A Local Haunted House uses Scares to Beat Breast Cancer

By Itza Martinez

Reporting Texas

Skulls made from recycled milk jugs display inside SCARE for a CURE’S haunted house Manor, Texas on Oct. 17, 2024.

MANOR, Texas  –Screams of terror echo outside SCARE for a CURE’s haunted adventure northeast of Austin that sits on the same property of Ghost Town Manor. 

This is one of the city’s most interactive adventures and is in the middle of their Halloween season ‘Nightmares of a Legend,’ which runs until Saturday, Oct. 26.

“We send in groups of six, and they will go into a station, and once they’ve gone into the haunted house, if we do everything right, they never see another guest,” said Keith Ewing, haunt director for SCARE for a CURE. 

Behind the entire build, back-to-back shows, makeup artists, and scare actors that pull off the adventure each year are volunteers. 

“So we start building the first weekend in August and you can imagine, in Central Texas, in August that we are all dying,” said Erica Sigler, volunteer director for SCARE for a CURE. “We call it ScareFit instead of CrossFit.” 

The creative process for the haunt starts around a year in advance to decide on the upcoming theme and ends in November when the set gets torn down but for volunteers and community members, there is a bigger purpose behind knocking the socks off of people. 

“Being able to make a visible and substantial impact on care that can be received for people battling breast cancer…we have survivors come and talk to us and we can see that what we do here matters,” Sigler said. 

SCARE for a CURE has raised over half a million dollars since 2007 toward the Breast Cancer Resource Center.

“Getting education as a patient at the beginning is very important because many patients’ natural reaction is, I have a mass, I might have cancer, I want it taken care of yesterday,” said Dr. Kimberly Brown, breast surgical oncologist at UT Health Austin.

The Breast Cancer Resource Center helps ease the anxiety breast cancer patients experience throughout their treatment by providing support groups, online communities, and classes through each stage. 

“I would definitely encourage women who are concerned and want to get screening, again, talk to your doctor or your provider in getting a mammogram…, women with more dense breasts may have small tumors missed by traditional kind of earlier generation mammography and there’s now many different options to account for that,” Dr. Brown said.

For those at SCARE for a CURE, scaring is caring.

“We have a volunteer who is a male volunteer dealing with a type of cancer and he goes and gets his chemo and then he comes out and does his work because it’s that important to him,” Sigler said.

Sharing compassion for those dealing with a potential diagnosis is part of it. 

“I want them to know that there are people that don’t know them, that they’ll never meet, that have their back. That’s us here at SCARE,” Sigler said.