Stoned Zombie in a Haunted House

Photo via Flickr user Sam Howzit

Smoking at work is completely acceptable if you have one of those really agonizing jobs. If taking a few hits makes the monotony of sitting in a tollbooth even slightly more bearable, then who are we to judge the collector? Today, weed complements my work in an unremarkable way, simply fueling the will to write and read things on the internet. That’s nothing compared to the augmented experience I had several years ago as a zombie in a haunted house.

Most of the other zombies were local theater kids who treated the month-long scarefest as a seasonal performance gig, but for me it was a move of desperation. I lost my job a few weeks earlier and needed a source of income quick. A buddy of mine hooked me up with a tryout, in which I had to scream obscene things at four people sitting in chairs. They gave me directions like, “Tell me what you’re going to do with my body after you kill me,” and then took notes as I went off.

These people took this shit seriously. When you roll through a haunted house, it all kind of blurs together, but there are layers to it. This haunted house took place in a 200-year-old gothic prison. Every section had a different director who implemented a different theme. In my section, there were only black light bulbs, and everything was painted in black light paint, including our faces. A zombie handed the patrons a pair of 3D glasses on their way in, and they would put them on and become completely disoriented and easy as fuck to scare.

There is one central task for zombies, and that is to scare. Everyone I worked with relished a really good scare. At the end of a long night in whatever dank, gloomy section of the prison they were assigned to, they’d trade scare stories while wiping off their gory makeup in the prison’s locker room. As much as I tried, I was never as committed as these kids. Scaring people is fun, but when you’re high it just seems like an antagonistic thing to do to a person. More than anything, it was my duty as a figurative inmate in this prison to haunt it. They paid me to scare, and so I did. But then there were long, slow nights when there was no one to scare. The Phillies were in the World Series that year, and throughout that week in October, I sat in the walls of the giant prison, in the dark, face painted in garish colors, twiddling my thumbs. It only took one slow night to teach me never to come back without my one-hitter.

My scare-spot for the next night was in a wall, isolated from the other zombies, so I had an easy time taking a quick puff and blowing it away into some unknown 200-year-old crevice of the prison. After hours of sobriety, I immediately felt ripped. My ears instinctively perked up, hearing screams and clinking chains echoing at me from all over the prison. The whole place was empty of customers, and these guys were still at it. Or were they? I was definitely high. I snuck another quick hit from the one-hitter.

I poked my head out of the wall. Usually, I would do that to scare some middle-aged New Jersey woman into the clutches of the other zombie right behind her. But right now I was just checking out the glowing black light paint, scrawled from floor to ceiling in a hundred different patterns. “How have I not been stoned in here before?” I mumbled to myself. I pulled my head out of the wall and reached for the one-hitter again.

About an hour later, I got bored of the black light and sat down inside my wall spot. I started to notice the smell of the prison. It mostly smelled like a wet dungeon, but it mixed with the glue and plastic smells of the set materials, forming a sweaty odor that I couldn’t get out of my nose. After alleviating that with another swift pull on the one-hitter, I heard footsteps right behind me. Someone else was in the wall with me.

It was probably another zombie walking through my section. It was impossible to tell who it was in the dark, but I sensed a figure go past me. I figured it was time to stop smoking in the wall. I waited a little while and exited, walking to the edge of our section. There was a dark, little corner where I was sure no one else would venture. I felt my way into the little closet at the edge of the building. Was this a cell at some point? Did somebody sit in here, just like I’m about to, teetering on the thin line between sanity and hysteria? I shrugged it off, crouched down, and popped my one-hitter in my mouth.

As soon as I clicked the lighter, the flame illuminated a face just a few inches from mine, staring directly into my eyes. It was a small, round, hairless face, and its mouth winced open, revealing a top row of crooked teeth encased in wires. In front of its eyes sat a pair of rectangular, cardboard 3D glasses. As soon as I screamed, the face screamed right back at me. The lighter went out as I scrambled out of the corner. Catching my breath, I yanked out my phone and shined the screen around me. I saw nothing, but heard a burst of infantile sobbing. I shined my phone down and saw a little Asian kid with tears streaming down his cheeks. He must have walked down the wrong corridor and lost his parents before running into me smoking weed on the job. I looked down at him so our eyes were level, and he screamed even louder. Of course—the zombie makeup. Out of character, I tried to tell him he’d be fine and pointed him to the exit. He didn’t respond and kept crying. I started to grow a little concerned that my boss would walk by, considering that I had scared this kid by smoking weed basically at him. I had to get this kid out of here. If reason wouldn’t work, I had another handy method from the zombie toolkit. I raised my hands in the air and put on my raspiest zombie voice. “I’m gonna eat your heart and impale your head on a stick!” I yelled. The kid screamed and bolted right past me and out of the building. I stuck my head out the exit after him and watched him run away. I chuckled. “Hey!” came a voice. I turned to see a zombie prison officer with a giant gash going across her cheek. One of her eye sockets was swollen and black, and the other eye was all white and had a tiny pinpoint for a pupil. “Not so rough with the little kids,” she said, annoyed, and walked away.

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