Photo: Flickr/kkennedy
For the last five years, a group of college students have built a haunted maze in Long Beach, Calif., and opened it up for free to community members on Halloween night.
But this year, the students decided to make an eco-friendly Halloween attraction, constructing 90 percent of the 2,500-square-foot maze out of materials that would have otherwise ended up in the landfill, the Long Beach Post reported.
The students spent the last few months combing street corners and dumpsters to find the perfect spooky items to fill the haunted maze, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The maze, which snaked through a yard of one of the student’s parents, featured walls made out of salvaged shipping pallets and thrown-out tarps, as well as corn stalks constructed from reused packing materials. Even a stilt man’s crutches and a creepy old dentist’s chair were recovered from the garbage.
While utilizing discarded materials made financial sense for the cash-strapped students, they also wanted to highlight the importance of reusing waste materials.
“If you see something on the side of the road and want to be creative, pick it up and do something with it,” Katie Transue, a Long Beach City College biology student, told the LA Times. “You can turn trash into anything, honestly. You clean it up and you can turn it into an experience like a massive haunted house if you want.”
The haunted maze, which was triple the size of previous years’ labyrinths, featured 10 themed rooms, including a graveyard, spooky barn and slaughterhouse, and 12 costumed characters such as scarecrows, clowns and zombies.
READ: Long Beach, Calif., Bans Plastic Bags
50+ Tips for a Green Halloween
Low-Waste Design Challenge: Two Holidays, One Pumpkin