The Pumpkin Fest Riot
Yankee Magazine, Haunted New England Edition October 1st, 2000
On October 31st of 1998 the small town of Robin, New Hampshire, turned into a national news story when their family friendly Pumpkin Fest turned into a full-fledged riot. Cars burned in the streets, pets were murdered by rioters, occultists chanted charms hoping to bring back the devil. What was once a quaint New Hampshire town became a war zone.
To this day, experts have conflicting opinions on what caused such an event to descend into chaos. Some experts blame the drunk college kids that flooded the streets from frat parties, some blame the wiccan occultist who was arrested on that day, and others claim they had drunk apple cider with a hint of botulism that may have crazed the crowd.
Since the harrowing event occurred, Robin, New Hampshire has not had another Pumpkin Fest. What was once a festive fall activity for the western part of the state is now written in history as one of the most bizarre incidents in regional history.
Since 1998, the town of Robin has stopped all Halloween events. There is no pumpkin festival, no pumpkin carving, no trick-or-treat, no apple cider – in fact the Office of the Mayor will issue a citation if you’re even seen wearing black and orange on All Hallows Eve!
If you ask the townspeople of Robin what happened on that day, many will avert your gaze. They will shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t know” and then tell you about how beautiful the fall foliage is this time of year. More than anything this town wants to get beyond its darkest day.
But if you’re looking for a scare this Halloween, and you’re not afraid of a little hocus pocus, stop by the large metal clock on Main Street. It’s where the occultist, Dr. Beatrix Brighton, claims she saw the devil himself on that dark day. While Dr. Brighton is still a practicing professor at Robin State College, her opinions on this subject have come under scrutiny from her colleagues, the administration, and the media.
You see, Dr. Brighton believes that this peculiar incident wasn’t about drunk college kids or botched apple cider – it was about the Devil making his mark on the world on his favorite day.
Prologue
Robin, New Hampshire, was a small town with little mischief until the fall of 1998. The people were polite, the students were relatively boring compared to most college campuses, and life in the town was relatively uneventful. It was the kind of town you’d love to live in if you were married and had children and wanted a quiet life.
It was pretty damn boring.
Hunter Tanner, a six-foot-tall baseball player from Medford, Massachusetts, was one of the city’s bored residents. A senior and one of the oldest in his fraternity – he had stayed back two years, once for academics and once for athletics – he was tired of the sleepy town of Robin and was in need of a little Halloween trickery.
Like most college students he also needed money.
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Late one night in late October, Hunter put on a black ski mask with some gloves and he tiptoed out of his fraternity house and over to the Smith Building. It was the building where Robin State College held all of their arts and humanities classes. And because no mischief ever really happened in Robin late at night, the door to the building had been left unlocked. It was a quiet town with good natured people – nothing strange or bizarre had ever happened in Robin.
Hunter walked through the empty hallways, looking for one classroom in particular: Dr. Beatrix Brighton’s history room. While the door to that room was unfortunately locked, that did not stop Hunter Tanner. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
In his jacket pocket, Tanner had a metal steak that he put up to the window of the door. He hit the flat side hard with the back of his hand, causing the glass to shatter across the floor. He reached into the door and opened it from the inside.
Dr. Brighton's classroom was a cabinet of curiosities, where taxidermied jackalopes shared shelf space with jars of deadly nightshade. Though kind, the history professor had an unsettling fascination with the historic and valuable oddities that made her lectures unforgettable.
Hunter Tanner, while popular with his fraternity and on campus, was a bit down on his luck. His father had passed away last year and his mother did not work, causing his monthly allowances to end. With the demands of baseball, he didn’t have time to work – not that there were many jobs in Robin anyway.
So he had another idea.
He was fascinated with the growth of the internet and a new thing that just came out called eBay. You could sell anything online to anywhere in the world. And people were paying big money for the strange, unusual, and peculiar.
In the back of Dr. Brighton’s classroom was a glass case that held her most prized possession, and what Hunter rightly assumed would be the most valuable. To someone like you or me, it would look like just a plain old giant rock. It was gray with black dust powdering it like a sugary donut. It was propped up on a small stand in the middle of the glass box next to a sign that read: “The Stone of One Thousand Souls.”
The description read as follows:
The Stone of One Thousand Souls was given to Queen Mary II after the Glorious Revolution by a demonologist by the name of Braxton Heritage. Heritage claimed that the stone had absorbed every demonic entity that caused the strife in England for the prior 50 years.
Dr. Brighton talked about the stone constantly. She had acquired it from an auction in France a few years ago and paid a pretty penny for it. As Hunter stared at the seemingly normal rock, he noticed that the dust on the rock gave it a bit of a glimmer. It sparkled in the darkness. With his gloves on, Hunter delicately lifted the glass box and put it down on the ground. With his right hand he grabbed the rock – it was about the size of a grapefruit and it felt heavier than it should in his hand. He slipped it into his coat pocket as some of the black dust fell off onto the floor of the classroom.
Success.
He wondered how much he would start the bidding off at.
Was $1,000 too high?
With $1,000 he could fix his car and even afford to give some money to his mother. And who is to say that the bidding wouldn’t just stop there? In a few days Hunter could be a thousandaire – maybe even a hundred thousandaire if things went his way!
Even if Hunter had a momentary pang of guilt, it didn’t last long. He justified his theft with one simple and very true fact: Dr. Brighton had plenty of unusual and rare expensive objects. It was only fair that Hunter had one too.
With a skip in his step, he left Dr. Brighton’s classroom, closing the door behind him.
Little did he know, he was actually carrying the weight of one thousand souls in his varsity jacket pocket.
