CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — The donut coffin did it again. The Crispie Screamers, a team of employees from Chillicothe’s Crispie Creme bakery racing a black wooden coffin painted with a pink donut, won the Chillicothe Halloween Festival’s Coffin Races for the third straight year, taking home the $500 grand prize after burying the competition heat after heat, The Ohio Newsroom reported.
The race is the festival’s signature event — now in its ninth year — and it works like a soapbox derby with a graveyard twist. Participants build a coffin out of wood or plastic and fit it with wheels; one teammate rides inside while four pushers — pallbearers, in the festival’s telling — run it down a slight slope to the finish line. There is no engine and no steering. “This is the highlight normally every year of the Halloween festival,” organizer Dean O’Brien told The Ohio Newsroom.
“We got a little bit of a slope here,” O’Brien told The Ohio Newsroom. “You get a little push off, then it’s all legs. Come on baby. Bring it home.” Teams dress up and decorate their coffins to match, and O’Brien told The Ohio Newsroom the creativity is the point: “Your creative instinct, let it go, man. It could be a pink bunny, I don’t care. But it is the coffin race, so most people try to make it somewhat graveyard-ish.”
The idea came from other community festivals, O’Brien told The Ohio Newsroom. Manitou Springs, Colorado, claims to have originated coffin racing in 1995 to memorialize Emma Crawford, a 19th-century resident whose dying wish was to be buried at the top of Red Mountain — and whose coffin, decades later, came racing down the mountainside after years of harsh rains, according to The Ohio Newsroom’s account of the tradition.
The defending champions knew they were the team to beat. The Crispie Screamers have won the last two years with the same donut-themed coffin, and part-time Crispie Creme employee Brenden Foltz told The Ohio Newsroom the team saw no reason to change it: “One of our previous teammates built this, and we just kept the same since. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” “You need athletes, I mean real athletes to beat these guys,” O’Brien told The Ohio Newsroom of the donut runners.
This year’s stiffest new competition came from an unlikely rival: the Chillicothe Police Department, racing for the first time as Mystery Inc., with an officer riding in the coffin in a Scooby-Doo suit, The Ohio Newsroom reported. The irony was not lost on local radio host and coffin race commentator Lori Graves, who told the crowd over the microphone, according to The Ohio Newsroom: “Cops vs. donuts. Couldn’t have set that up any better, could we?”
On Graves’s cue the green flag flew, the Crispie Screamers pulled ahead, and Mystery Inc. veered toward the sidewalk; the donut coffin crossed the finish line in under 15 seconds, The Ohio Newsroom reported. “I almost got took out by a cop, but there we go!” Graves said, according to The Ohio Newsroom. “The Crispie Screamers are the winners of the first heat.” A third contender, racing a plastic coffin covered in skulls and crossbones, fared no better, and the local biker club Lost Tribe took home second prize this year, according to The Ohio Newsroom.
The police department is already planning its rematch. Officer Jonathan Davis told The Ohio Newsroom the Mystery Inc. team is reconsidering its design for next year: “I think next year we’re gonna run the caster wheels like everybody else has. That seemed to be where the speed was pulling from.” Come next October, Davis told The Ohio Newsroom, they will be back.
Why it matters goes beyond the finish line: the proceeds from the festival’s weekend of events are split among local nonprofits, and everyone who works the festival is a volunteer, according to The Ohio Newsroom. “Anyone who works this festival gets nothing,” O’Brien told The Ohio Newsroom. “What we get is a good heartfelt moment when we know that we help some people in the community.” O’Brien told The Ohio Newsroom he hopes good-spirited rivalries like cops versus donuts bring more people — and more coffin contenders — to the festival next year.
Related coverage: Chillicothe was also in the statewide spotlight this week when President Trump rallied there, and the Halloween weekend forecast across Ohio stays dry for festivities.
What happens next: the Chillicothe Halloween Festival’s downtown events continue Saturday, and the Coffin Races return next October — with the Crispie Screamers, still undefeated, as the team every new challenger will be building a coffin to beat.