“This is the last cloth I have.” — After 34 Octobers, Wanda Hoyt (71) is sewing her final 306 sets of ghost lights by hand. Then the loft in Ohio closes for good.

Above an old awning shop in Circleville, Ohio, there is a loft with a cutting table, a soldering iron and a line of ghosts hanging from a wire. Wanda Hoyt has worked up there every autumn since 1992, and every stitch in every ghost is sewn by her own hand. This October is the last one: the cloth she has used for thirty-four years came off a mill that no longer exists, and there is enough left for exactly 306 sets.

Circleville, September. The loft smells of cotton dust and the coffee she keeps forgetting on the hot plate. A wire is strung wall to wall with eleven ghosts hanging by their cords, waiting for faces. She takes one down the way you would take a shirt off a hanger, finds a fold she does not like, and gives the hem one short snap with her wrist. The whole thing settles.

“That is the part nobody notices,” she says. “And that is exactly why you do it.”

The mill closed. She bought the shelf.

Every ghost Wanda has made comes out of the same material: a fine, closely woven white cloth with a quiet sheen, originally spun as a liner for canvas awnings. Soft enough to fall properly, tight enough to hold a hem, and dense enough that a light inside it spreads out instead of showing through as a bright dot.

The mill in the Carolinas that wove it shut in the spring of 2024. Wanda drove down with her granddaughter Tessa and a pickup and bought what was still on the shelf.

“The loose cloths let the light out in dots. The stiff ones will not drape. This one does both jobs at once and it took a mill sixty years to get it right,” she says. “I have enough for 306 sets, and I would rather finish on a good cloth than carry on with a worse one.”

Thirty-one years of awnings, then the ghosts

Wanda learned cloth the unglamorous way: 1975, a canvas shop on the edge of town, hemming boat covers and stitching storefront awnings for half the businesses on Main Street. “They put me on the heavy work,” she says. “Joke is on them. Heavy work is where you learn how cloth actually behaves.”

The first ghosts came in October 1992, when a shop on Main Street wanted something for the window that was not another paper bat. Wanda sewed three, hung them in a row, and ran a light string inside each because the window went dark by five. By Friday, four people had come in asking to buy them off the glass.

“Three is the right number,” she says. “One is a decoration. Three looks like they came up the yard together.”

Where the shape came from: a bedsheet, 1960

“My mother cut the eyes with kitchen shears and they came out crooked,” she says. “I went up and down that street feeling like the best thing anybody had ever seen. I am still trying to get back to how that felt.” She has been the Halloween one in her family ever since — decorations up the first week of October, in every house she has lived in.

Which is why the felt faces are cut freehand and never traced, and why no two pairs of eyes sit quite level. “A perfect face looks like a factory. A crooked one looks like somebody loved you enough to make it.” And why none of them are frightening. “I have never once tried to scare a child. I want the little ones walking right up to them.”

One pair of hands, from the chalk line to the switch

Nothing about a Hoyt ghost is assembled somewhere else, and nothing about it is run through a machine. Wanda chalks each panel around a paper pattern so old the edges have gone soft, cuts it with shears, and sews every seam by hand — needle, thread and thimble, the weighted cord going into the hem as she works her way around it.

“A machine seam is faster and it is stiffer,” she says. “Hand stitches give a little. That is why the cloth still falls right after fifteen Octobers on a porch.”

Then comes the part people do not expect from a seamstress. She builds the frame — a length of fine wire for each arm, bent by hand over a wooden form. And she does the electrics herself: strips the ends, solders the joint at the bench, seals it, fits the battery holder and burns the string in overnight before it ever goes inside a ghost.

Only then is the string stitched in, so from the outside there is nothing to see but cloth and a thin dark cord at the crown. Last of all, the face. Start to finish, by hand throughout, one ghost takes her the better part of a day.

The one detail she will talk your ear off about is the hem. “Wind is what makes or breaks a hanging ghost. With weight in the hem it swings out and comes back, all evening, like it means to. People think they are paying for the sewing. They are paying for the hem.”

The house the whole street talks about

A porch with three of them lit tends to become the one address everybody on the street mentions — the house the trick-or-treaters steer for first, the one parents slow the car down in front of, the one the neighbours end up copying the following year.

“You are not decorating your own house,” Wanda says. “You are decorating everybody’s walk home.”

The last October

At the end of the month the loft closes. On the shelf there are 306 sets left, cut and sewn in the two years since she brought the cloth home.

So she did something she never did in thirty-four years of craft fairs: one clear farewell price on the whole remaining run. At the Pumpkin Show these sets went for $54. The set of three is now $39 . “My granddaughter Tessa handles the website and everything else with buttons on it,” she says, laughing. “She told me I was not spending my last good October behind a folding table in the cold. She was right.”

What sets Wanda’s ghost lights apart

• Hand-stitched start to finish: cut, sewn, wired, soldered, faced and tested by Wanda herself — needle and thread, no sewing machine, no moulds, no production line.
• The awning hem: a weighted cord sewn into every hem, so wind makes them sway and come back instead of flipping up.
• The cloth does the glowing: the light string is sewn inside the body, so the whole ghost carries an even warm light instead of one bright spot.
• Hand-bent wire in both arms: set each one once and it holds that pose all season. One set, three different attitudes.
• Friendly, not frightening: the freehand felt face reads from the far end of the street — and the little ones walk straight up to it.
• Hanging in two minutes: cord sewn on, button cells already fitted. Out of the box, over the hook, switched on.
• Limited: 306 sets remain — the last of the mill cloth. When they are gone there is no next batch.

What customers say

• ★★★★★

  “I bought mine at the Pumpkin Show in 2012. Fourteen Octobers later the same three go up on the porch beam and they look the way they did the day I carried them to the car. I ordered a second set this year for my daughter’s first house.”

  – Marianne T. , 66, Chillicothe, OH
• ★★★★★

  “My husband thought I had lost my mind spending real money on Halloween decorations. Then the wind came up and ours swayed and came right back, and he spent ten minutes explaining the hem to the neighbor. He is the one who wants a second set.”

  – Beverly A. , 63, Hendersonville, NC
• ★★★★★

  “Batteries were already in them, so all three were hanging before the coffee got cold. In person the light comes through the whole body instead of one bright spot, and the little ones on our street go straight past the candy bowl to look up at them.”

  – Donna R. , 70, Springfield, MO

The sets are sold only through this page, where Tessa runs her grandmother’s small shop area. Every order carries a 30-day money-back guarantee: hang them, switch them on at dusk, and if they are not right for your porch, one email is enough.

Disclosure: This is a paid advertisement. Quantities stated reflect inventory at the time of publication and may change. Customer statements are individual experiences. Delivery before October 31 applies to orders placed while stock remains.