PICKERINGTON, Ohio — For 85-year-old Terry Dunlap, walking out to his pumpkin patch on Tuesday morning was gut-wrenching.

“It hurt. I was, I was sick when I saw it,” Dunlap said. “I saw they were gone. I just almost, I got sick. I just physically, you know, it got me.”

Dunlap owns and operates Sam’s Pumpkin Patch in Pickerington. He says that sometime over the past week or so, someone slipped into his field and stole about 300 pumpkins — his very best ones.

“They took the great big ones about the size of a bushel basket with big handles on them,” he said. “So the premium pumpkins that nobody else has, and that's some now somebody else does have.”

The pumpkins would have sold for $20 apiece, adding up to a loss of more than $6,000, Dunlap said.

He didn’t realize what happened right a

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