Howl Camp

In case I haven't mention it I have a pretty cool job. I get to work with people AND animals. As wonderful as a job it is, it doesn't pay much and it's part-time with no benefits and sometimes I get no hours. Anyway, so every halloween weekend we put on a scarier event called Howl-oween and we run a overnight camp during this event. So the guest not only get to enjoy the event, but get a bonus of animals, funny instructors pretending to be something else, yummy food and more that I cannot think of.

So this event few of us will volunteer to do it, but we still get paid. We pick a theme and plan our program around that. We try to stick with a conservation theme, but that is also Halloween. This year we decided on mummies and each one of us was a "ancient" conservationist who had a certain area we studied. I cannot explain all of it because it's still not 100%, but we had an explorer who found an amulet that brought us back to life and there were the protectors of the amulet that didn't want us to stay alive.

I was an ancient mammoloigst who studied mammals. This is why when you seen my costume I had stitches, I figured more that likely I should look like I had to be sewn together first before they mummified me.


So we got the planning done and my costume was very easy to put together. If you want to know how I did it, take a visit over at my sewing blog Fallen Bettie's Stitches . We spend a lot of time thursday, Friday, Saturday and I wasn't there, but Sunday as well setting up and taking our part of the event down. Needless to say I'm pretty tired, but I had a lot of fun and all of use did an amazing job.

So the event itself rather than the camp part that I was working at had several different activities. All rated by skulls. 1 skull meant the activity was not scary and all ages would enjoy it. 2 skulls was moderately scary and more than likely kids 8 and up could handle it. 3 skulls was very scary and only older children and adults would be okay with it. I saw children very very very young at this event, which was fine, but I felt like there was only a few things they could do and enjoy. It did start off 3 years ago as a scarier event meant for older children and adults.

I did a few of the activities mostly the scarier ones with my co-workers. We wen through a haunted maze that was okay. The line kept backing up or they would scare the people in front or behind us and not us. Not sure if it was because we had our name tags on and our radios to identify ourselves as employees. So it wasn't that scary, plus I think I have seen enough scary stuff that nothing really phased me. Though I've been to one "haunted house" that spring up during Halloween and remember not being that scared, but enough because my friends were freaking out. There was a  desert of the dead with zombies, but again they didn't do much with us and one even said "oh never mind you're scarier than I am" when they saw us with our costumes and make-up.

Explorer and Mummies, I'm the one on the right of the explorer with the bow

We did one more scary one, which I think was suppose to be vampires, but they had the same make-up as the zombies, but with fangs. We had one of our campers who was about 7 or 8 come with up and man those vamps were targeting here. She handled it well, but they way they were coming to her was scarier than it should have been. So once we finished that it was about time to meet our group so we could ride the train. While we were watching all of us mummies were dancing to the music. I know nothing of this gangham style or whatever it's call, but they played that song about 15 times between the two nights.

The train was done by a friend and former co-worker Nathan Blackwell who has some great sci-fi star treck like show and an awesome zombie movie. Check him out over at Squishy Studios. So the train was on his comedy web series called Voyage Trekers. Pretty funny and so the premise was we were a crew asked to rescue other galaxy members from other rescuer crews.

Once that was done we took our group back to their camp site for snacks, animal presentations and the finale of our program which was pretty fun.

I will finish up by saying that we were a bit hit. Tons of people were stopping us to take our pictures, video of us dancing, both nights and lots of comments... apparently most people don't know the difference between a mummy costume and a zombie.. yes I know my face paint looks more day of the dead than zombie, but I'm bad at face painting.