Sydney Hernandez always knew what she wanted to be when she grew up.
A Screamster.
As a child growing up in Sandusky, Hernandez went to the park–and particularly to Halloweekends–as many times as she could.
“I don't think you can live in Sandusky for even five minutes without hearing about Cedar Point or about Halloweekends,” Hernandez says during a recent video call. “I remember going to Cedar Point way back in the day when the
Overlord was there, and me, as a little 13-year-old had the
Overlord speech memorized. I loved every little part of it. And I knew at 13 years old, this is what I want to do.”
Hernandez was so certain that she started her own haunted house at her childhood home “just waiting to be of age to come and work for [Cedar Point],” she continues. “And genuinely, I haven’t been able to look back. I think it’s the most incredible job that anyone could ever ask for.”
Now in her seventh year as a Screamster, Hernandez, who now lives in Fremont, lives out her childhood dream every Thursday-Sunday scaring park guests in various locations, including the
Clownz Hall of Infamy Tour.
“It’s an absolute blast,” she says. “I enjoy so much the theming behind it, and I’m a huge music buff. The fact that we have a live show four times a night in my zone–I’m spoiled entirely.”
For her teammate Chris Woodard, the Screamster life wasn’t one that he felt compelled to. In fact, it all happened quite by accident.
Woodard originally was hired to work at RipCord (
now known as Professor Delbert’s Frontier Fling) for Halloweekends, but was called back the next day and asked to be a Screamster.
“I never thought anything about it, never anticipated that I would be a Screamster, but the first night I went out there, I started scaring, and I was immediately hooked,” Woodard says. “It was no looking back after that.”
And 20 years later, he’s still scaring.
Woodard, of Toledo, has seen and scared a lot over the past two decades. As an area supervisor, Woodard is “kind of all over the place.”
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Courtesy of Chris WoodardChris Woodard as a Cut Throat Cove Screamster“I think I have probably scared in just about every attraction that we have,” he says. “But predominantly my two favorites to go to are
Slaughter House and Cut Throat Cove. Those are the two you’ll find me at the most often.”
The life of a Screamster, no matter where they are scaring, involves a deep transformation–both physically and mentally.
A Screamster’s shift starts well before park guests arrive, as Hernandez’s day starts around 2:30 p.m. with makeup application that can take 30-45 minutes, followed by costuming. While some Screamters get through the process faster, all emerge transformed into terrifying creatures–no longer the person they were when they walked in.
“Even our makeup artists, whether they spend 20 minutes on you, whether they spend an hour on you, they are fantastic at what they do,” Hernandez says.
After makeup comes the costumes, which are all made by Cedar Point’s costuming department.
“Costuming has helped us out big time,” Hernandez says. “They provide everything, they make everything. They make sure any type of alterations for safety are made.”
Thursday-Saturday, Halloweekends attractions close at midnight, so Screamsters are usually “cleaned up and back to our normal selves” by about 1 a.m. This out time shifts to about 9 p.m. Sundays since the park closes at 8 p.m.
“It’s a lot of networking and talking to people and just really enjoying working for a place that doesn’t feel like work,” she says.
The thrill of scaring guests is, of course, the highlight of that work. Woodard recalls a Sunday afternoon in broad daylight outside of Slaughter House when he scared a man so intensely that he never even made it into the haunted house.
“I was working the queue, and snuck up behind a couple of guys,” he recalls. “They were probably in their early 20s. They’re standing there chatting. I waited a couple of seconds for them to notice me. The one guy turns around, looks at me, lets out this blood-curdling scream and then hurdles over the queue like an Olympic hurdler, launches himself, sprints out of the line, and I never saw him again.”
Although some folks are easily frightened, there are those who try to pull the Screamsters out of character. That’s not an easy task, though, as Screamsters are trained to envelop themselves in their characters.
“It’s really weird when you get into that makeup and when you get into that costume, it's no longer Chris, it’s no longer whoever that may be,” Hernandez says. “You don't realize how much of a mental shift you can go into with just a little bit of makeup on your face and your hair done a little bit differently. Do people try to break us out of character? Absolutely? Could it work? Sometimes also absolutely. But it's such a strange mental shift when you get in there that you're not you. You don't feel like you're playing a character. You're feeling like you're playing a different version of you. So it's a really interesting mental game.”
Woodard echoes his teammates' sentiments.
“We call them our little group of weirdos,” he says. “Our best Screamsters are ones that aren’t afraid to let go, that aren’t afraid to make fools of themselves. I always tell my Screamsters, if you feel like you’re making a fool of yourself, you’re doing the job right.
“You literally become somebody or something else when you put on that costume and that makeup,” he says. “And that's really how we train all of our Screamsters, too. We tell them, ‘Go look in the mirror, because what's looking back at you is not you anymore. You cease to exist, and you have become this horrible, awful creature that you see standing before you, and you just lock it in mentally, you kind of cease to exist, and you just become that character.”
And those characters can be satisfyingly terrifying for guests–and for the Screamsters.
“Just hearing the reactions, knowing that that is what they came for, and that is what they got, and that is what they're leaving with,” Hernandez says. “I mean, that's a big motivator. But also you can be a little sadistic and just really enjoy seeing people freak out seeing you.”
Hernandez is willing to bend over backwards to give guests a scare–literally.
“I used to do these crazy backbends, and that was what really got me started,” she says. “I would completely flip over backward and have my spine bent in half.”
She scared so many people with that trick, in fact, that she sent some home with an unintentional souvenir.
“During that year, they put me between the guests and the bathrooms, so whenever I got a good scare, I had to point people to the gift shops and they sold extra sweatpants that year because people were peeing themselves so consistently around me,” Hernandez laughs. “So it’s a really crazy, really fun opportunity to have. Of course, you want to provide your guests with the best thing in the world, but you also kind of take a weird pleasure from it, knowing that you've got them that good.”
For Woodard, seeing the growth of Screamsters like Hernandez is what keeps him motivated after two decades in the role.
“It is seeing the Screamsters that come in and get their first really epic scare, and just seeing how excited they get for it,” he says. “Seeing people like Sydney deal with adversity and be able to grow from it and become a better Screamster. That is my favorite thing; just watching the rest of the team succeed and helping the rest of the team succeed in what we're doing. I love that.”
That camaraderie and support among the staff is what has kept Hernandez coming back to Halloweekends for the last seven years.
"I’ve never felt more heard, respected, more understood and more seen by supervision, by our bosses,” Hernandez says, highlighting how supervisors like Woodard have supported her through personal challenges, including medical issues. “The reassurance and the care that I got from supervision has set such a high standard, but I feel like every single job that I go to from here on out will never be able to obtain the same level of respect that [the Cedar Point management staff] have given. They take really good care of us, they’ve always done such a fantastic job, and there’s no words big enough or meaningful enough to say thank you for that.
“Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy living out my dream of being a Screamster, but the support and the people around me are the reason I always come back.”