I Was A Halloween Monster

A True story by David Knoles

It was the year 2000, the beginning of a new millennium, and I had
decided that Halloween had to be special. So when I saw the notice for the
open casting call in the local newspaper, it seemed like a gift from the
gods.
With its bright blue skies, sun-drenched beaches and waving palm trees,
you might not think that Southern California offers much in the way of a
proper setting for Halloween. But you'd be wrong. People around here don't
just like Halloween, they're insane over it. They spend a king's random on
costumes, decorations and props, and the celebration lasts a whole month.
Major amusement parks like Knott's Berry Farm and Universal Studios are
literally transformed into sprawling realms of Halloween horror complete
with elaborate mazes and thousands of costumed monsters.
And then there is The Queen Mary.
Queen Mary is the last of the grand ocean liners of the 1930s that
carried passengers in high style across the Atlantic before air travel
sank the passenger trade. Now she's a tourist attraction and luxury hotel
permanently moored in Long Beach harbor. But there's something about the
Queen that makes her the perfect setting for Halloween.
The Queen Mary is haunted.
In fact, she isn't just haunted, she is reputed to be the most haunted
place in Southern California. She sports a cast of wholly or partially
manifested ghosts who have been regularly seen by a plethora of different
people for years, and it isn't unusual in the least to find staterooms
just made up by the housekeeping staff in total disarray when guests
arrive.
So when I read the casting call for Shipwreck, which is what Queen Mary's
month-long Halloween "Terrorfest" is called, there was no way I could
resist. Six monster mazes built in and around the ship. Four hundred and
fifty monsters to haunt them. Thirteen nights to do the haunting. What a
rush.
So there I was on a Friday night in mid-September, standing in front of
the gangway leading into the Exhibition Hall aboard the ship along with a
couple of hundred others, waiting for an audition for a role as a
Shipwreck monster. At first it seemed a little intimidating, since all the
others around me were a couple of decades younger than I was, and I could
definitely feel those odd nervous "stage fright" butterflies that always
seems to preceded any kind of performance or public speaking. But once we
were inside, the feeling was replaced with the charge of pure excitement.
We were lead below decks in groups of ten. Then, one by one, each of us
was called into a darkened, cavernous room lit with dull green and blue
lights and misty with clouds periodically billowing from a hidden fog
machine. When my name was called, I walked around a bulkhead wall and
faced a panel of five or six (it was hard to see exactly) maze supervisors
in "Shipwreck" crew Tee shirts sitting behind a large table. After asking
a few questions, their request was simple. Become a monster and give us
your best scare.
I took a breath and then I sprang at them, arms held high and hands
curled into claws, laughing like a maniacal ghoul. I was proud of that
laugh. It was deep, loud and totally disturbed. I was hoping that the
sudden "attack" would make them all jump. Of course, since they had been
at it for days, they'd probably pretty much seen it all, so the best I can
say is that I think I saw one of them flinch.
When I stepped back, one of them said, "Very nice. Thank you." And that
was that. I walked back and joined the group. They hadn't seen what I'd
done, but they were all impressed with the volume of my ghoul laugh.
Before any of us had much time to think about it, a talent coordinator
appeared from around the wall, dismissed a couple of people who hadn't
made the cut, and then lead the rest of us upstairs to fill out W4 forms.
It was then that it occurred to me that I was a Halloween Monster.
What followed from there was a month of absolute Halloween delight.
Beginning on Thursday, October 6, there had been 14 nights of performance.
Shipwreck opened to the public at 7 p.m., but we were there at 5:30 so
that we could be in costume, out of the make-up chair and into our spots
in the mazes to greet our victims when they wandered inside. Once opened,
the chaos continued until midnight -- 1 a.m. on Saturday's. Was it fun?
You bet. Imagine that you're one of the six college students wandering
through the creepy halls of the Myer house in "Halloween Resurrection." I
was Michael Myers, popping out from where I was least expected to scare
the wits out of you. Of course, instead of a knife or anything like that,
I had a shaker can, which was a noise maker that made a sound as startling
as my ghoul laugh. Sometimes people would just jump. Others (and this was
considered the ultimate scare) would fall down, sometimes in a whole
group. Some would turn in a panic and run. These were my favorites. The
chase was always, if you'll pardon the pun, a rush.
Even though, as you can imagine, it was incredibly fun, it could be at
times physically exhausting. It was sort of like doing deep knee bends and
wind-sprints while screaming like a manic for six straight hours. But what
the heck? Each one of my "victims" had paid 26 bucks for the experience of
being a participant in a live horror movie. It was my job to make sure
they got it. And, damn, was I good at it.
Starting off sort of thin, the crowds grew progressively larger as it
drew nearer to Halloween night. While there was something memorable about
each individual performance, basically every night was the same. When
Halloween night finally arrived, it almost felt like a let down, since it
seemed like there should be something unique about it. But there wasn't.
Into make-up at 5:30, into the maze at seven. It seemed like it would just
be another night of performance that would end with the thinning of the
crowds, followed by a quick sweep of maze supervisors and security
officers and then unceremoniously concluding with the announcement over
loud speakers that the mazes were closed. Not much of a WOW finish.
But as it turned out, it didn't end that way at all.
The night began the same as always. Halloween night that year was on
Tuesday, so the crowds were thinner than they had been on the previous
Saturday, which was a very good thing. There had been so many people
coming through the maze on the Saturday that it was practically impossible
to scare anyone. They came in a thick swarm that never ended from start to
finish. There were plenty of times that night that I found myself pinned
against a bulkhead just trying to stay out of everybody's way.
But the Halloween night crowd was the kind we monsters liked. Small
groups of 12 or so with plenty of space in between. Lots of screaming on
their parts. Tons of good scares on ours. One poor woman in my maze, which
was appropriately called "The Factory of Fears," got so scared that she
passed out and had to be carried out of the maze by paramedics, or so I
was told at first break. All in all, a pretty decent albeit typical night
of Shipwreck.
But then, around 11, the guests quit coming. Instead, a whole parade of
