The Curse of Bridge Hollow follows the Gordon family moving into the titular town on Halloween and contending with the ferocious decorations that come alive and wreak chaos.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot Summary
The Gordon family moves into the town of Bridge Hollow from their city life in Brooklyn. Howard Gordon, the father, is a science teacher and believes in nothing but cold, hard facts.
Sydney, the kid, is not so keen on moving to a new place, while mom and dad seem enthused to do so. While Syd sulks and scoffs, the parents sing their way to Bridge Hollow, which Gordon says was considered the safest US town last year.
The town is observing Halloween celebrations and the Sting Jack is a big attraction of the celebrations. The family is surprised to see the town so rife with decorations.
Syd asks to decorate their new house as well, but since they’ve just moved in and the stuff hasn’t been set up yet, they can’t do it.
Later on, while Emily and Howard meet the mayor Tammy Rice, Syd takes leave to go and look around the town. At the graveyard, she meets three students who are members of the Bride Hollow High School Paranormal Society.
Jamie, Ramona, and Mario quickly become friends with Syd and tell her about the old Hawthorne house her family has just moved into.
Syd learns that her new house used to belong to a preeminent spiritualist medium of the 20th century — Madam Hawthorne. Ramona tells her that according to rumours, she still lives there, in spirit.
Syd is excited to learn her house might be haunted. She returns and uses the virtual Ouija board, trying to ask if Madam Hawthorne is still there.
The Ouija Board answers “here”, following which doors in the house start opening up on their own, leading Syd to the attic. There, she finds an old chest kept hidden behind wooden boards.
Inside the chest, she finds a Jack-o’-lantern which she brings downstairs into the kitchen. Meanwhile, she also decides to buy a Halloween costume and go to the Stingy Jack festival.
Howard isn’t keen on any Halloween celebrations but Sydney has decided not to pay any heed to her party pooper dad.
Meanwhile, Syd also lights up the pumpkin she found in the attic but Howard extinguishes the flame. However, the flame keeps being lit up again.
Soon the flame from the pumpkin transfers onto a toy bat that comes alive. Amid Howard’s stubborn scientific scepticism, Sydney picks up on the horrors she has accidentally unleashed.
All the decorations in Bridge Hollow start coming to life, wreaking chaos all across the town. The father-daughter duo goes to Madam Hawthorne’s granddaughter who’s still alive.
The elder woman tells them about her grandmother and how she trapped the soul of Stingy Jack in that same lantern Sydney lit up.
She also reveals that Stingy Jack wants to stay in the mortal realm forever and needs to send a soul to hell in order to achieve that. Now that he’s returned, he’s on a hunt for a soul.
The duo race to the festival and Syd reunites with her friends. Evading the killer clowns that have come alive, the group flees to the occultist who bought Madam Hawthorne’s grimoire at the auction.
It turns out to be none other than Principal Floyd. He tells them he’s a mere collector of these diabolical articles and then finds the grimoire.
However, the skeletons in his yard come alive and launch an attack. In the chaos, the page containing the spell to trap a soul gets burned down.
After Howard slays all the skeletons down with a chainsaw, the group heads off to the Bridge Hollow graveyard. They hold a seance and bring back Madam Hawthorne, who talks to them through Howard’s body.
She tells them the spell for trapping Stingy Jack and skedaddles back to her dead state. The group then heads to the festival where all the Halloween decorations have ensnared the Bridge Hollow people.
Meanwhile, the big Jack-o’-lantern has been possessed by the Stingy Jack and he’s headed for the lantern in Gordon’s house. Syd and Howard run to save Emily.
They all battle, Emily is dragged by Stingy Jack into the portal to hell but Howard stops him. While Syd fights the bat, Howard chants the spell and traps Sting Jack to the lantern, which Syd extinguishes quickly.
The Curse of Bridge Hollow ending explained in detail:
Does Stingy Jack get trapped in the end?
The Stingy Jack materializes during the final stretches of the film, taking over the big Jack-o’-lantern statue at the festival.
As midnight approaches, so does the opportunity for Stingy Jack to trade a soul to the devil in order to gain permanence in the mortal realm.
He also needs the lanterns to execute the trading. So he arrives at the Hawthorne house where the Gordons now live. Emily is the soul he grabs to trade with the devil but Howard and Sydney intervene.
Together, the father-daughter duo successfully defeat Stingy Jack, with Howard managing to trap him in the lantern again, using the spell from Hawthorne’s grimoire like Madam Hawthorne once did.
What is the curse of Bridge Hollow?
The curse of Bridge Hollow is the curse of Stingy Jack — the archaic figure that inspired the Jack-o’-lantern, a famous Halloween decoration.
The story goes that he was a real man who once lived in Bridge Hollow. Due to being a real jerk, the town folk one day hung him dead. However, the devil took pity on him.
And so he was given a gift — a pumpkin which was carved with the fire of hell and turned into a lantern. Through this lantern, he could travel back and forth between the world of the living and the world of spirits.
However, there was a caveat to the deal. He could only come to the living on Halloween and stay from sundown till midnight.
Who is Madam Hawthorne?
Madam Hawthorne was a former owner of the house that the Gordons move into. She was a famous and powerful spiritualist medium of the 20th century.
One night in 1927, Hawthorne held a seance along with many powerful mystics from all over the world. They conjured up Stingy Jack, who wanted to remain in the mortal realm for more than the limited annual period.
Hawthorne managed to cast a binding spell and trap Stingy Jack inside his own lantern, which was later locked into a box and kept in the attic. It’s the same chest/box that Syd finds in the present day.
What are the boxes Syd and Howard find at the end?
Alas, the spooky adventures don’t end for the Gordon family. It turns out that the attic of their new home contains not just one but several chests like the one Syd found the lantern in.
These new boxes are all marked with initials of names beside a year. Howard and Syd let out an emotion that can be best encapsulated with a “Nope” after seeing the chests.
These chests most definitely contain other articles like the lantern. Madam Hawthorne was a famous and likely a busy medium, powerful enough to trap even the Stingy Jack.
She would have trapped many other such entities in her lifetime, all of whom she must’ve trapped in objects that were all kept locked inside those chests.
The chest Syd opened and found the lantern in was marked “SJ1927”. “SJ” is the initial for Stingy Jack and 1927 is the year Hawthorne trapped him inside the lantern.
The other chests are just like that one, all marked with the initials of the entities that are trapped within them.
The Gordons won’t be keen on opening any of them after learning the recent lesson, but this means that story of the boxes goes on.
Someday, someone in Bridge Hollow might as well dare to unleash another diabolical entity into the world, knowingly or unknowingly.
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