A Closer Look at Scaremare, Lynchburg’s Own Halloween Hot Spot

By Shelby Loveday

Every October thousands of people come to Lynchburg to attend Scaremare, one of the most popular Halloween-themed activities around, for a fun and frightening night.

Held for three weekends during October, Scaremare is a walk-through journey that takes approximately 45 minutes and leads visitors through a variety of spine-tingling activities, such as haunted houses, dark woods and trails filled with the nightmares of Halloween.  Visitors are scared by spooky characters and ghouls as they walk through the trails and make their way through the old houses.

According to the official Scaremare website, what started out as a small attraction in 1972 has grown into one of the busiest weekend activities during the Halloween season.

As the quality and quantity of Scaremare has developed and improved over the years, the number of participants has as well.

“It was another very successful year with over 28,000 in attendance,” Josh Coldren, supervisor for Scaremare, said.

This year Scaremare broke a record for the amount of people who attended and the average attendance for a Friday night was around 4,000.

One of the most interesting aspects about Scaremare is that all the workers are volunteers.  Sponsored by the Center for Youth Ministries at Liberty University, Scaremare needs about 300 volunteers each night to operate.  Many of these volunteers are Liberty University students.

“I enjoyed talking to people about what they are scared of, encouraging people, calming people down and even scaring people,” Liberty student Alyssa Davis said when asked what she enjoyed most about volunteering.

To keep the attraction running, there are a multitude of jobs that volunteers can undertake.

– Ticket booth operator

– Line regulator and group organizer

– Security

– Characters and actors who scare visitors as they make their way through the journey

– Backstage roles that keep the night running smoothly

While all of these roles are vital to the attraction, the most popular of the jobs are the characters.  Although the experiences within Scaremare vary slightly from year to year, there are certain characters that remain because of popularity with the visitors.

The most well-known of these characters is Sickle, a frightening yet lovable clown who makes an appearance every year and loves to interact with the crowd.  Other memorable characters include a giant demented Easter bunny and ghostly figures known as Candle-Walkers.

Supervisors for Scaremare say the attraction plans to continue to grow and improve so that they can keep interacting with the community in an even better version of this unique outreach.