“That was the last one I will ever make.” — Why a 71-year-old Ohio potter is letting his final 194 handmade monster lanterns go at 49% off.

By Marguerite Ames · Hearth & Hollow · September 8, 2026 · 6-minute read

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Americans will spend roughly four billion dollars on Halloween decorations this year, and most of it is molded PVC that will be in a landfill by Thanksgiving. A carved pumpkin caves in after five days. A battery tealight runs a flicker loop about three seconds long, and once you notice the loop you cannot stop noticing it. By the time the children come up the walk on the thirty-first, half the porches on the street are lit by something that looks like it was printed rather than made.

Vernon Kesler has been fighting that particular loss for forty-three Octobers, one lantern at a time, in a cinderblock shop behind his house in Zanesville, Ohio. This year is the last one.

The man who fires the crowd

Zanesville earned the name Clay City honestly. Weller, Roseville and McCoy all ran their potteries within a few miles of Vernon’s street, and for most of the last century a Zanesville kid grew up knowing what a good glaze looked like the way a Detroit kid knew engines. Vernon started at nineteen, sweeping floors for an old production thrower who had come up through the Roseville works and who charged him nothing to learn on the condition that he never rushed a drying rack.

The lanterns began in 1983, and not as a product. His street ran heavy with trick-or-treaters, and he wanted something on the rail that would still be lit and still be warm when the last small group came through at nine o’clock. He made a pumpkin with a stubby stem for a lid. The next year a neighbor asked for a black cat. Then a ghost, a mummy, a pumpkin in a witch’s hat.

Forty-three Octobers later there are seven faces, and Vernon does not call them variants. He calls them the crowd.

“A face out of a mold is the same face ten thousand times. Press one with your thumb and it looks back at you.”

Why one of Vernon’s holds a flame all night

Set one of his next to a supermarket lantern and the difference registers in your hand before you can put words to it. There are reasons for that, and Vernon has names for all of them.

Small enough for one hand — and it takes any tealight you already own

They stand about the height of a coffee mug, take an ordinary tealight, and come in seven faces: the classic jack-o’-lantern, a wicked-grinning pumpkin, a pumpkin in a witch’s hat, the black cat, the mummy, the ghost, and the skull.

The night it stopped being about Halloween

There is one story Vernon tells, and he tells it plainly, without decorating it. A few years back a young mother stopped on his walk with a boy who would not go up to any house with a motion-activated skeleton on it. She asked whether they could just stand by the rail a minute, where it was quiet and warm.

They stayed about ten minutes. The boy took his mask off and watched the flame move behind the mummy’s eyes.

“That is the whole thing,” Vernon says. “Not scaring anybody. Giving them somewhere warm to stand.”

The arch cracked in March

Vernon built his kiln in 1981 out of hard firebrick he pulled from the old Mosaic Tile works when it came down — a wagonload at a time, for almost nothing, brick by brick, on his own. It has been fired more than nine hundred times.

In March he opened it after a cooldown and found a crack running the length of the arch, on the underside, where forty-five years of heat had arrived first. He mortared it, strapped it, and gave it a slow test fire. It held.

So in August he loaded it one final time, packed to the shelves, and gave it fourteen hours. When it came down and he opened the door, everything inside was good.

One hundred and ninety-four pieces came out of that firing. That is not a limited run. That is the entire remaining supply, and there is no way to make another one, because there is no kiln to make it in.

“A man builds one kiln in his life if he is lucky. I am not building a second one.”

He is direct about why there will not be another. Laying up a kiln takes a summer, a few thousand dollars in brick, and a back that can carry sixty-pound bags of castable up a ramp all day. At seventy-one, he has the summers. He does not have the back. “I could tell you I might get to it,” he says. “I would be lying to you and to myself.”

What he misses most is not the money. It is August: loading the shelves at five in the morning while it is still cool, the smell of the burners catching, sitting out with a thermos watching the cones through the spy hole. Forty-three of those, and no forty-fourth.

Why he is letting them go for so little

A gallery in Columbus offered to take the whole run at fifty-nine dollars a piece. Vernon turned it down, and not because the number was too low.

“They would have sat in a case,” he says. “A lantern in a glass case is a dead thing. It has never had a candle in it.”

His granddaughter Ruthie, 26, is the one who set up the little shop, photographed every face on the porch rail, and finally put a price on them at all. They kept it deliberately low — $29.99 a piece, 49% off the $59 that gallery would have put on the tag — for a plain reason. There are 194 of them and no room to store them, and Vernon would rather every last one be lit on somebody’s rail this October than boxed in a barn.

“Put a candle in it,” he says. “That is all I want out of this.”

What people are saying about Vernon’s lanterns

Where to get one of Vernon’s lanterns

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