"Fifty-five years I've painted these bats. Now I'm the one who can't see them." — Rita (74) is selling the last of her Halloween glass at a special price.

For 55 years Rita Kisner has hand-painted Halloween glass in New Martinsville, West Virginia — first in the Ashlock Glass paint shop, then alone in her basement after the plant closed. When it shut in 1994 she saved eighty crates of unpainted glass from the dumpster. Those crates are empty now, and when the last 431 lamps are gone, there is no more glass and nobody left painting it.

New Martinsville, September. The bench sits under the basement window, because that is where the daylight is. On the table: a turntable, six little pots of enamel, a jar of thinner, and a sable brush she has been using since 1976. The Ohio River is four streets away. Rita Kisner works the way she has since she was nineteen years old. But this autumn is her last.

"It's my eyes," she says, tipping a shade toward the window. "I paint the inside of the glass, so you're working backwards, looking through. You need to see the line before you lay it down. I used to do a bat in about four seconds. Now it's twelve, and I only work while the daylight's good. Come October it's done by half past three."

Then she says the part that seems to bother her more. "People don't pay for this anymore. Walk into any store in October. It's a plastic pumpkin with the face printed on the outside. Looks fine in the box. Put a bulb behind it and you've got a gray blob. What I do is just about gone."

55 years, one bench, and eighty crates that never made it to the dumpster

Rita started at Ashlock Glass in 1971, nineteen years old, in the paint shop. Thirty benches, thirty women, a radio on the shelf and the heat of the furnaces coming through the wall all day. The men blew and pressed the glass. The women decorated it.

She was trained by Opal Ferree, who had been painting the Halloween bats since 1959. "Four strokes," Rita says. "Body, wing, wing, and the little notch. Opal could do it without looking down — she'd be talking to you the whole time." In 1976 Opal's hands started shaking and she gave up the bench. Rita took it, and painted that same bat for the next eighteen years.

Then in 1994 the plant closed. On the last week, the unpainted stock sat out on the loading dock, headed for the container — plain glass nobody was going to decorate now. Delbert Fauber, the floor foreman, told her to back her wagon up to the dock.

And then she simply did not stop. The bench went into the basement, the crates went under the stairs with a blanket over them, and Rita kept painting the same three designs she had learned in the paint shop. For thirty years she sold them at the autumn markets in Wheeling and Moundsville — a folding table, an extension cord, and a row of lamps switched on.

She never expanded the range. "I know these three the way you know a song," she says. "Anything else, I'd have to think about it. And when you have to think about it, the line wobbles."

What makes Rita's lamps different

It isn't the shape, and it isn't the color. It is where the paint sits — on the inside of the glass, the way the old plants did it, and the way almost nobody does it now.

The inside-painted build: Every piece is painted from behind, through the opening, in reverse order — the last color you want the eye to see goes on first. The glass itself is the only surface anyone ever touches, so the design cannot scratch, chip, wash off or go dull. Then the paint is fired on, which is what fixes it to the glass instead of sitting on top of it. Inside sits a low-voltage USB light that stays cool, so it can run all evening without heating the glass. That is why a lamp like this is still bright after thirty Octobers on a windowsill, while printed decorations crack and fade after a season or two.

"Some of my customers have lit theirs every October for over thirty years"

Rita lifts a tin biscuit box onto the kitchen table. It is full of photographs and Christmas cards. "People bring them to the table," she says. "Same faces every year. They'll say, 'here's ours, third window on the left.'" She pulls one out from 2013: a front window in Steubenville, a lamp glowing behind the curtain, a child's hand in the corner of the frame.

The reason they last is simple: patience instead of speed. A factory prints thousands a day. Rita paints one lamp at a time, and a single piece takes her most of a morning — from the first line to the moment she plugs it in and the color comes up.

Under the stairs she keeps a crate she calls "the bring-backs." It is full of things people have handed her at markets hoping she could fix them: a "stained glass" lantern with the color peeling off in strips, a pumpkin light with a crack straight through the plastic, a window hanging that turned out to be printed film on acrylic.

"I can't repair any of it," she says. "Not because it's difficult. Because there's nothing there. Hold it up to the light and nothing happens. Real glass you look through. That's the whole point of it."

The end of an era — and one last chance

At the end of October, Rita puts the brushes away for good. "There's nobody to hand it to," she says. "Not because nobody wants it. Because there's no plant left to learn it in. You can't teach somebody inside-painting on a kitchen table."

Eighty crates sounds like a lot. Spread over thirty-two autumns, it isn't. Over the last two winters, in the hours her eyes still gave her, Rita worked through what was left in the bottom of them — every usable piece, down to the last one: 431 lamps. The crates are stacked empty against the basement wall now, and there is no more glass coming.

So that the lamps find good homes before Halloween, she has done something she never did at the markets: set one clear price on every single one. At the autumn markets in Wheeling her lamps sold for $99. For this last collection, they are $59.

"My granddaughter Kayla handles the computer part," she says. "I can paint a bat backwards through a piece of glass, but don't ask me to work a website."

• Painted by hand, one at a time: Every lamp is painted by Rita herself, at the same bench, with the same brush. No transfers, no production line.
• Inside-painted glass: The design sits behind the glass, fired on — it cannot scratch off, wash off or go dull. Run your thumb over it and you feel nothing but glass.
• Real glass, real weight: Heavier and cooler in the hand than you expect. You know what you are holding the moment you pick it up.
• Colour that comes through: Because it is glass, the light passes through the design — you can see it from across a dark room.
• Cool-running USB light: Low voltage with a simple on/off switch on the cable. Safe to leave on all evening.
• Weighted base: The weight sits low, so a knock on the shelf doesn't send it to the floor.
• Not just for Halloween: Most owners leave it out long after October — on a windowsill, a mantel or a bookshelf, right through the dark months.
• Limited: 431 lamps from the last of Rita's glass. Once they are gone, there will be no more.

What real customers say about Rita's lamps

"A gift for the people you actually care about"

What makes one of Rita's lamps such a good gift isn't only the work that went into it. It's that the work has an end date. "When you give somebody one of these," Rita says, "you're giving them something that took a woman a morning to paint, out of glass that came off a loading dock in 1994. A light for the dark half of the year — and something that won't be made again."

Her customer Christine H. (44) from Wheeling agrees: "I gave one to my sister for her birthday and told her the glass came out of the old plant before it got thrown away. She went quiet and just held it. Knowing a 74-year-old woman painted every line of it by hand — it stops being a decoration. I ordered a second one for myself two days later."

Where can you buy Rita's lamps?

The lamps are available exclusively through this page. Kayla runs Rita's small shop at Backroad Goods, and it's the only place you will get an original lamp out of that basement in New Martinsville.

Be careful elsewhere: on Amazon, Temu and similar sites, cheap look-alikes have started showing up. In a photo they look similar. In your hand they're molded plastic with the design printed on top. Hold one up to a light and you'll see the difference immediately.

Every order comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If the lamp isn't right for your home, one email to info@backroadgoods.com is all it takes to get your money back.