I have never seen or heard anything like this. I called my Dad in Sacramento and told him about it. He had never heard of seeds sprouting from the inside of a pumpkin. He suggested that I try to make pumpkin pie out of it. I did that one year but it didn’t work out too well. Turns out that Jack O’Lantern pumpkins are unsuitable for pies. Sugar pumpkins are better for pies. A quick Google search reveals that you can cook fairytale pumpkins into pies. Maybe next year with a pumpkin that doesn’t have green sprouts growing inside it.

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Carving a pumpkin with a three-inch thick wall wasn’t an easy task. I wanted to do a side-to-side grin with tiny sharp teeth that would look down from the balcony on the one or two kids who come trick-or-treating in the complex. (Most of the kids go to the Halloween party hosted by the leasing office at the clubhouse on Friday.) I ended up carving half the pumpkin away to have a big set of teeth. This was the best I could to do given that my sharpest knife was the biggest knife that I have. The pumpkin guts with the sprouted seeds ended up in the trash.

The nice thing about being a writer is that I’m thinking about turning this fairytale pumpkin into a short story. I’ve been wanting to do an “Invasion of The Body Snatchers” story for some time but I haven’t found a unique angle to trick out the story with. Sprouted seeds inside a pumpkin appears to the perfect treat: “They look like ordinary pumpkins until they were carved open and the green tendrils among the discarded pumpkin guts slithered out of the trash to eat people.”

Maybe I should put the trash out before I go to bed tonight. Happy Halloween 2010!

Update Tuesday 2 November 2010 @ 1:45PM – A little research reveals that the seeds inside the pumpkin can sprout if the pumpkin was kept too warm (about 70F degrees) for an extended period of time. Since the grocery store kept the pumpkins near the entrance that gets direct sunlight and there was a recent one-week heatwave, it was enough to get the the seeds to start sprouting. Remember that the next time you shop for a pumpkin.