The last thing anyone would expect while walking down the stairs of the Wesley United Methodist Church is to run into a zombie. With Halloween eight days away, the chances of that happening are a little bit higher.

The Wesley Foundation is putting on a haunted house this All Hallows Eve. Zombies with blood dripping from their mouths and innocent victims with blood smeared across their bodies are just a couple of the intense characters likely to appear during any one of the production’s numerous rehearsals for the final performance.

“It’s definitely geared toward college kids,” said Lindsey Long, one of the event’s co-chairs and senior in LAS. “We decided that if we were going to do this, we had to do it right. It couldn’t be cheesy or anything.”

Although haunted houses run by churches aren’t typically known for gore, the event’s co-chairs are asking that only children older than 13 attend the Halloween night event.

“We’re going to make it so that all the frat boys who think it’s dumb end up screaming like little girls,” said Jarod Spohrer, junior in FAA and the other co-chair of the event.

So far, Long said they have not experienced opposition from the church. Rather, the haunted house is an alternative to the bar scene, she added.

“As long as we stay away from things like the Exorcist or anything religiously based, it’s not a problem,” Spohrer said. “We’re mainly trying to give the thrill of being in a real suspense or thriller type of movie.”

The campus ministry is hosting the event with a limited budget between $200 and $300 in order to donate an expected profit of about $300 to the Wesley Food Pantry, Long said. The cost for entry is $5.

The Wesley Food Pantry is a food kitchen that was started about three years ago and takes place on the third Thursday of each month.

“It’s done later in the month because that is the time when people’s food stamps start to run out,” Long said. “It was created as sort of a supplement to food stamps.”

But planning a haunted house of this scale does have its challenges, especially when working with a group of 30 volunteers.

“The toughest challenge so far is just that everyone has so many ideas,” Long said. “It’s hard to limit people. It’s been both a blessing and a curse.”

Although going to the event Halloween night should be a fun scare for everyone, volunteers putting on the show have more excitement and passion toward the event than the average performer.

During rehearsals, it’s not unusual to see the “zombies” dance, sing and try to scare random people on the street.

“We’ve all gone to haunted houses before, and none of them met our expectations, so we’re incorporating different aspects of everything we’re interested in,” Spohrer said. “It’ll be fun to see everyone’s reactions.”

Nory Reyes, a volunteer for the event and freshman in AHS, put it best:

“It’s so out of character for me. It’s just so different and fun to do something I wouldn’t usually do,” Reyes said. “Scary is fun.”