As the sun set over eastern Colorado Springs and a large, waxing moon rose to take its place, the nightly inhabitants of Ghouls Gulch were getting ready for an evening for horror.

With an hour and a half to go until their guests arrived, members of the large Ghouls Gulch family were donning their ghoulish finery and getting ready to take their places in the haunted house screaming and rattling chains.

By night, the Ghouls Gulch crowd may seem like an local rendition of the Addams family – a motley crew of disturbed clowns, gruesome ghouls and monsters, and corpses walking like the living.

But by day, without makeup and costumes, they are just people – mostly teenagers and young adults – who sweat in their costumes and suck on cough drops to smooth their screaming voices while working back-to-back shifts to bring Ghouls Gulch to life.

For the 12th year running, Ghouls Gulch owner Mike Bizub has a crew of young volunteer actors fill the haunted halls of his two mazes inside a large empty building at 3910 Palmer Park Blvd. Bizub says the location – an abandoned strip mall – is certifiably haunted by a couple of ghosts named Rick and Lucy. Although the voices of the real ghosts may be lacking, Bizub – whose day job is running a local private cemetery – will spend a year preparing the fake-haunted mazes, gearing-up for a whirlwind fall with hourslong haunted houses and back-to-back Halloween engagements around El Paso County. By Sunday evening, more than 35 actors were getting ready for their third night of haunting. They lined up outside one of the mazes, a haunted Sanitarium, to get their makeup done.

“We call ourselves a haunt family,” said Bizub.

On Sunday night, 19-year-old Bonnie-Kate Stiles and 15-year-old Latesha Bamber were waiting to get their fluorescent makeup applied to complete their clown costumes.

The two were scheduled to haunt the Sanitarium, a dizzying experience that has visitors wear 3D glasses as they teeter through a neon maze of monsters and dead bodies. While they waited, the girls swapped stories on how to remove the makeup, which often gets stuck on their faces for days if they aren’t careful. “I love it when I get the 3D makeup, even though it’s really hard to get off,” said Stiles, who uses shaving cream to remove it.

Bamber likes to use regular makeup remover, while yet another clown suggested rubbing alcohol.

The clowns planned to spend the night yelling gibberish at each other, said Bamber. They have been coached to scream from their diaphragms – to save their throats – and other actors behind the stage will give them tea, cough drops and water to keep their voices going. Purposely terrifying people can be a risky job, and Bizub teaches the actors to stay an arm’s length away from people wandering the maze.

“I’ve almost gotten punched a couple of times,” said Stiles. Visitors pay to be scared – $15 for one maze or $26 for both.

The rest of the acting troupe filled the haunted house, which takes visitors on a tour through a misty cemetery and into the house itself, where actors lurk behind mirrors and doors waiting to scare a passerby. Some people enjoy the massive spiders and clutching bony hands, while others can’t make it past the entrance, said Bizub.

“If people come out laughing, we still feel like we did our job,” he added.

Back in the makeup line, the clowns’ jovial conversation came to a halt when the lights went off, plunging the building into darkness. There was less than an hour to go until the first visitors started lining up.

“Really? Already?” said Bamber, her voice rising out of the blackness. “Or are they just doing a check?”

“I think they are just doing a check,” said Stiles, answering uncertainly from somewhere next to her.

“Good, because I still need to get something to eat.”