“They’re taking the whole place — the shop, the house, the windbreak.” — Loretta (71) is letting the last 412 of her hand-built witch whirligigs go at 49% off before the dozers come.
The short version: “I’m not quitting. I’m being cleared.” The quarter section Loretta Quinlan has rented outside O’Neill, Nebraska for forty-one years sold this spring. The new owner is taking the farmstead out so the field runs edge to edge — house, shop, windbreak, all of it — the first week of November. Stacked in the granary is the last run of witch whirligigs she will ever build: 412 of them, cut, welded and coated over last winter. Whatever hasn’t found a yard by then goes down with the place. For the first time in thirty-seven years, anyone can have one — 49% off.
The shop still smells like cutting oil and cold iron. Her father’s vise is bolted to the bench where it has been since 1961, and she hasn’t decided yet whether it comes with her or stays for the dozer. The wall of hand tools is down. The coffee can of drill bits is in a box by the door.
“The letter came in April,” she says. “It was two paragraphs. Polite enough. A date and a number to call if I had questions.”
The ground has never been hers. Her parents rented it, and Loretta kept renting it after them — the house, the shop, the row of cottonwoods her father planted as a windbreak. The old owner died in February. His heirs sold the whole section in the spring to a large operation two counties over, and that operation is doing what nearly everybody out here does now: taking the farmstead out so there’s nothing to drive around.
She asked. More than once. Whether the shop alone could stay, whether she could keep paying on it, whether she could move the building onto the far corner at her own cost.
“They were decent about it,” she says. “Decent, and then it was no, every time. To them a farmstead is nine acres you can’t plant. I’ve done that math myself — it’s not wrong. It just happens to be my nine acres.”
She’s moving into O’Neill, a small house on a town lot. And that, she says, is the part people don’t follow.
“Everybody tells me to just set up somewhere else. I’m seventy-one years old and my next neighbor will be twelve feet off the property line. You don’t cut and grind steel twelve feet from somebody’s kitchen window. There’s no somewhere else. There’s just town.”
For thirty-seven years you could not buy one of Loretta’s witches at any price. She never made them for a store and never once advertised. This is the first time — and the last time — they’ll be available to anyone outside the people who knew where to knock.
A school carnival in 1989 — and the witch she never meant to sell
Loretta was eleven the first time her father let her hold a piece steady in that vise. The Quinlan shop fixed whatever broke on the farms around O’Neill, and most of what broke, back then, were windmills — the tall galvanized Aermotors that pulled water for the cattle. She trued her first fantail at seventeen.
Then the electric pumps came, and the windmills came down by the hundreds, and the work went with them. So she turned the shop toward the only thing she knew better than anybody: things that turn in the wind. Weather vanes. Whirligigs. Garden pieces.
The witch was an accident. In the fall of 1989 the grade school needed something for the entrance at the harvest carnival, and Loretta cut one out of a drop of sheet steel on a Thursday night — a witch on a broom, riding above a pair of rings full of bats and stars.
“I set her out Friday morning and forgot about her,” she says. “Monday there were seven people in my driveway.”
She has built them ever since. A few dozen a year, in the quiet weeks between harvest repairs, and never more. No store, no listing, no sign at the end of the lane. People heard about them at church, at the co-op, at the fair — and then they drove out and knocked.
She calls the figure Old Mag. Nobody remembers why anymore, including her.
What makes Loretta’s whirligigs different
The thing that makes one of these worth owning isn’t the witch. It’s what’s underneath her — and that part comes straight off a windmill.
Most wind spinners have one ring. One ring needs real wind to move, and when it gets real wind it fights the stake and works itself loose. Loretta builds hers the way her father balanced a fantail: two rings, turning against each other.
The steel is galvanized first and powder-coated black over the top — two layers, in that order. It’s the difference between a piece that looks the same in its fourth October and one that shows rust freckles by Thanksgiving.
“Paint is how you find out in March what you bought in October,” she says.
One’s been in the same yard since 2019
Loretta doesn’t keep records, but she remembers where they went. There’s a woman on the north end of town she gave one to seven Octobers ago.
“It goes out the first Saturday of September and comes in when the snow does,” Loretta says. “Same stake hole every year. She told me the neighbors slow down at that corner now, and the school bus kids watch for it. That’s the whole job, right there. That’s all I ever wanted one of them to do.”
She has opinions about the alternative, and she doesn’t soften them.
“I’ve got nothing against the big blow-up ones. But you go by at nine in the morning and there’s a twelve-foot ghost laying in the grass like something died. Half the time you’re looking at that, not at the decoration. Mag doesn’t have an off switch to look bad in.”
