Unalaska, AK – The jack-o'-lantern is a staple of Halloween decoration in most of the United States. But many kids growing up in the remote villages of the Aleutian Islands and the Alaska Peninsula had never seen one in the flesh until eight years ago. That was when the crew of the ferry Tustumena began using its final trip of the year, in early October, to bring Halloween cheer to the villages between Kodiak and Dutch Harbor.

These days, the Tustumena's crew delivers hundreds of pumpkins--which are donated by the Safeway grocery store in Kodiak--to children along the ferry route every year, in what's now called the Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run. KIAL's Charles Homans visited with the co-conspirators on the ferry's October 7 stopover in Dutch Harbor in the middle of the Pumpkin Run.

(This story first aired on APRN's "AK" program on October 28.)