“After 34 Octobers, I am done. These are the last ones I will ever make.” — Wanda (71) is letting the final 433 of her ghost lanterns go at a special price. Her most asked-for piece is retiring.
In an old awning shop in Circleville, Ohio, Wanda Hoyt spent thirty-one years keeping the weather off other people’s porches — and every autumn she made something of her own. Now the 71-year-old is putting down her shears for good, and saying goodbye with the piece people ask for by name: the ghost lantern. Why is it suddenly so sought after? Because this is the last autumn it exists.
Wanda Hoyt (71) in the loft of the old Hoyt Awning & Canvas shop in Circleville, Ohio. After 34 Octobers, she is closing the workshop.
Circleville, September. The loft above the old awning shop smells of wet cotton, stiffener and cold coffee. Ghosts hang from the rafters on wires, arms out, drying. On the long table lie bolts of cotton gauze, a tub, a spool of tempered wire and a cardboard pattern gone soft at the corners. Down in town they are putting up the barricades for the Pumpkin Show — the festival this place has held every October since 1903. Wanda Hoyt is not going this year.
“I am seventy-one,” she says. “And my hands do not open the way they used to.” She lays her left hand flat on the table. The little finger stays curled. “The doctor has a name for it. What it means is I have about twenty minutes from the time the cloth comes out of the tub before it sets. My hands need thirty.”
She pauses, then adds the part that clearly bothers her more. “And the trade went away too. Nobody pays for cloth work anymore. Everything is a printed shell with a bulb inside it. My way of working is quietly disappearing.”
31 years, 400 porches — a life spent keeping the weather off
Twenty minutes from the tub until the cloth sets. Her hands need thirty.
Wanda has done the arithmetic. Her father opened Hoyt Awning & Canvas in 1961; she took it over in 1979. In thirty-one years she stitched the awnings, porch screens and boat covers of more than four hundred houses across four counties. Split seams on a 1940s canvas marquee. A porch screen re-stretched every spring for the same woman for twenty-two years.
“In the beginning it was only canvas,” she says. “You make the thing that keeps rain off a family and then you disappear. Then in 1992 I made a ghost out of surgical gauze for my own porch, because I wanted something up there and I did not want plastic. The next morning my neighbour was standing in the driveway asking me where I bought it.”
By that October she had eleven orders. She has made them every autumn since.
What makes Wanda’s ghost lanterns so different
At noon he is still something to look at. That is the part most Halloween decorations cannot manage.
What makes hers different is not the shape, although the shape is what people notice first — the spiral body, the reaching hands, the frayed hem. It is what happened in 1996.
She took forty ghosts to the Pumpkin Show that year, stiffened with starch, the way every instruction sheet on earth still tells you to do it. It rained the night before opening. In the morning all forty were lying on the folding table, collapsed.
“Starch is sugar,” she says. “It pulls water out of the air. Everybody who makes one of these at home finds that out on the worst possible night, usually after two days of work.”
She had spent three decades treating canvas so it could live outdoors. That afternoon she went back down to the shop and treated the cloth the same way she treated a boat cover. She has not used a gram of starch since 1997.
The build: seven layers of grade-40 cotton gauze — the heavy open weave that used to come off a mill in North Carolina — six yards in every ghost. The spiral is fourteen feet of tempered wire, and it is the structure, not the decoration: the body hangs on it and stays where it is put. Each hand is formed over its own armature and dipped on its own. Fifty warm white lights are threaded through the spiral and the body by hand. The eyes are two ovals of black wool felt, the only part of him that does not let light through — which is exactly why they are the first thing you see from the street. One ghost takes her the better part of a day.
“Grade forty is not what gets sold as cheesecloth now. What you buy in a shop today is a ten or a twenty — you can read a newspaper through it. And starch on anything that lives outdoors is a two-day job waiting for one wet night. Treat the cloth the way you treat canvas and it will still be standing in ten years.”
Dale Chambliss, cotton finishing, 38 years, Gastonia, North Carolina
Every one of them stands on the same pumpkin
The mould Wanda took off the pumpkin Dell grew in 1994. Every base since has come out of it.
Her husband Dell grew pumpkins on two rows behind the shop. In 1994 he brought one in for the Show, and Wanda carved it at the kitchen table.
“It was the best face I ever cut,” she says. “And in eight days it was going to be soup on the step.”
So she did what a canvas maker does with a pattern she wants to keep: she took a mould off it. Every base that has left her shop in the thirty-two years since has been cast from that one pumpkin — mineral-filled, heavy for its size, and it never has to rot. Dell died in 2011.
“There are a few thousand jack-o’-lanterns out there in this country,” she says, “and every single one of them is the same pumpkin. He grew it, I cut it, and it never went soft.”
“I have customers whose ghosts have been out for eighteen Octobers”
Hundreds of thank-you cards, the oldest from 2001. Wanda has kept every one.
Wanda pulls a wooden box out from under the bench. Inside are hundreds of letters and cards. “Thank-you notes. Some of them write every couple of years,” she says. She takes one out, dated 2008: “Dear Mrs Hoyt, yours has been on our step for eight Octobers now. Our grandson says goodnight to him on the way to the car.”
There is a plain reason for that kind of lifespan: one at a time instead of by the hour. While factories optimise for output and thin materials, Wanda bends the frame, layers it, dips it and lights it herself.
She keeps a crate by the stairs that she calls the lost and found. It is full of things people carried up to her and asked her to fix. A ghost with its face printed onto a moulded shell. A homemade one that folded in on itself in the first week of October. A string of lights inside a pillowcase.
“I cannot fix a single one of them,” she says. “Not because I am not good enough. Because there is nothing in there to fix. Hold mine up to the light and you can count seven layers. Hold theirs up and it is a curtain with a bulb behind it.”