This is everything that’s left
The reason there is a final run at all comes down to timing that nobody planned.
Last winter Loretta built more than she ever had in one season — the list of people waiting had gotten long, and for the first time she had said yes to a table at the Holt County fall market. She cut, welded and coated straight through from November to February. Four hundred and twelve of them, wrapped in moving blankets and stacked in the granary on the far side of the yard.
Then the letter came, and there was no market table, and by November there won’t be a shop.
“No apprentice, no drawings, nobody standing behind me,” she says, and she isn’t bitter about it. “Nobody wants to spend a winter learning to run a torch for what it pays. I don’t blame a soul for that.”
A garden center over in Norfolk offered three years running to carry them at eighty-nine dollars apiece. She said no every time — it never sat right, selling something through a register that she’d always handed to people herself.
Now there’s a date on a letter and a machine on a trailer. So she has done the one thing she never did in thirty-seven years: she cut that price by 49%, down to $45.
“I’m not doing it for the money,” she says. “I’d rather they stood in somebody’s yard this October than went into a pile with the building.” Her grandson Cody (24) is the one who put them online. “I’m no good with any of that. He had the whole thing running before I finished my coffee.”
The place comes down the first week of November. When the last of the 412 is gone, that’s it — the shop is scheduled, the bench goes to a nephew, and there is nobody taking over the work. Order by October 22nd to have her standing in your yard before Halloween.
What people say
“I put her out the Saturday after Labor Day and by the second week my mail carrier was rolling his window down to talk about her. She turns when nothing else in the yard is moving. I don’t know how that works and I’ve stopped asking.”
“My grandkids are five and seven and they are done with the bloody stuff every other house puts out. This one they walked right up to. My granddaughter named her. That was three Octobers ago and she still asks when the witch is going up.”
“I ordered one and then ordered a second one four days later, because one looked lonesome by the porch step. They’re heavier than I expected — that was the part that sold me. It’s not something that blows into the neighbor’s hedge.”
Where to get one of Loretta’s whirligigs
Loretta’s whirligigs are sold in one place only: Backroad Goods, the small online shop her grandson Cody (24) runs. They have never been in a store and they never will be.
“Cody handles all of it,” Loretta says. “I don’t keep up with the internet. He packs them out of the granary and I sign the slips.”
Payment & shipping: all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every piece ships flat in a rigid box with the rotor packed separately — never a poly bag. Orders leave within 2–3 business days. Free returns within 90 days.
A word of caution: as word has gotten around, look-alikes have turned up on marketplaces. They photograph the same. They are single-ring stampings in painted aluminum, and they are not hers. The real ones come only from Backroad Goods, galvanized under the coat, two rotors, one pair of hands.
Orders have been running a lot heavier than we planned for. More than half of the final 412 have shipped this week. Once the granary is empty that’s the end of it — there’s no restock and no second run. My grandmother isn’t starting over in town.
— Cody, Backroad Goods
The bottom line
This is the Halloween decoration you won’t be throwing out in November.
That’s not an accident. Loretta built them the way her father built things for the farms out here: to stand outside, in the weather, for years, and to still be worth looking at. Nothing to plug in. Nothing to inflate. Nothing lying flat on the grass at nine in the morning. Just steel that turns when the air moves, and keeps turning after the trick-or-treaters have gone home.
Thirty-seven years she kept these to the people who knew where to knock. These are the last ones she’ll ever build.
Take one home — with Loretta’s 100% money-back guarantee
Her parting terms: a 90-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
Put her by the walk, by the mailbox, at the corner of the porch. Live with her for a season. If she doesn’t belong there — if you don’t love her — send her back and get your money back. No questions.
Final run — no reorders once it’s gone. Ships within 2–3 business days in a rigid box. Free returns within 90 days. Order by October 22nd for delivery before Halloween.
More from customers
“It bothers me more than it should that somebody can scrape a woman’s whole workshop off the map for nine acres of corn. I bought two — one for me, one for my sister in Peoria. I can’t stop a bulldozer but I can keep a couple of these out of the pile.”
“I ordered her for the looks. I kept her because she’s the only thing in my yard I don’t have to do anything to. No cord across the walk, no fan running all evening, no hauling her in when it storms. She just goes.”
“My husband has not commented on a single thing I’ve put in that yard in thirty years. He came in from the driveway and asked me where the witch came from. I ordered a second one that afternoon.”
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Customer statements reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Images are for illustration; because each piece is built by hand, the final product may vary slightly.
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