I am no expert on pumpkins or pumpkin diseases but my guess would be Black Rot? If you go on Google and type in "photo gallery of vegetable diseases" it will bring up a very informative website from Cornell University that covers the diseases and shows photos of the different diseases and has a lot of information about every disease. Hope this helps!

Trev,

Below is a picture of the whole pumpkin. The lesion is in the center of a side of the fruit.

Here is a picture of a vine. The vines don't seem to be in bad shape, but I'm no expert.

Here is a better picture of the whole fruit. Again, thanks for the advice everybody.

Ok, let's try this again. Below is a picture of a vine. As far as noticing anything unusual before the pumpkins do this, there are only two things that I can think of that stand out to me. First, I did notice that the leaves up at the start of the vine, in other words, the first couple of leaves that sprouted from the ground started to brown, withered and died away. But it was just those first few leaves. The rest of the leaves look lush and green with no signs of any type of problems. Besides, I always thought as the vine grows longer, those first few leaves eventually start to brown away anyways, so I didn't think it was anything unusual. But maybe it was? The other thing that I noticed was just as the pumpkin was starting to slightly start to turn color, there was one spot that wasn't turning color, but instead was just a ghost white color. I knew that was a bad sign. When I first noticed that this certain spot was not turning color, I pressed on it slightly just to see if it was soft in any way. It had just a slight give to it, whereas the rest of the pumpkin was hard as a rock. It's like this certain spot didn't fully develop or something, unlike the rest of the pumpkin. It didn't develop that hardness to it. Those are the only 2 things I can think of that may have signaled trouble. And by the way, Trev, you are correct, that blackness was just a secondary thing. That wasn't originally there. The only thing there was the white spot. And when that white spot first developed, that spot was like indented. In other words, think of somebody peeling away the skin of an onion. If you just skin the peel away in one certain spot, eventually that spot won't be even with the rest of the onion. If you ran your hand over that onion, once your hand hit that spot where you peeled away the skin, it would be slightly indented. This is how the pumpkin was.

Do you start the plants on mounds covered w/ plastic or hay? I see that most people are doing that these days. I guess that will help keep it from getting too wet from the dew in the morning, thus developing the rot. Perhaps also you didn't fertilize it enough and over-watered. Last 2 yrs were tough on pumpkin growing -- last yr too wet at least around here, this yr too hot and dry in a lot of areas. Although our weather changed back to more normal summer like weather for us around here in PA.