Ghostly white face, sharply contrasted by red smeared lips and nose, the mark of his last victim. His figure limps through the fog, slowly crushing the leaves underfoot. His demented smile is a guarantee that you won’t escape in time.

Not to worry, it’s only senior Justin Lenton. Last year, Lenton volunteered with Spooky Nights at Shelby Farms as a fun way to pass time on the weekends with friends. His role at this haunted trail was to jump out of the walls of a tent to scare visitors.

“I kind of like scaring people,” Lenton said. “I scare my five year-old brother a lot. When he’s watching TV or eating I’ll put on my Phantom of the Opera mask, and move around really creepy and he’ll get really scared.”

Last October with the help of professional makeup artists, Lenton was transformed into a demonic clown.

“I thought [the clown] would be one of the scarier things, like for people with phobias,” Lenton said.

Although Lenton admits his time as a demonic clown has not made him immune to getting scared, it has opened his eyes.

“It kind of shows a different perspective of it, like how it’s set up and how much work is put into it. You wouldn’t think it takes as much work as it does,” he said.

Five Grant(9) shares a similar experience as Lenton. This year is Grant’s second year at the corn maze, and he loves it.

“It’s always been my dream to work at the corn maze, but I wasn’t old enough. As soon as I was, I jumped on it,” Grant said.

But, every good thing has its down sides, and at the corn maze, it’s the punches. Grant explains the three types of punches haunted attraction employees encounter: startled, semi-aware, and conscious. The startled punch is when a tense customer’s first instinct is to punch the person they believe to be attacking. Semi-aware punches are when a customer is so overwhelmed by the fact that they are in the corn maze, that they throw a punch at the first threat.

“And conscious punches,” Grant said, “are when someone’s startled, they turn around, and just smash me in the face. I get punched a lot, nothing unusual.”

Working a seasonal job like the corn maze extends the holiday festivities.

“Now that I work at the corn maze, I don’t have to look forward to [only] one day of dressing up,” he said. “And on Halloween I’m not going trick or treating, I’m going to work- and I’m perfectly fine with that.”