The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., is autumn’s answer to a winter wonderland. It glows with something close to 10,000 hand-carved, illuminated pumpkins, drawing crowds all month long and well past Halloween, through the weekend after Thanksgiving.

Even on its opening weekend in September, the line of cars to the parking lot stretched far down South Riverside Avenue, overseen by a conspicuous police presence.

The grounds of stately Van Cortlandt Manor are packed as well: children in strollers and on shoulders wearing glow necklaces and waving pumpkin light sabers. Grown-ups gather at a tent that sells pumpkin spice ale and hard cider before heading to a two-story spider web, a carousel of skeletal horses, and a covered bridge where bats flicker blue in synchrony with the disquieting soundtrack and whooshing wind of the Headless Horseman galloping by.

He is, after all, the reason for the season.

The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze is the vivid orange jewel in the crown of the Sleepy Hollow region’s thriving Halloween industry, which would not exist if not for the Washington Irving short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”