monsters from other parts of the top of the long maze shuffled past me,
apparently heading toward the break room a couple of decks below. They
were followed closely the maze supervisor, Brian Unger, whose face was a
study in concern and urgency. I tried to ask him what the heck was going
on, but all he said was for me to follow him with no other explanation
than that.
Obviously, I was burning with curiosity when I got to the break room, a
large, brightly lit meeting room at the aft of the ship. Nearly everyone
from the Factory of Fears and the neighboring maze called The Engine Room
were already there. It was from my breaker (breakers being monsters given
the minor authority of supervising breaks during the show) Diana that I
learned what was going on.
"One of the monsters was attacked by some guy with a knife," she said
gravely.
"What?" I asked. "Was he hurt?"
She solemnly shook her head. Apparently a thin Hispanic man wearing white
face make-up had somehow gotten a folding pocketknife through the security
metal detectors. He pulled it out and swung it at one of the monsters,
nicking a wall, and then chased him down the hall before vanishing around
a corner.
It wasn't just a story, because another monster had seen it happen. Once
they reported it to security, the event was shut down and the mazes were
cleared. But not everyone had heard about what was going on. Brian told
Diana that there were still a cluster of monsters at the end of the
Factory of Fears who hadn't been told. Diana was young -- no more than
twenty -- but she took her role of responsibility very seriously. She said
she didn't know if Unger was going to get them, so she told me she was
going below decks to bring them out herself. No one else said a word, but
I couldn't let her go alone, so I said I'd go with her. I'd like to say
that my motivations were selfless and heroic, and partially, maybe they
were. But let's face it. This was the stuff of horror movies, and I found
myself burning with the kind of curiosity that did in the cat. It's the
kind of curiosity that always motivates characters to follow a creaking
sound up the staircase or open the wrong door despite the fact that
everyone in the theater is screaming at them to run. I think it's called
stupidity.
Nonetheless, down we went.
The Factory of Fears is the longest maze on the ship. It begins on the
aft topside deck and winds down four decks to a gangway at the bottom.
Like all the mazes at Shipwreck, Factory is elaborately decorated with
atmospheric scenery, dim green, blue and purple lights and grisly props.
Without the loud, thumping, repetitive music that usually thunders through
loudspeakers to create a sense of nervousness, the maze was eerily silent.
The only sound, in fact, was the occasion hiss of a still active fog
machine and the sounds of our shoes against the metal deck plates. We had
flashlights, which was reassuring, and Diana kept calling for monsters,
just in case someone was hidden, waiting for the next group of guests. But
no one answered. We hurried through the twisting hallways without stopping
until we reached the meat locker. It was a caged area containing a huge
side of latex beef beside a grisly kitchen. The last four monsters were
clustered together there.
"Did you hear what happened?" one of them said as we approached. "There's
a killer on the loose with a big butcher knife! He attacked one of the
monsters. I wonder who it was that got it?"
Killer? Butcher knife? My, how the story had grown, I thought.
We didn't stop to correct them, we just told them that everyone was to
report to the break room. But before we could lead them out, Unger
appeared with a couple of security guards, and he said he'd take them up
the outside stairway. But Diana and I lingered, and decided instead to go
back up through the maze just in case we had missed someone. It was then
that it got scary. On the way down, we half expected to have someone pop
out at us, because we knew all the monsters weren't accounted for. But now
that they were, the only person who might pop out at us was the stalker.
We walked side by side, nearly pressed together as we slowly ascended
toward the top. The hallway from the meat locker was misty and covered
with artificial cobwebs that waved occasionally causing us to stop and
stab at them with the beams of our flashlights. We tiptoed through the
crypt, which had stacked shelves meant for monsters to hide in,
half-expecting someone to come rolling out of one of the spaces. Then it
was through the fog into the gallery, a place where pictures changed under
a periodically cycling black light. We hugged every corner, peering around
them before moving on into the long, dark, gloomy Hall of Faces from which
Styrofoam gargoyles stared menacingly down at us.
The silence was staggering and nothing moved. It was agonizing. By the
time we got to the theater, which featured a giant ghoul on stage that
seemed to dance under a strobe light, we were running. We ran up the final
staircase and burst into the bright light of the break room.
We sighed with relief. Diana hugged me and thanked me a thousand times
for going along. I told her it was no big. But it was. You have no idea
how the imagination can play tricks on you. Even though I hadn't said
anything, I thought I'd seen the stalker at every turn. I don't know what
I would have done if he had popped up. I was just glad I didn't have to
decide. Then it occurred to me, and I had to smile, that I'd had a much
scarier experience than anyone who had paid to go to Shipwreck. And I was
being paid to do it.
Unger and the last four monsters had beaten us up to the break room, so
we were the last to arrive. Lord, how the rumors had grown since we left.
Now the stalker wasn't just a killer with a butcher knife, but a masked
executioner who had hacked up a couple of people with an ax. Worse yet,
Diana and I were two of his victims.
Funny. I felt pretty spry for a chopped up corpse.
Unger announced that the event was over, and that we would all be paid
for the rest of the night. Then he told us to leave, adding that he would
explain at the cast party a week later. Of course, since it was supposed
to be a secret, everybody knew what was going on even if the story was
growing more outrageous by the second.
As everyone was shuffling out, I saw a girl named Kathy who had been
working in the theater before everyone had been pulled out of the maze.
She'd left in such a hurry that she'd forgotten her bag, and now she was
too scared to go back down and get it. Since I'd just been there, I took
her down. Aside from the ghoul on stage, the seats had been peppered with
life-size ghoul dummies, the idea being that a live monster could sit
amongst them and then pop up and surprise passing guests. As Kathy reached
for her bag, she said, "I wonder if all these are really just dummies?"
She stopped. We looked at each other and then starred back at the seats.
"Let's get out of here before one of them gets up," I said, and once
again, we ran for the stairs.
Outside, before leaving for my car, I remember looking back at the ship
and smiling. I'd wanted a dramatic finish to Halloween night. I guessed
I'd gotten my wish.

