By PAUL VITELLO
In a dozen incidents during the weeks before Halloween this year, black and white Americans around the country faced a kind of Rorschach test of the national psyche: Is that a funny Halloween ghoul in a noose hanging from your neighbor’s tree? Or is that a racist symbol of lynching hiding in the Halloween tableau?

The question has frayed nerves in New Jersey, Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Georgia. It has prompted protests from the N.A.A.C.P. and from black leaders who have raised questions about possible links between the displays and a rash of what have been considered race-baiting incidents involving nooses, from Jena, La., to Teachers College at Columbia University.

Unlike those incidents, though, the mock hangings — considered relatively new to the panoply of Halloween mock-menace — have been displayed openly. And they are defended vigorously by people like Jennifer Cervero of Stratford, Conn., who this week removed the figure of a man hanging from a noose in her tree, after protests, but still finds the complaints of racial insensitivity she received “completely overblown and ridiculous.”

“We do up all the holidays really big, and this Halloween we decided to go for the big Wow,” said Miss Cervero, who is white and lives with her mother and sister in Stratford, a mostly white suburb of Bridgeport.

The resulting display included a plastic corpse with its head ripped off, a mechanical ghoul whose head spins around, a rotting corpse — and the offending figure, which she bought from an online catalog that lists it as Item HG-005078: Inflatable Hanging Victim Prop, which she hung, per instructions, from a tree. It cost $89.99.

The Rev. Johnny Gamble, pastor of the Friendship Baptist Church in Stratford, heard complaints from parishioners and went to see it for himself.

“At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. But there it was. A mannequin of a black man, hanging from the neck,” said Mr. Gamble, who is black.

When he knocked at the door, Joyce Mounajed, Miss Cervero’s mother, told him the figure was not meant to be a black man, but was dark-hued to convey the idea of decaying flesh. It was “just a decoration,” he said she told him.

“I told her, ‘We don’t decorate like that. That is a symbol of lynching,’” Mr. Gamble said. “What if my great-grandfather was lynched? There are no two ways of looking at this; that thing is extremely offensive.”

The origins of Halloween are murky, with links to pagan traditions, All Saints Day (a Christian holiday celebrated the next day) and the great Hollywood tradition of Freddy Krueger’s undead tribe. But in all its versions, sociologists say, it has been a holiday that celebrates transgressions of one kind or another.

Richard Lachman, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, said the noose is a fairly new part of outdoor Halloween displays, hardly seen until the last few years.

“It cannot be taken as a joke,” he said, considering the history of lynching in the United States.

Between the end of the Civil War and the end of World War II, an estimated 4,500 people were lynched in the United States, most of them in the South, according to figures compiled by Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). About 3,500 of the victims were black, and many of the rest were white Catholics and immigrants.

“Halloween has become less of a kids’ holiday and more of an adult holiday, and one of the reasons for that, I think, is that it offers an opportunity to do things behind a disguise,” said Mr. Lachman, who includes a study of Halloween in his course on the sociology of culture. “Expressions of racism are unacceptable at any time, but on Halloween some people might feel there is some room for giving vent.”

Lois Keenan, president of a Long Island-based company called Halloween Scene, which operates 37 stores in the United States, said no racist intent was involved when she stocked her stores with an inflatable hanging man similar to the one in the Stratford dispute. When customers complained on Sept. 25 about the figure hanging in the window of a Halloween Scene store in Somerset County, N.J., she said, she immediately pulled the item from all her stores.

“We in no way want to offend any American of any color,” she said. “This was nothing more than a prop, taken out of context. I mean, if you were going to depict a rotting corpse, what color would you make it? Brown. But if it’s offensive to anyone, we won’t offer it.”

In all the known disputes, the hanging figures have been taken down. In LaGrange, Ga., a small town where the population is about equally divided between black and white, the local N.A.A.C.P. organized a demonstration on Oct. 16 outside a house decorated with a gallows and three hanging figures. The homeowner, Deborah McCann, told The LaGrange Daily News that none of the figures were meant to be black, or racially offensive, but she and her husband took the figures down.

In Madison, Tenn., neighbors protested until a man took down three hanged figures in his front yard, one of them wearing the football jersey of Michael Vick, an N.F.L. quarterback who pleaded guilty this summer to a federal dogfighting charge. The man said he just hated Michael Vick, not black people.

Similar disputes cropped up in Greenfield, Wis., a predominantly white suburb of Milwaukee, as well as in Des Moines and in Morris County, N.J.

Richard J. McIntire, national spokesman for the N.A.A.C.P., said that while all the incidents were viewed as isolated, and addressed by N.A.A.C.P. organizations at the local, not national, level, they should be a reminder that “to the African-American who knows his history, the noose is a symbol that is both intimidating and infuriating.”

He added: “We are not against Halloween. But people should not be utilizing nooses on humanlike figures. It will cause problems.”

In Stratford, resolving the problem required a two-hour meeting at town police headquarters. Miss Cervero, her mother, Mr. Gamble, Mayor James R. Miron, Police Chief John J. Buturla and several others sat at a long table, trying to communicate.

“I said I was completely sympathetic to the feelings of Reverend Gamble and his parishioners, but excuse me, it’s just a decoration,” Miss Cervero recalled. “It’s a rotting, hanging corpse. We even white-washed its face after people complained, to make it lighter. I could not see the problem.”

Mr. Gamble said that the mayor, who declined to be interviewed for this article, had said there was nothing legally he could do but implored Miss Cervero and her mother to take the thing down in recognition of its effect on some people.

“It went on for quite a while, and when I felt we weren’t getting anywhere, I told them that unless they took it down there would be protesters outside their house every day for as long as it took,” Mr. Gamble said.

The women relented. Mayor Miron and the police chief followed them back to their house, and the mayor helped Miss Cervero take down the hanging effigy.

“I decided to put a post up through its back and stand it up in a fire pit,” Miss Cervero said. “I asked Reverend Gamble if there was a problem if we had the guy look like he was burning at the stake.”

Mr. Gamble recalled his answer.

“I have no problem with that,” he said. “That’d be just fine.”