Fright night vampires claim a stake in records

More than 500 fanged record breakers swooped onto Tulleys Farm to beat the UK record for the most vampires in one place on Saturday (October 5).

Obby reporter Nikki Cutler joined the record attempt at the preview night of the annual Shocktober Fest and after being transformed into a vampire she came face-to-face with members of the living dead in the six haunted attractions.

Despite knowing 100 ‘creatures’ were waiting in the haunts professionally trained to cause fear in every person that passed them I never believed a bunch of dressed up actors would be able to genuinely frighten me.

How wrong I was.

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I, and my clan of vampire friends, quickly realised what we were in for when we made our way to the entrance of the first haunt called ‘Hell-ements’.

The gate keeper to the ‘journey to hell’ warned us not to step any further if we had a heart condition, a fear of confined spaces, were pregnant or had a nervous disposition before casually directing us to put a black sack over our heads and keep hold of the rope at all times.

I became somewhat disconcerted as we proceeded to cover our heads and file into the darkened maze as one trembling zombie chain.

A word of warning, this event is not for you if you dislike bodily contact as this is possibly the only event at which you spend 90 per cent of your time clutching onto the person in front of you and jumping into the arms of fellow visitors.

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Each haunt has a different theme. They were all equally gruesome and nightmare provoking, but for me, the worst, (or should I say best?) was the Cellar Haunted House.

This haunt sends you around a dark home with incredibly realistic zombies waiting in the walls, ceiling and floorboards, which left me feeling like I had just stepped into a scene from the film ‘28 Days Later’.

Thankfully, my pathetic clan of vampires were just as scared as I was and one of the men was probably the most scared of all - we even found him crawling on all fours when things got a little too much.

Embarrassingly, there were several children with parents there who were managing to make their way around the haunts without shrieking as hysterically as my group of 25-year-old friends.

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I expected that the fear would wear off as I took on each haunt but the nerves only seemed to mount up and the adrenaline seemed to encourage my imagination to believe I was in genuine danger.

Once we had completed every ‘haunt’. throats sore and muscles tired from trembling, we sat on wheelchairs in the ‘aftershock red cross bar’ and enjoyed some well deserved test tubes of strange looking cocktail concoctions.

Shocktober Fest will open on selected days and nights in the run-up to Halloween. Day-time events will provide toned-down attractions suitable for younger children.

To find out more visit: www.halloweenattractions.co.uk/shocktoberfest or to see a video of the opening night visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GSxmEH5US0

Photos provided by Stephen Candy