The cast party was held a week later on board the ship. We learned that
we had entertained crowds of over 60,000 people, that our attendance and
popularity was second only to Knott's Berry Farm's venerable Halloween
Haunt, and that ours was considered the scariest Halloween event of the
season.
But it was the subject of the stalker that was on everybody's lips. Even
though he had only threatened two monsters in the Factory of Fears and had
only been glimpsed by someone in the Neighboring "Hall of Illusions" maze,
everyone had heard the story. No one wanted to believe that he was just
some skinny kid with a pocket knife since it was much more fun to tell of
a hulking figure who now wielded a double edged broadsword. But I had a
chance to speak with the head of Queen Mary security, who told me that no
trace of the stalker was found by either his people or the Long Beach
police. "He probably wiped off his make up and slipped out with the
crowds," he said.
Perhaps. But others think he may not have been a Shipwreck guest at all.
Some believe he might have been one of the permanent residents of the
Queen Mary, one who continues to haunt the halls and staterooms.
Who can say? Such is the stuff of legends. Such is the fabric of
Halloween.


For any of you out there who live in the Los Angeles area and have dreamed
of becoming a paid, bonfide Halloween monster, The Queen Mary in Long
Beach has announced the audition dates for its upcoming "Terrorfest",
Shipwreck 2002. Shipwreck, which is the second largest and by far the
scariest major Halloween event in Southern California features eight
monster mazes built in and around the historic (and haunted) ocean liner.
Monsters earn $8 an hour this year (not bad for something most of you out
there would probably do for free), and the auditions are open to any legal
U.S. resident 18 years and older who can commit to working each night of
the event You can check out the details on the employment page of their
web site at http://www.queenmaryshipwreck.com/

.
A word of advice: The auditions aren't for the shy or the timid. If you
plan to go, prepare to hit them with your absolute best over-the-top,
out-of-control scare. The results will be worth it. Trust me.