4414 Piedmont Avenue, Oakland
October 29, 2025
Sugar Pies, Cinderellas, Stellalunas, Ellsworth Pinks, Hoargarths, Jarrhadales, Muskins, Luminas, Blazes, Fairy Tales, Jack-O-Lanterns, Goosebumps: these are only a few varieties of the countless pumpkins on display and available for purchase at the Piedmont Avenue Pumpkin Patch, a seasonal wonderland that’s been going strong for over 25 years. Just a four minute walk from Mountain View Cemetery, it’s not only the place to get your autumnal gourds, it’s also a destination shop for costumes, masks, spooky tchotchkes, and all manner of All Hallows’ Eve decorations. But for me the pumpkin patch’s haunted house was the main attraction.
I’ve experienced many haunted houses during Hallowe’en season over the years, most of them pretty lousy (too heavy on bloody gore, not enough on actual surprise and fright), and so I didn’t have the highest of hopes. But this little labyrinth of the paranormal delivered: it was creative, carefully and artistically designed, and very clever. I jumped a few times and at one point actually let out a scared, startled yelp.
Located next to the 55-year-old florist shop J. Miller Flowers, the narrow entrance to the pumpkin patch doesn’t look like much. Once inside, it still isn’t much more than a brightly lit, wide hallway with Hallowe’en goods and decorations filling every nook and cranny. But keep on walking and you’re suddenly down a ramp and in an ivy-bordered backyard that opens up into a Wonka-esque space. In place of edibles, a plentitude of pumpkins of every shape, size, texture, and color occupy some hay bales and straw-strewn ground. Ghouls, skeletons, and menacing clowns keep watch over the patch, and red wagons are available for easy transport of chosen gourds.
Jon Goldstein and his partner Robbin Lee have been running the pumpkin patch for going on three decades, hosting grade school groups to tour the haunted house from September through the last day of October. Lee, born and raised in the Town, owns J. Miller Flowers, and Goldstein, a Minnesota native and sound engineer, designs the haunted house each year. Every year it is different.
For these school groups and the youngest children (and scared adults), the attraction’s lights are kept on and the moving props disabled. Each evening there’s this “Less Scary” version, followed by the “Scary” version for the more intrepid. We chose the latter: my partner and I eagerly paid the $10 admission fee and shouldered our way through heavy, foreboding curtains and into the darkness.
You are greeted by the song “Mona Lisa” as performed by Nat King Cole. I didn’t know what to make of this—it certainly wasn’t spooky music or the sounds of ghoulish shrieks. But, gaze upon a framed print of da Vinci’s famous portrait and—suddenly it opens up, a half-mummified figure leaping out at you. A fantastic jump scare. Other, sepia-toned portraits hung in the corridor, harmless enough until their visages transform into devilish faces. The strains of “Mona Lisa” take on an ominous quality as you keep going into the eerily lit dark.
A ghoul in green and some creepy goodness.
There are skulls and demonic clowns and creepy dolls with painted faces, a group of child figures circling in a “ring around the rosy” dance, windows that look in upon sinister tableaux that glow, snap, bang, and hiss; the sounds of crying babies, a portion with a disorientingly wobbly floor, and mannequins of the undead. And the coupe de grâce: a real human dressed as a harlequin complete with an ornate Venetian mask who giggles softly and menacingly at the end of a passageway as you approach. You’re unsure if it’s real or not until it leaps forward toward you. This is what made me yell. The young woman in the costume got me good!
The haunted house was so delightful I had to go through a second time to take it all in, steeled by the fact that I knew where the gotcha scares were located. But the harlequin (the actress goes only by the name “Bones”) got me once again despite my knowledge of where things were, creeping up behind me from somewhere in the darkness. Haha! Nice!
On our way out we had to pet “Pumpkin,” one of three dachshunds—Pumpkin, Goldie, and Kazar—that haunt the shop with their guileless cuteness. Definitely “Less Scary.”
