Fake blood, real screams: A clown curates fear at a top haunted house

A swollen full moon climbs the sky as Stitchy the Clown goes hunting for guests to scare.

He’s searching for signs of fear. Nervous walkers. Faces blank with anticipation. Timid first-timers. He’s been terrifying professionally half his life. He knows the look.

Dozens are here on this mid-October Sunday night at Field of Screams Maryland, walking into an open area where fire pits burn and the smells of burgers and fried Oreos breeze in from the concession stands. These are the first of what will be more than 2,600 guests at the Olney location, a Halloween attraction ranked as one of the country’s top haunted spots.

Near the fire pits, some teenage girls have just arrived from the parking lot. They huddle for a selfie, squeezing in to get the pastel smear of sunset into the snap.

But as they pose, Stitchy pops in among the grins, as suddenly and surprisingly as if he’d come up through a trap door below. Victorian top hat over bright red hair. Black eyes sunk deep in a skull crosshatched with stitches. Distorted clown grin. Gleaming fangs.

“AHHHHHH,” he screams, sending the group bolting in terror.

All around Stitchy, a careful clockwork of scares and surprises is kicking into gear. In the Slaughter Factory, a hangar-like shed, a dozen or so scare actors tuck themselves behind walls, squeezing in among fake human body parts.

This is Field of Screams Maryland’s 23rd season. Since starting in 2001, it’s gone from a single haunted house to an elaborate complex rated by USA Today in 2022 as the No. 1 haunted attraction in the country. It has a fan following and also topped the Washington Post’s 2019 ranking of regional Halloween events.

As the first guests arrive, everything has a Disney World-like efficiency: The trash cans are regularly cleaned; lines move fast; tickets and food orders are all a click away on any cellphone. But the day-to-day work involved in keeping it going is a juggling act between commerce and creativity. Ticketing apps and corpse-scented fog. Spreadsheets and severed heads. Groupon deals and buckets of fake blood.

And the centerpiece is Stitchy, now zeroing in on a mother with her two daughters, one a know-it-all high-schooler who has been here before, the other a middle-schooler visiting for the first time. The demented clown – real name Ryan Wyatt, Field of Screams’ co-creative director – towers above the younger girl in his three-inch platform shoes.

“WHO DOES THIS?” the girl screams as her mother and older sister giggle. The question could apply to the tens of thousands of guests who pay for tickets starting at $49.99 to come to Field of Screams Maryland each year.

But also: What kind of person puts on a mask to scare the heck out of people at a haunted house?

Wyatt stood backstage less than an hour before opening, daubing black paint and fake blood on a teddy bear.

“More blood?” a nearby scare actor asked.

“I don’t like a lot of blood,” the 26-year-old said, considering the splattered bear. “Depends on the scene. At our slaughterhouse? I’ll have a lot of blood. But I don’t just want to splatter it against random walls. Blood has to tell a story.”

Wyatt’s own story here began when Field of Screams Maryland was a simple two-story haunted house sandwiched between woods and farmland.

One year when Wyatt was young, he hid inside the coffins at Field of Screams, popping out and scaring the staff. By 13, he was part of the haunt, small enough to crouch among a display of eerie dolls before jumping out at guests.

“I’ve been here ever since,” he said. “It became a huge passion of mine. I loved going out and scaring people.”

When Wyatt sat for his makeup, he regularly landed in the chair of Christian Cedillos, another local a few years older. Cedillos’ interest in special effects, makeup and prostheses led him to volunteer at Field of Screams. The teenagers found themselves among a close-knit community of horror fans, theater geeks, cosplayers and other self-described weirdos who made up the staff each year.

“Everybody may feel like misfits in their own life, but when they come here, everybody’s basically the same,” Cedillos said, 28. “A lot of the people here have their 9-to-5 jobs, but they need to get some energy out. So here, they get to go into the woods and run around like a psycho and scare people.”