Scared Seriously Silly

Terror Comes to a Tiny Town, and People Can't Get Enough

How you love to play with fear, as if it were fire. You inch up to the edges of cliffs, you go home with the bad kids after school, you ride roller coasters, you scream through chain-saw horror movies. An odd sort of play, but people pay money to believe they are under attack, doomed, damned, dead, and then they brag about how scared they were.

But it is fear -- the Markoff brothers know the booby traps that lurk in your fight-or-flight back brain, adrenal glands, all the synapses of simple survival, and right now, with Halloween approaching, they want to set them off.

"We definitely want to scare people," said Alex Markoff, 35, the middle of the three Markoff brothers, who for the last 14 years have been getting thousands of people, young and old, to pay $15 to $20 apiece to spend 20 dark minutes in Markoff's Haunted Forest in Dickerson, a tiny flick of a town in upper Montgomery County.

"But we don't want to traumatize people," he said. "We've had people pee their pants. We've literally had to carry people out." He glanced around a barn where the Markoffs were training their ghouls and walking dead and said: "Tone down the scare of your scene" if small children are getting too scared.

The Markoffs spend their lives in the fear business, in one way or another. The rest of the year they run an outdoor adventure camp called Calleva, provoking a different kind of fear with "extreme caving," kayaking, rock climbing and sleeping in the looming quiet of the deep, dark woods. Fear, yes, but screaming -- full-bore head-gripping screaming -- is not encouraged in the middle of a rock climb.

But it is the whole purpose of a walk through candlelit woods before Halloween.

How do the Markoffs do it? Why does it work?

First of all, there is no escort; you walk this path by yourself or with friends whose arms you can grab. Twigs snap.

"It doesn't matter who you're next to," 12-year-old Katie McFall is telling her friend Lauren, "as long as you have an arm."

"No," Lauren moans. "Nooo. Nooo."

Lauren has been watching the giant gates before them open and close. She's seen smoke billow out. She finds herself alarmed by the huge glowing eyes of the skull inside.

And then the bogus advice -- implying that the denizens of the Haunted Forest have their best interests at heart -- but somehow making everything worse.