By Millicent Drover, Fall Festivals and Fellowship Reporter

UPPER HOLLISFORD — As families unloaded hay bales and paper bats into the parking lot of Mossgrove Chapel of the Pines on Saturday for this year's trunk-or-treat, one question hung over the event like a plastic spider on fishing line: who won in 2019?

Nobody knows. That includes the judges.

The three-member Trunk Decoration Review Panel has been deliberating the 2019 contest for seven years, unable to choose between the Gundersons' minivan, which was dressed as a giant smiling pumpkin, and the Pettibones' hatchback, which held a hand-built cardboard lighthouse with a working flashlight on top.

"They were both excellent trunks," said panel chair Lorraine Wickersham, 71, seated behind a folding table stacked with binders. "The pumpkin had scale. The lighthouse had engineering. And the Pettibones' dog was dressed as a seagull, which we're still not sure we're allowed to count."

According to church records, the panel first deadlocked at 1-1-1 on the night of the event, when the third judge voted for "the lady who handed out full-size candy bars," whose trunk had no decorations at all. A recount the following Wednesday produced the same result. A second recount was scheduled for Thanksgiving week and then moved, as Wickersham puts it, "to a calmer season."

Since then, the panel has met 38 times. It has reviewed 412 photos, two hours of shaky phone video and a detailed diagram of the lighthouse submitted by Gary Pettibone, 66, who has offered to rebuild it "for the record."

"I'm not asking for a trophy," Pettibone said. "I'm asking for closure. And maybe a trophy."

The Gundersons, meanwhile, have kept the pumpkin. The giant orange frame still sits in their garage, carefully wrapped in a bedsheet, in case the judges request a second viewing.

"Our kids were in elementary school when we built it," said Annette Gunderson, 48. "One of them is in college now. She calls every October to ask if we won."

The deadlock has caused problems for later contests. The church cannot hand out the traveling trophy, a spray-painted gold traffic cone, because it is still technically on hold for 2019. Winners from 2021 through 2025 have each received a laminated certificate reading "Pending."

The church council tried to step in last spring with a motion to declare a tie. The motion failed after members of the Women's Fellowship pointed out that a tie would mean making a second traffic cone, and nobody could agree on the shade of gold.

This year's contest went ahead as usual. Forty-one trunks took part, including a pirate ship, a haunted barn and, once again, a pumpkin minivan and a cardboard lighthouse, parked side by side at the Gundersons' and Pettibones' request so the judges could "see them in context."

At press time, the panel had announced that it would not score the 2026 contest until the 2019 result was settled, and the lady with the full-size candy bars had once again drawn the longest line in the lot.