A decade later, the pre-law and finance sophomore still gets scared while going through “haunted” buildings.

“They get you all the time,” Wilder said. “They’re still getting me - I thought I was done with it.”

Around Halloween, commercial haunted structures - from houses to schools to barns - and places such as cemeteries and forests lure people of all ages. Although the haunted house is the most well-known scary spot, variations such as haunted hayrides, mazes and even baseball parks have popped up around the country.

“The way I see it is it’s as good a venue as any,” said Jeremy St. John, marketing assistant for the Lansing Entertainment and Public Facilities Authority, about Oldsmobile Park in Lansing. The facility uses the stadium annually for “Fright Night.”

“It leaves a lot more space to be creative with when you’re trying to create, really, a whole different world,” St. John said.

Most local haunted venues are open tonight through Halloween. For information on times and dates of haunted places around Michigan, visit www.usol.com/holidays/halloween/hauntedhouses.html.

These haunted places appeal to people because they provide a visceral rush without putting people’s lives in danger, said Gary Hoppenstand, an American Thought & Language film professor who specializes in popular culture.

“It’s the same appeal that reading spooky horror fiction or riding a roller coaster has: The thrill of fright but in a safe environment not threatened with terror or horror,” Hoppenstand said. “Things happen, but people can engage in the illusion of it and walk away.”

Wilder is the head designer of the “Cellar of Terror,” a haunted house the Case Hall Black Caucus will put on Friday night in a storage room in the hall’s basement.

“There will be illusions going on, people jumping out, smog machines, graveyard scenes - some of everything,” he said.

Often, haunted venues have themes. “Fright Night” is presenting “Haunted Hollywood” this year, with scenes from horror movies set up throughout the baseball park. Sundance Riding Stable in Grand Ledge hosts a haunted house and a haunted hayride every October, both of which usually follow a theme, coordinator Nancy Eddy said.

This year, the house resembles a medieval castle, said Eddy, who plays a witch. It once resembled a ghost town and also has had Western themes.

“The house almost does a 100 percent change every year - the thing that always stays the same is the maze (at the end),” Eddy said.

Students in Park and Recreation Resources 215, Recreation Program Management, put on an annual haunted house for children ages 5 to 13 at the Bailey Community Center.

The students try to make the house, in the old Bailey Elementary School, a little bit different each year while keeping it “in good taste,” instructor Robert Palmer said.

“They look at the last year’s haunted house and try to figure out what to improve,” the parks and recreation tourism resources graduate student said. “They try to make it as scary as possible.”

The haunted house has three levels, and each room has a different theme, said Jim Crisp, director of East Lansing Recreation and Arts, which oversees the house.

“In years past, we have had cardboard box tunnels - every once in awhile there might be a box with a hole in it and who knows what might come out of that hole,” Crisp said. “One year, there was a hospital-type setting with a lot of large bones laying around on the beds (in one of the rooms).”

Although some haunted venues change throughout the years, most keep key elements such as classic folklore, graveyard scenes, strobe lights and smoke machines.

“There’s usually some sort of coffin scene, but that always changes on how it happens (in the Sundance haunted house),” Eddy said. “Some years Dracula’s in there, some years he’s not.”

The basic floor plan for the house stays the same, Eddy said.

“We just kind of change rooms and put in different skits and things,” she said. “You could move a wall or change coffins. And character roles always change.”

The route stays pretty much the same for the hayride too, starting out with classic horror such as mummies and folklore and continuing on to sections such as an old mining town and a witch segment, Eddy said. An alien section joined the ride this year.

Haunted places provide fun both for the scared and the scary, Hoppenstand said.

“There’s entertainment on both sides - the people putting it on and the people going to it,” he said.

“It’s very much a ritual. The ritual is bringing people together to have a good time and do something different, and on the other side, it allows people to scare people while being safe.”

St. John agreed.

“If you find it fun to scare other people, then you act in a haunted house,” he said. “The only thing more fun than being surprised is actually delivering the surprise.”

Some haunted houses allow actors to grab visitors’ ankles or arms, while others prohibit this.

“If they do touch you, it’s accidentally,” said Tammy Miller, who works at the Sundance haunted house. “They don’t grab you because of natural reflexes. We tell them not to be too forceful.”

Wilder agreed.

“If you grab someone, they’re going to grab you back.”

Organizers say planning takes a significant amount of time.

“We’ve been getting on it since the first day of school,” Wilder said. “We did the shopping over two and a half to three weeks, and we’ve been getting ready for it for the last week or so.”

Although Wilder has driven as far as six hours round-trip to haunted venues, he and his friends wanted to make the thrills more accessible to students. About 90 people are running the haunted house, which covers 75 yards - about 3/4 the size of a football field.

“We figured it was something we could do that hasn’t been done on this campus, especially on a large scale,” he said.

PRR 215 students organize and design the Bailey haunted house, advertise it and host it.

“They get stuff from the university, like wheelbarrows and hay from the farms,” Palmer said. “They make materials and use stuff from previous years sometimes.

“Then they dress up and are hosts and characters.”

St. John said the authority started setting up for “Fright Night” as soon as baseball season ended, near the end of September. It has been recruiting actors for the past month and a half, including the MSU men’s and women’s volleyball teams and fraternities.

“On any given night, we have between 25 and 30 people, and this year for the first time, we have a couple full-time actors,” he said.

St. John said a significant amount of materials goes into making “Fright Night,” but the cost is offset by the 500 to 2,500 people who go through the house every night it is open.

“The scope of the event offsets the cost,” he said. “It’s interesting to see how dynamic it is when you get behind the scenes and see how much work it is to make something like this fly.”