Page 18 - Flathead Beacon // 10.26.16

HALLOWEEN PREVIEW
Group of professional scarers haunts the Fritz corn maze each year, providing thrills and chills for them and visitors alike
From left: Gray Goss, Caden Baxter and Dustin Goss, scarers at the Fritz haunted corn maze. GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
BY MOLLY PRIDDY OF THE BEACON
As you’re walking down a path mostly obscured by shadow, surrounded by cornstalks taller than most men, the fog begins to roll in. The eld is quiet, but your ears are primed for anything — the snap of a twig cracks like a gunshot in your jumpy nerves. It doesn’t take much imagination to start scaring yourself, but you play it cool.
That is, until the brash whine of a chainsaw immediately shatters what cool you had left, and you’re running some- where — away is the goal — before you can register what it is you saw.
This is the goal of the group of dedi- cated professionals lurking within the Fritz Corn Maze on U.S. Highway 2: to remove the need for imagination to make the maze spookier.
“I think people have this engrained need to feel a little adrenaline,” said Chris Fritz, owner and operator of the corn maze with his wife, Heidi. “I watch the kids, even on the cow train, just in the regular maze, and I think that’s just something people like. A part of human- ity is feeling that little bit of exhilaration.”
An a able and generous farmer, Fritz transforms from his everyday persona into the embodiment of fear and terror. He’s one of the frighteners in the maze, the people dressed as the undead or the
semi-dead or the fully-alive-but-seem- to-want-you-dead who scare the willing participants on the Haunted Trail and Haunted Barn.
The Fritzes haunt their corn maze
and barn for the last couple weekends in October — Oct. 21-23 was the opening weekend that, despite rain on Friday, was a total success. It will be haunted again from Oct. 28-31.
“When we do get rainy years like this, the fog starts coming in, that’s pretty cool — it makes it pretty eerie,” Fritz said. “We had great numbers for Saturday.”
Dustin Goss, 18, has been a frightener at the maze for three seasons now, after he and his brothers were hired through LC Sta ng. The brothers took the scary ball and ran with it; Goss said he vis- its places like Scarywood at Silverwood Theme Park in Idaho and professional haunted houses in bigger cities to see “how they’re doing it.”
The way he describes it, haunting a corn maze is the natural progression of wearing costumes while trick-or-treat- ing. While many of us outgrow the child- hood tradition, some take those passions and apply them elsewhere, and with more intensity.
“Halloween is my favorite holiday,” Goss said. “This is literally the best thing an adult can do on Halloween.”
Caden Baxter, center, haunts the Fritz corn maze with a chainsaw. GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
CONTINUED ON PAGE 21
18
OCTOBER 26, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM