After people decorated Fairfield Hills campus with scarecrows throughout October, Newtown Parks & Recreation announced the winners to its sixth annual Scarecrow Contest on Halloween afternoon.

The community could vote for their favorite scarecrows, all made by individuals, families, businesses, sports teams, and local organizations. A total of 19 scarecrows decorated the campus light posts for all passersby to see.

The Burton Family took home the award for Fan Favorite with 166 votes, with kids and adults alike gushing over their scarecrow overtaken by a giant red snake.

Most Original went to the Dunne family, who received 141 votes for their skeleton family bike ride. An adult skeleton smiles on his bike ride with his two skeleton children, one sitting comfortable in a child carrier while the other hangs on for dear life.

The Newtown Nighthawks scarecrow by the Zanghi-Blank families won Newtown Pride with 97 votes. The iconic local mascot is decked out in a Newtown Nighthawks shirt, with a sign reading “Let’s Go Hawks” hanging above him.

Honorable mentions include: Town and Country Garden Club of Newtown with 141 votes for Fan Favorite, UK Gourmet with 105 votes for Most Original, and The Newtown Bee with 94 votes for Newtown Pride.

According to Connor Negri, assistant director of Parks & Recreation, a total of 781 votes came in between when voting opened on October 24 and when it ended on Halloween.

This marked the second year where people cast votes online for the scarecrow contest, after Parks & Recreation switched to online voting for the one held last year.

Negri said they got some feedback about navigating the website used for the contest last year, the survey platform SurveyMonkey.

“For [last year’s] survey, each question was broken down into two parts because we could only upload a certain amount of photos for questions,” Negri explained.

He said this ended up confusing some people, so they switched over to another survey platform, SurveyLegend, for this year’s contest. Parks & Recreation successfully uploaded the photos for all 19 scarecrows under each question and avoided the issue.

“I haven’t gotten any bad feedback this year from the survey, so hopefully everyone enjoyed it,” Negri said.

With the conclusion of this year’s scarecrow contest, Negri felt it ultimately went very well. He said he was happy to see so many votes come in from Newtown and beyond, noting four votes from England, three votes from Canada, and another three votes from Spain.

“We’d love to get as many people as possible to walk the trail, but also we love having more people have access to the survey,” Negri added.

The biggest change this year, Negri said, was that Parks & Recreation added QR codes to every single lamp post. This way, people did not have to search for the survey online; they could simple scan the QR code with their phone and access the survey right away.

Negri’s favorite part of the contest has been, and still is, seeing all of the colorful and creative scarecrows that are set up throughout the Fairfield Hills campus.

“[Parks & Recreation] can only do so much with this event by [itself], we’re really dependent on the public of the town and the businesses to make this really special and fun for everyone who visits the campus,” Negri said. “It really does help bring the community together, and that’s what’s really special about events like this.”

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.