Where the Glow Began
Every glowing trail has to begin somewhere.
For Jack O’Lantern Glow, that beginning came in 2024 with an ambitious idea: transform the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden into a nighttime world filled with illuminated pumpkins, original artwork, Halloween characters, and autumn surprises for the entire family.
It sounded magical. It also meant creating an enormous outdoor production from the ground up.
Long before the first guest entered the trail, our team was sketching concepts, testing materials, developing themes, building displays, planning lighting, and figuring out how hundreds of individual creative pieces could become one cohesive experience.
Jack O’Lantern Glow did not arrive as a finished tradition. It was built one pumpkin, one display, and one late night at a time.
Creating a New Cincinnati Halloween Experience
Cincinnati already knows how special the zoo can feel after regular operating hours. As daylight fades, familiar paths take on an entirely different personality. Trees become silhouettes, gardens become theatrical scenery, and every bend in the trail offers the possibility of a surprise.
That made the Cincinnati Zoo a remarkable setting for Jack O’Lantern Glow.
Our goal was to create something that belonged in that setting: a family-friendly Halloween experience that felt imaginative, artistic, and full of discovery. We did not want guests to simply walk past rows of pumpkins. We wanted them to enter scenes, meet characters, notice tiny details, and see what could happen when traditional jack-o’-lanterns were treated as an art form.
Some pumpkins were funny. Some were beautiful. Some were strange. Others worked together as pieces of much larger scenes. Each one helped tell the story of the trail.
A Year of Work for a Few Weeks of Magic
Guests experienced Jack O’Lantern Glow during October, but the work behind it began much earlier.
Large-scale pumpkin art requires a combination of creativity, planning, craftsmanship, and repetition. Ideas first had to be turned into sketches. Displays had to be designed for an outdoor environment. Pumpkins needed to be carved, painted, assembled, labeled, transported, installed, illuminated, tested, and maintained.
Then all of those elements had to work together along an active zoo pathway.
Our local artists and production crew spent countless hours turning ordinary materials into expressive faces, recognizable figures, and glowing scenes. A single finished display might represent days or weeks of work, yet guests would encounter it as one moment within a much larger nighttime adventure.
That contrast is part of what makes an event like Jack O’Lantern Glow so special. Months of behind-the-scenes effort become a few weeks of shared Halloween memories.
Building the Trail for the First Time
The inaugural season brought the kind of challenges that only appear when an idea leaves the sketchbook and enters the real world.
How bright should a display be without losing its nighttime atmosphere? Where should guests first see a character? How would a scene look from a child’s height? Would the artwork still read clearly from across the path? How could we protect detailed pieces from changing fall weather?
Every evening taught us something.
Our crew adjusted lighting, repaired artwork, refined displays, and watched how guests moved through the experience. We learned where families naturally stopped for pictures, which small details sparked the biggest reactions, and how a reveal could be made even stronger with a change in timing, placement, or color.
Those lessons became part of the foundation for every season that followed.
The People Behind the Pumpkins
Although pumpkins were the stars of the trail, people made Jack O’Lantern Glow possible.
Local artists gave thousands of faces their expressions. Builders transformed drawings into three-dimensional displays. Lighting and technical crews made sure the artwork came alive after sunset. Installation teams carefully moved the pieces into place. Operations crews welcomed guests and kept the experience moving. Throughout the run, team members returned night after night to inspect, maintain, reset, and repair the show.
The finished trail may have appeared effortless, but it was the result of many different talents working toward one shared goal.
That is one of the stories we hope to tell more often. Jack O’Lantern Glow is not simply a collection of finished displays. It is a celebration of the imagination, patience, problem-solving, and hard work required to create them.
When the Trail Finally Lit Up
There is a moment in every production when the work stops feeling like a collection of separate pieces and finally becomes a show.
For Jack O’Lantern Glow, that moment arrived when the sun went down and the trail illuminated for its first guests in October 2024.
Scenes that had been viewed for months beneath workshop lights suddenly existed under a dark October sky. Pumpkins glowed among the trees. Music, color, and light transformed the pathways. Families began taking photographs, children pointed out their favorite faces, and guests slowed down to study the details our artists had hidden throughout the experience.
The idea had become real.
Approximately 50,000 guests visited during that first season, giving Jack O’Lantern Glow an unforgettable beginning and showing us that this new Cincinnati Halloween event had room to grow.
More Than a First Season
The first year of Jack O’Lantern Glow was exciting, exhausting, educational, and deeply rewarding.
It showed us which ideas connected with guests. It revealed where the experience could improve. Most importantly, it gave us the opportunity to begin building a new fall tradition for Cincinnati families.
The trail would continue to change. New displays would be imagined. Familiar favorites would evolve. Our artists would become more adventurous, and the lessons of that inaugural season would influence every decision that followed.
But no matter how much Jack O’Lantern Glow grows, everything traces back to 2024: the first sketches, the first pumpkins, the first illuminated trail, and the first families who stepped into the glow with us.
That was where the magic began.
