The job is to scare people. Wichita State University students Reese Willbanks and Izzie Licata take the responsibility to frighten seriously. They know the sound of success on a dark October night.
“Any time you make anybody scream and run away from you or jump away,” Licata, a sophomore from Memphis, Tennessee, said. “Teenage boys especially. When they’re with their girlfriends and they’re trying to act all bad. When you get them – that’s how you know.”
Willbanks and Licata are among the roughly 100 actors at Field of Screams Kansas, a long-running haunted attraction at Prairie Pines in Maize that counts several Wichita State students and alumni on its cast and crew. The lore of the murderous Spurlock family, the attraction’s theme, started with a class paper at WSU by Kip Scott, owner/operator of the attraction.