger. The carvers will go through 20,000 pumpkins for this month-long show. The pumpkins typically have to be replaced in a week's time due to weather, primarily heat.

Reckner said he doesn't do too much carving anymore. He comes up with the annual theme, chooses the music and coordinates everything.

There is something new this year: the Soaring Eagle Zip Ride. People can ride 115 feet above the zoo and see the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular from the air.

For ticket information, click here.

The trail opens at 6 p.m. Hours are 6 to 11 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and 6 to 10:30 p.m. on the other weekdays. The show runs through Sunday, Nov. 5.

King Henry VIII and his six wives occupy a pumpkin.

So, what kind of elbow grease does it take to carve one of these Jack-O-Lanterns? Check it out in this very noisy video. (You might want to kill the audio because it's very loud.)