Happy Halloween everybody! A runaway giant pumpkin was spotted hurtling straight through a junction after it came loose in high winds.
In scenes reminiscent of an actual horror movie, the loose inflatable had people fleeing the streets and cars swerving out of its path in Dubuque, Iowa.
The jack-o’-lantern came loose from ‘Pumpkinfest’ at a local farm on Friday
One driver, Pam McCarron, told local news channel WMBF: ‘This is not AI-generated. This actually truly happened, and I was the car involved in this. ‘I think I was pretty calm, but you don’t see that every day.’
She was on her way to a work meeting when the giant squash nearly ran her off the road.
She expressed her thoughts when she saw first saw it coming: ‘Is it gonna hit me? Is it gonna hit my car? Is it gonna like go over my car?
‘It’s big enough that I couldn’t see around it to know if there was anything on the other side, when [the inflatable] was on the other side of the street. I was like, I don’t know if there’s a car coming.’
Dubuque Police Lt. Luke Bock said he first saw the traffic camera video on Facebook on Thursday morning.
He said: ‘I was like, boy, that’s a big pumpkin, so obviously the police officer side of me was like, we don’t really need those things bouncing down the roadway.’
Bock said he can laugh at the video because there was no oncoming traffic at the time.
‘It’s entertaining. Like it’s funny to watch it, but you just, I guess, a lot of times you think about what could have happened, what if?’, Bock said.
Fortunately, no injuries were reported.
The city council tried to make light of the situation quotingChamillionaire’s hit ‘Ridin’ Dirty’. They posted on X: ‘They see me rollin’…inflated…They tryin’ to catch me flyin’ in a hurry…
‘We love seeing all of the Halloween decorations around town. But be sure you secure your front porch ghosts, 12-foot skeletons, and giant inflatable pumpkins so they don’t end up flying away!’
It came the week after a British pumpkin grower set a new world record after producing a giant squash.
Ian Paton, from Lymington, Hampshire, managed to grow his 20-foot wide pumpkin named Bagheera to 2,856.8lbs (1,295.8kg).
Paton said his thirsty pumpkin needed 130 gallons of water daily.