This house is alive … with Halloween Spirit!
By Benita Heath
HQ 56 | SUMMER 2005
For 51 weeks out of the year, the old Joseph Miller homestead, a gingerbread mansion circa 1891 found on a backstreet in Kenova, looks very much the way it must have when it was built by the prominent West Virginia banker and friend of President Grover Cleveland. Then, as now, it stands quite formal, elegant and very, very Victorian.
But all that changes when there’s frost in the air and the promise of spooks and goblins takes over the village. Then for a week each year at the end of October, the Miller house glows with the magic of Halloween in a way that only its current owner, Ric Griffith, knows how to bring to it. It’s kind of enchantment that brings people to his front yard in droves.
Most of the time, Griffith is known around town as a pharmacist and owner of the Griffith and Feil Drug Store on Chestnut Street in Kenova. It’s a family business that was owned for 50 years by his uncle, the late Simpson Griffith and father, Dick Griffith, before he took over in 1993.
But when it’s time for trick or treaters, Griffith gets a new identity as he is transformed into the “Pumpkin House Man.’’ It has become an appellation that easily identifies the businessman even to those who don’t know what his day job is.
Like all good Halloween tales, Griffith’s is rooted in childhood … the childhood of his daughters. When they were in grade school, he got the idea that each one should have her own hand-carved Jack-O-Lantern displayed proudly on the front porch. So he got pumpkins and a knife and spent a couple hours one night changing each pumpkin into a glowing face. When he saw how nice they looked on the front porch, Griffith got the idea that a few more would look even better.
That was about 25 years and thousands of pumpkins ago.
When the family moved in 1991 to the Miller mansion, Griffith’s wife, Sandi, saw a beautiful old home and a great place for their family.
“I saw a platform for pumpkins,’’ Griffith says.
This season, Griffith will need more platforms than he ever has, because his game plan is to, once again, outdo himself. From porch ceiling to roof, window sills to trees in the yard, everywhere there’s an empty space there will be a glowing Jack-O-Lantern to greet the hundreds who make the seasonal pilgrimage to his house.
In fact, this year there will be a staggering 3,000 of them, burning brightly through the night starting the week before the Halloweeners come out to the first few days of November.
But then such ambitious plans are typical for Griffith. Each year his goal is the same: to put out more pumpkins than he did the year before.
Naturally, it is a goal that takes some help from his friends. No, let’s correct that. It takes a lot of help from his friends, family and even perfect strangers who have heard about the Pumpkin House and want to be a part of the fun.
“This whole thing is only possible because of the cooperation of the volunteer help…because these people enjoy it,’’ Griffith says. “It has grown beyond the ability of my family, my friends, even the youth groups who have been coming. We depend very dearly on volunteers … strangers who show up and help us for just brief periods of time. You know we had one woman who would come on her lunch breaks.’’
No matter the number of pumpkins – last year it was a skimpy 2,850 – the drill is the same. First, truck after truck drives into Griffith’s car port and unloads their wares, stacking the pumpkins anywhere they can find some room.
“Most of them are the size of soccer balls,’’ Griffith says. “We do have some very large ones. There will be some 100 pounders … 20 or 30 of those.’’
Then Griffith, helped out by his oldest daughter, Heidi Romero and her husband, Jorge, grab some black Sharpies and start to draw. Images can range from a hoot owl that will be placed prominently on the limb of a tree by the house to Egyptian hieroglyphics on pumpkins stacked in the shape of the Great Pyramids. Of course, there’s always the usual Halloween fare like ghosts, witches and the typical Jack-O-Lantern faces.
“Or I’ll do simple things, like eyes staring out of the darkness,’’ Griffith says.
Drawing is time-consuming and requires a special trick, or else there won’t be any treat. Naturally, Griffith has to make an outline that can be recognized easily from the street. But he also has to make sure he doesn’t cut away his pumpkin “canvas’’ so much that the night air will cause it to rot before the show is over.
“The challenge of pumpkin design is to see how much you can leave. The more you leave the sturdier and stabler it will be,’’ Griffith explains. “You need to minimize the drawing so the pumpkin will last longer.’’
It’s a task that daughter Heidi says brings its own special rewards.
“I think the neatest thing is watching everyone come in,’’ she says. “The children will stand there wide-eyed. And it amazes me that all night long there will be people there, even at three in the morning.’’
Next, come the volunteer teams whose only goal is to create as much waste as possible. Their job is to scoop – and scoop and scoop – out the insides of the pumpkins.
“This is really one of the most important jobs and it is time consuming,’’ he said.
And what happens to all these potential pumpkin pies?
“There are families who pick them up. They feed them to their cattle,” Griffith says. “I say I’ve smashed more pumpkins than any teenager in the world.’’
Then the pumpkin is ready to come under the knife as up to a dozen volunteers man electric jig saws, because when pumpkins are carved en masse and on deadline there is no time to waste.
“We set up tables on the car port and have saws ready for the people standing at the stations. We bring them the pumpkins as fast as we can,’’ he says.
Griffith likes to joke that creating his Pumpkin House is his personal obsession and admits he asks himself the same question he is asked by others over and over again.
Why do you do this?
“It’s fun and it’s uplifting to have people enjoy something that is nothing more than carved vegetables,’’ he says. “There’s a bunch of vegetables and thousands of people looking at them. The pumpkins have that strange orangish glow and it’s almost hypnotic.’’
