“We need a little person to be Freddy Fazbear.”
In all of Halloween history, this remains the most terrifying sentence I’ve ever heard. It was October 20, 2023 (my freshman year) and I was volunteering with the rest of my old school’s drama club at a lo
cal haunted house.
To be honest, I hadn’t quite been expecting to be the one getting scared out of my wits at a haunted house, considering I would be the one doing the scaring. But being a fourteen-year-old freshie with social anxiety and a habit of messing things up, the result is, in hindsight, not all that surprising.
Everyone in the cast turned their heads to look at me, one of the youngest and shortest members of our group. I shook my head, mouthing “no” to my best friend over and over again.
It was no use. I donned the Fazbear costume, none too happily, and tried to make the best I could with the sweaty costume and mask that gathered more condensation than it did oxygen.
(To this day, I still envy the actors who got out of such a thing. I really, really should have volunteered the night before.)
We dispersed to our stations with half an hour to go until the scaring would start. Mine happened to be a small black room, built into the walls of the house, with a camera that had a blind spot right where the door was.
(A word of advice to haunted-house-goers: don’t hug the wall. I hit no less than five people with the heavy wooden door, and at one point, I couldn’t even get the door open because there was an entire party clustered around the thing. Stay where you think the camera can see you, and you’ll probably get out with a few less bruises than you would otherwise.)
But, anyway, back to the present. Back to a version of me who didn’t know she’d be panicking and breaking character to apologize each time she body-slammed – door-slammed? – an unfortunate visitor.
The wait was forever, it felt like, and in the darkness with a single blinking light and the phone I really wasn’t supposed to use as my only consolation, things were off to a rough start. I knew I would have to jump scare visitors, but there couldn’t have been more of a Nervous Nelly that was ever elected for the role. And… really? Me, five feet tall, best known for being quiet, with the world’s least terrifying scream?
…Although I’m pretty sure the slamming of the door covered up any sound I made, so it wasn’t a total loss.
The clock ticked ever onward. A group of teenagers, an overprotective mother with her children (another tip, if you take your kids to a haunted house, don’t ask to get a freebie on the scaring. We’re there for a reason). The few moments of rest I got between groups were welcome, even if tainted with anxiety. Anxiety about how I was doing – was I performing well enough? – anxiety about how badly the people I’d hit with the door were hurting, and worst of all, anxiety about the killer clown actor, whose voice I could hear from across the entire house. Hearing “I’m gonna getcha!” every five minutes, accompanied by the sound of thundering footsteps and a revving chainsaw, was really making me go haywire.
But, hey, it’s a haunted house. I can’t slight people for doing their jobs, and make no mistake, they were killing it out there. Pun fully intended.
It felt like forever, honestly, but I definitely hadn’t expected to check the
time when I was finally released from my punishment and see that it was two in the morning. I thought it had to be midnight at the latest, if not 12:30. The fact that I had been there for five hours was a shock, and my feet were sore from standing. It wasn’t a big help that it was a Friday, either; I was so tired that as my best friend and I reunited, I’m pretty sure I blacked out while we told the others their shifts were over.
I’ll confess, I wish I’d gotten her job instead. Nestled in the corner of a creepy “library”, I found her with her nose buried in a book. All she’d had to do was look unsettling and follow people around until they noticed. We had a good laugh looking at each other in our costumes, but it was the kind of exhausted amusement that signaled, “Yeah, it’s time to go home.”
Looking back on all of this, I do miss it, in a way. Do I miss having to throw my shoulder at the door to scare off wall-huggers? No, absolutely not! But do I miss being scary for the love of the game? Yeah. I’m pretty sure that if I were to be cast as Freddy Fazbear again this year, I could use the mask to my advantage and care less about breaking character to say sorry.
I definitely didn’t go through it for nothing, either – despite being an itty bitty underclassman with little experience acting in a solo role, I do hope that the people I encountered had a great time. I absolutely encourage anyone thinking of celebrating Halloween this year to support their local haunted house. Not every one will have a teenage Freddy Fazbear smacking you with a heavy door, I promise, and it’s definitely more fun to visit rather than work, in my opinion.
I wish all of you a Halloween season free of the very embarrassment I experienced, and regardless of how you spend this year’s spooky season, have a good time! And if you do wind up volunteering at a haunted house… well, have fun with it! YOLO, right?
