The World's Heaviest Pumpkin Is Now the World's Heaviest Jack-o'-Lantern. Next Stop Is a Pig Farm.

SALEM, Mass., Oct. 31, 2026 — The heaviest pumpkin ever grown has spent Halloween week as the heaviest jack-o'-lantern ever carved, sitting on the town common in the city best known for its 1692 witch trials. After Halloween it gets chopped up and fed to pigs.

The pumpkin weighed 3,156 pounds when it won the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Warren, R.I., on Oct. 10, making it the first pumpkin, and the first fruit of any kind, to pass 3,000 pounds, Patch reported. Grower Ron Wallace raised it in Rhode Island over 123 days.

Then Todd Graves, the founder of the Raising Cane's chicken-finger chain, got his hands on it. Graves brought it to Salem for the city's 400th anniversary, and professional carvers Eric Jones, Monique Hawk and William Wilson went to work, along with Graves and his daughter, Sophia, according to Guinness World Records.

After 32 hours of carving, the finished piece had flying bats, a knobbly-nosed witch, a startled skeleton and, because the sponsor was a chicken-finger chain, crinkle-cut fries and a cauldron of dipping sauce. The team turned the pumpkin's own scraps into 3D decorations and worked in parsnips, radishes, beets, carrots, apples, eggplants and turnips. The turnips were a nod to the old tradition of carving lanterns out of them before pumpkins took over, Patch reported.

The detail that made the record possible is that it didn't get lighter. Guinness adjudicator Michael Empric confirmed the finished jack-o'-lantern still weighed 3,156 pounds, which beat the old record of 2,749 pounds by more than 400. That pumpkin, set in 2023, was nicknamed "Michael Jordan."

"This Guinness World Record Heaviest Jack-o'-Lantern is seven years in the making," Graves said, according to Patch. It's his first Guinness title. Salem Mayor Dominick Pangallo declared Oct. 27 Great Pumpkin Day, Boston.com reported.

The jack-o'-lantern stays on Salem Common through Halloween night. After that, Guinness says, it will be cut up and donated to a farm in New Hampshire as pig feed, which makes for a very lucky group of pigs.