A giant inflatable jack-o’-lantern bumped parked cars and rolled into traffic in downtown Dubuque, Iowa, forcing an SUV driver to steer around a Halloween decoration large enough to block her view of the other side of the street.
Pam McCarron was heading to a work meeting when the windblown pumpkin came toward her on Main Street. The encounter was captured by a traffic camera and featured in KCRG’s October 8 report by Keegan Turnbough, accompanied by McCarron’s account of what it was like behind the wheel.
The anchors introducing the report said no one was hurt. Dubuque Police Lt. Luke Bock, who reviewed the traffic-camera recording, noted that there was no oncoming traffic when McCarron maneuvered around the pumpkin.
“This is not AI-generated,” McCarron said in her interview. “This actually truly happened, and I was the car involved in this.”
Behind the Wheel
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“Is it going to hit me? Is it going to hit my car? Is it going to, like, go over my car?” she recalled.
She could not see around the pumpkin to check whether a car was approaching from the opposite direction. The recording gave Bock a view of the roadway that McCarron lacked at the time, but he also considered how the encounter could have ended differently.
“It’s entertaining. Like it’s funny to watch it,” he said. “But you just, I guess, a lot of times you think about what could have happened.”
Bock recommended following the manufacturer’s instructions and securing decorations in the yard. His warning included the possibility of an object obstructing a highway, prompting a driver to swerve into a crash, or striking someone walking along the road.
Elsewhere in Dubuque, homeowner Jennifer Edwards had no inflatables in her Halloween display. The reporter visited her during the eighth year of her monthlong trick-or-treating tradition, held on Fridays and Saturdays at her Mount Alpine Street home.
Her Halloween display still had plenty of other decorations. In previous years, she had used inflatables, which she described as difficult to keep level and balanced.
“Safety is a big, big, big concern,” Edwards said. “Inflatables are really hard to keep staked.”