A bewitching tradition: Greenfield couple’s ‘Halloween House’ marks fifth year 

Every year in Greenfield, around the beginning of October, people in town start to speculate: what will Jim and Ginnie Plourde come up with this year? If you drive down Route 31 on the way to Lyndeborough from the center of town, you can’t miss the Plourde’s “Halloween House.” This year, a sea of multicolored witch hats soar in the air between the house and the pumpkin patch.

“It started with Christmas decorations,” Jim Plourde said. “We saw a big lighted Christmas banner and we loved it, but the price was ridiculous, so I decided to see if I could make one myself.”

“And he did! And it kind of just went from there,” Ginnie says.

The Plourdes have always decorated for Halloween, starting with a pumpkin patch that expanded every year. Jim keeps an eye out for new pumpkins all year long. In 2017, the Plourdes transformed their house into a castle, with “stone” arches and a giant skeleton greeter. A ghostly cemetery encircled the entire house in 2018, and in 2019, Jim created a full-scale pirate ship on their front lawn, complete with rigging, sails, and a skeleton crew. The ship is constructed out of pallets and attached it to a trailer, so it can be folded up and stored, and it now sits neatly covered up in the back yard until its next incarnation.

Next was a haunted house, and this year’s theme is witches.

“This is our fifth year going all-out with Halloween, and we’re never going run out of ideas, but we are running out of storage, so we’re going to start recycling and repurposing,” Jim said.

“It’s fun to look at what we have and say … hmm, what else could we do with that?” Ginnie says.

Jim, who grew up in Milford, always loved Halloween, and has happy memories of his mom decorating the house. The first year he and Ginnie decorated their home, he used several pumpkins that had been his mom’s. One special addition to the pumpkin patch is Maggie the Dog, a ghostly black lab with a jack-o-lantern around her neck, who is a memorial to the Plourde’s dog, Maggie.

The Plourdes have had many curious visitors over the years. One Halloween, Ginnie, who works from home, looked outside to see an entire family getting out of their van in front of the pumpkin patch.

“They were brushing all the kids hair, and then they lined up and started doing a photo shoot for their Christmas card! When I walked out and said hello, they seemed really surprised that someone actually lived here,” Ginnie said. “They were from Florida.”

While the Plourdes’ two grown daughters now love the annual decorations, they didn’t always love Halloween.

“One time we surprised them with a trip to a haunted house, and they hated it. One just refused to go in, and the other ran out screaming! Then another year, we took them to a corn maze, but we didn’t know it was a haunted corn maze,” Ginnie says. “That was a big ‘oops.’ But they got over it. They love Halloween now.”

This year’s display took serious planning. The Plourdes test out their ideas at the Halloween-themed weekend which happens every September at the campground where they spend time in Maine.

“It took a while to work out the grid for the hats. It was pretty complicated,” Ginnie says.

Although their home is outside the center of Greenfield, the Plourdes routinely get up to 150 trick-or-treaters. The Greenfield Police stop by regularly to make sure traffic is flowing safely.

“Some people drive by several times a day, and the kids all wave. The bus from Summerhill came by the other day and stopped. That’s why we do it,” Ginnie Plourde said. “We just love it.”

Jim isn’t done creating yet for this year: he’s currently working on getting a witch to “fly” across the property on Halloween.

“Come see us,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to find.”