If you plan to visit the Lion’s Club’s Haunted Tunnel this Halloween season, you may want to bring a change of clothes, coordinator Rusty Mittendorf said.

Monday, September 25, 2000

If you plan to visit the Lion’s Club’s Haunted Tunnel this Halloween season, you may want to bring a change of clothes, coordinator Rusty Mittendorf said.

That’s because the club promises another year of frights so scary, you might just wet your pants, he said.

"It’s happened in the past," Mittendorf said. "We’ve had people faint, throw up or wet their pants because they were so scared. One year, a woman passed out and we had a couple of paramedics posing as monsters. They started to carry her out and she woke up. When she saw these two monsters carrying her off, she fainted again."

The Lion’s Club has been planning its longstanding annual fright-fest fund-raiser all year, keeping some traditional scares around and adding other heart-pounding ideas, Mittendorf said.

Some of the scenes in the Haunted Tunnel are inspired by popular movies and television shows like "Friday the 13th," "The Mummy" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Other tunnel scenes are just ideas that the tunnel planners come up with and, while visitors will see a few of the things from years past, many things will be new.

"This year we plan to scare the heck out of a whole lot of people," Mittendorf said.

The tunnel this year has 12 haunted rooms. Six of them are new.

"We’ve got an Egyptian theme to one of our rooms," Mittendorf said. "We’re doing some things with pulleys and counterweights. We’ve improved the moving wall with spikes. And the Werewolf is back."

Just where will the werewolf be in the tunnel? You’ll have to pay the $4 admission price to find out.

Although he doesn’t like to make predictions as to how many people will go through the Haunted Tunnel, last year’s event attracted more than 5,000 people, Mittendorf said.

The Haunted Tunnel is scheduled to start Friday, Oct. 13. This year, the tunnel will only run around each weekend, rather than every night for the two weeks before Halloween.

Mittendorf said the club changed that schedule to help school-aged volunteers, who have classes during the week.

Proceeds from the Haunted Tunnel benefit the Lion’s Club charities.