The Mysterious Pumpkins at Rounds Hall
13The Plymouth State University Pumpkins have appeared atop the Rounds Hall spires for the tradition’s 50th anniversary (1975-2025). A weather cam is always trained on the spires from a building across campus, but someone mysteriously cuts the camera right when it happens, on a random night every October. Students from the meteorology department find an hour missing from the footage the next morning & voilà, the pumpkins are up! Only a few people know the secret of how they get there, and none of them are talking. The only clues are cryptic names that have been found written on the rafters in the clock tower. I’m thinking there must be a trap door up there above the clock, but it would still be dangerous as hell. No thanks, I’ll just put a pumpkin out on the porch like a sane person! 
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Oh, that’s cool but getting up there looks terrifying!!!
@Kyeh
Absolutely!
@chienfou @Kyeh Yep, that’s why I’m sticking with the porch pumpkins!
@chienfou @ircon96 @Kyeh Buster Keaton was pretty good at innovative and daring stunts, Tom Cruise has been getting there, but Harold Lloyd was the greatest!
@chienfou @ircon96 @phendrick I would argue with you about that - Buster Keaton was the best.
@chienfou @ircon96 @Kyeh What’d he do? He was just standing there.
Put up your dukes…
Whether you defer or not, I want the north end.
@chienfou @ircon96 @phendrick
In Harold Lloyd’s clock stunt he wasn’t really that high off the ground. Buster Keaton had a REAL house fall around him!
And there’s this (it gives me the shivers!)
@chienfou @ircon96 @Kyeh Technically, that was a wall, not a house. The rest of the house was still stnding.
(I wonder how many standins they went though in getting the spacing just right?)
Read Wikipedia on how Buster learned how to do falls when he was a kid.
I did say he was GOOD.
@chienfou @ircon96 @phendrick I know about his childhood - it would be considered child abuse these days!
And yeah, okay - but it was A REAL WALL WITH REAL BRICKS!
@chienfou @Kyeh @phendrick I don’t rank them, because all 3 are certifiable nutjobs who are infinitely braver than i am, which i grant isn’t saying much, but i think they’re arguably more ballsy than most people!
It’ll be a drone thing shortly…
@chienfou That’s gonna be one big-ass drone!
… And do they stay up there till they rot off, or what?
@chienfou They disappear as randomly as they appear, at the same time, so I’ve always assumed they must come & remove them. Not to mention, for liability purposes, falling chunks of giant pumpkins could be a problem.
So, apparently my hatch theory isn’t a clue, since – according to this NHPR article – there isn’t one. But, even if there were, those pumpkins are huge & those spires are very tall, with no flat area to stand on once you’re up there, so there’s that. Even experienced roofers or climbers would be challenged, to say the least.
https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2020-10-31/the-great-and-mysterious-pumpkins-of-plymouth-state-university
The local news did a story on it that has some cool drone shots & talks to a townie who allegedly knows the secret:
@ircon96
Very cool!
That freeze frame on the YT video splash makes it look like there might be an opening on the left under that coroded-copper “tent” on top just below the spires. If so, that would be the safest way to access the spires. I’d like to see better drone footage around that. Or a shot of the ceiling where those signatures are.
Also looks suspiciously like seams on that copper plating. (Hinges?)
Wonder what the funconality of that cable or rod that goes across the top of the copper is?
@phendrick funcTIonality
stupid smell-checking phone with its auto-corrupt
The showme bot spells better.
@phendrick Just say “function” and avoid the whole problem.
@Kyeh @phendrick I was thinking the same thing about the seams, etc, but like i said, even if there were a hatch, there’s the problem of where to stand and how to reach the top of the spires. “Safest” is a very relative term in this case! Lol
I’m assuming that thing you’re seeing is the broken lightning rod that some people mention when discussing the story, saying the Great Pumpkin Society should fix it while they’re up there, as if they’re not already busy enough!
@Kyeh Strong NOPE on talking to the internet. Main reason I haven’t hired Alexa or any of its siblings. I’m not comfortable saying much to unknown callers in my natural voice for the same reason. In a few tests I made, AI wasn’t particularly better getting my speech than YouTube’s generated CCs anyhow. And if my brain-dead phone doesn’t grok my typing, why should it do better on my speech where the bit content is order of magnitudes higher?
But thanks for making the suggestion.
@phendrick I didn’t suggest anything about “talking to the internet!” I don’t use those services either. I just meant “use a simpler version of the word” in my ongoing battle against jargon terms. I guess I should have said “just type function.”
@phendrick Wow, that almost turned into one of those sitcom misunderstandings! Lol… That’s okay, @Kyeh, I knew what you meant!
@Kyeh I’m pretty sure I did in fact type “function” but my Galaxy phone is always playing my mom - I’m much older than it is - and changing what I type to what IT thinks I meant to say. Sometimes I don’t proofread it closely enough and some really weird sentences get put out there.
I thought you meant I should compose by speech. Not gonna do that, as stated above.
As a totally irrelevant aside, “type function” is a thing in many programming languages, meaning functjon is a specific data type.
@phendrick Yeah, I thought of that too (type function) but figured you’d know what I meant. I’ve never used Siri or Alexa or speech-to-text either.
@Kyeh I have much imagination and am used to considering a lot of different contexts, but in the end tend to take things very literally.
@ircon96 @Kyeh Lightening rod. Makes sense. And also might be the clue to the mystery. Will explain later when I have more time to fight with my phone.
Found on the Plymouth.edu site.
https://magazine.plymouth.edu/issue/spring-2021/traditions-what-distinguishes-psu-and-warms-our-hearts/
It it’s real who cares why. It’s cool and knowing would ruin it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@unksol Maybe knowing would ruin it for you, but not knowing is a rock under my pillow.
You like traditions? Those at Plymouth are teeny compared to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditions_of_Texas_A%26M_University
And, TBH, I’m really surprised someone hasn’t ‘spilled the beans’ in this day and age of influencers and click counts.
@chienfou So true, but hey, we Yankees can really keep a secret when we want to, esp the old-timers! JD Salinger moved to Cornish, NH, in the early 50s & I remember hearing stories about all the out-of-towners who would show up at nearby businesses trying to find his house & no one ever spilled the beans.
@chienfou @ircon96 I love that.
@chienfou @Kyeh Me, too! I used to take day trips up to Hanover all the time, driving all over the back roads, etc, because i love that area around Dartmouth, and don’t think I wasn’t tempted to try to find his house while i was in the neighborhood, but knowing how protective they were of him made me reconsider!
As someone with experience in unauthorized access to clocktowers and other highest points on college campuses (campi?) I am kind of shocked that they can still pull this off in the current day when there are cameras positively everywhere.
The physical act of getting them up there is fun to think about, though it’s most likely either easier than we think or they are just nuts who actually climb it. The height looks daunting but there are some people just built different that are unaffected by the relative distance between themselves and the ground.
@djslack
As long as you don’t follow in Charles Whitman’s footsteps…
@djslack I wonder if this was just drone dropped/installed
@pakopako Today, maybe. 1975, I doubt it.
And traditions are strong at colleges, so more than likely it’s the same old secret passed down.