The end of an era — and one last chance
The last batch: 433 ghosts, built in the nineteen months since the diagnosis.
At the end of October, Wanda closes the loft for good. “I have no successor. I taught it to two people. Both were gone after one autumn — it takes three or four years before your hands know it without you watching them.”
On the shelves there are still 433 ghost lanterns. The last batch that will ever come out of that shop, built in the nineteen months since the doctor put a name to her hands, in the hours her grip still had left in it.
“It is not about the money now. I want them switched on, out on porches, where somebody is glad to see them.”
— Wanda Hoyt, Circleville, Ohio
To get them onto porches before Halloween she has done something she has never done in thirty-four years: one clear price on every ghost. At the Pumpkin Show they went for $89 apiece. “My granddaughter Tessa (29) is selling them online — at my age I would not know where to start with all that internet business,” she adds, laughing.
It was Tessa who photographed them out on the porch and put the whole thing together over a single weekend. “She told me I was not going to spend my last good autumn standing behind a folding table in the cold. She was right.”
Every one of them came out of the same loft in Circleville, and there is no next batch behind it. Order by October 29 to have him on the porch for Halloween.
Claim One of the 433→$49 today · regularly $89 · 30-day money-back guarantee
What sets Wanda’s ghost lanterns apart
Buster, 13, has had the spot under the cutting table since the year the shop stopped making awnings.
Built one at a time: every ghost is framed, layered, dipped, wired and lit by Wanda herself — no moulds for the cloth, no line, no second pair of hands.
Seven layers of real cloth: grade-40 cotton gauze, six yards in every figure. Hold him to the light and you can count them.
No starch, ever: the cloth is set the way boat canvas is set. Starch draws water out of the air and collapses on the first damp night. This does not.
The felt eyes: two ovals of black wool — the only part of him that does not let light through. That is exactly why they are the first thing you see from down the street.
Warm white, never blue: fifty warm white lights threaded by hand through the spiral and the body. No cold light, no colour cycling, no remote.
Timer built in: six hours on, eighteen off. He comes on by himself at the same time every evening, all October, without anybody touching him. There is a manual switch in the base as well. Three AA batteries, not included.
A base that does not rot: cast from Dell’s 1994 pumpkin, mineral-filled, the mass sitting low so a gust or a slammed screen door does not put him over.
September to Thanksgiving: built for Halloween, but most owners leave him out through the harvest. He reads as autumn, not as one night.
Limited: 433 left from Wanda’s final batch. When they are gone, there is nobody making more.
One honest note before you order: he stands about 29 inches — roughly the height of a kitchen stool — and the porch photographs make him look bigger than he is. He takes three AA batteries and they are not included. He is built for a porch, a covered step or the spot beside a front door, not for the middle of an open lawn in a storm; Wanda never put hers anywhere the wind could get a full swing at it. Everything else is exactly as shown.
433 ghost lanterns are left in the loft in Circleville. When they are gone there is no next batch and nobody making them.
See What Is Left→$49 today · regularly $89 · order by October 29 for Halloween
What real customers say about the ghost lantern
Photos sent in by customers last October.
“I have bought a lot of Halloween things that looked better in the photograph than in the box. This one is the other way round. He is smaller than I pictured and about four times nicer — you can feel it is real cloth the second you lift the lid.”
– Gail M., 63, Chillicothe, OH
“I ordered one and had a second one on the way within the hour, so there is one on each side of the front door. My husband thought that was excessive until the sun went down.”
– Roberta S., 58, Owensboro, KY
“From the kitchen window you cannot see the whole thing, just the two dark eyes sitting in the middle of the glow. My grandson makes us drive past slow every single time.”
– Charlene D., 66, Athens, GA
“Third October he has been out on the covered porch through the rain and he is exactly as firm as the day he came. I have had string lights die faster. He stays out until Thanksgiving and nobody has ever asked why he is still up.”
– Marilyn P., 54, Bloomington, IN
“The gift for people you actually care about”
What makes the ghost lantern such a good gift is not only the work in it. It is what is behind it. “When you hand somebody one of these, you are handing them a piece of real cloth work,” Wanda says. “A light for the dark half of the year — and something that is not going to exist again.”
Her customer Dana K. (41) from Springfield puts it plainly: “I gave one to my mother, who has been answering that door for forty years. She did not say much. She just set him on the step, switched him on and stood there looking at him. Then I had to order one for myself the same week.”
- 34 Octobers of ghosts, since the first one in 1992
- 31 years of awnings, porch screens and boat covers before that — 400+ houses across four counties
- 7 layers of grade-40 cotton gauze, six yards in every ghost
- 1 pumpkin — cast in 1994, underneath every single one
- No starch since 1997, the year after forty of them collapsed in the rain
- 433 left — the entire final batch, and the last there will ever be
Where can you buy Wanda’s ghost lantern?
They are available exclusively through this page. Her granddaughter Tessa runs Wanda’s small shop area there, and that is the only place an original out of the Circleville loft will come from.
Be careful elsewhere: on Amazon, Temu and similar platforms there are cheap copies in circulation that look roughly similar in a photograph but have nothing to do with Wanda’s work — a thin printed shell with a bulb behind it, or a bag of gauze over a plastic cone. Hold one up to the light and you will see it straight away.
Every order comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If he is not right for your porch, one email to info@backroadgoods.com is enough and you get your money back. Orders placed by October 29 arrive in time for Halloween.
Every ghost was built by hand in an old awning loft in Circleville, in the last nineteen months Wanda’s hands could still do it. This is the final October they exist.
Check Availability→Limited quantity · 433 remaining · $49 instead of $89