The silence that filled the old house was suddenly broken with a piercing scream as a man began dragging and beating a woman covered in blood.

More screams echoed as another man, chained to the wall, shouted in delight, “Get her!”

The first man dragged the woman to the fridge and stuffed her inside.

Bowling Green senior Nick Stewart, the man chained to the wall, didn’t mind that his friend terrorized his fiancee. It’s their job.

The three are actors at The Massacre, a haunted house on Three Springs Road.

“Sometimes, I’m shackled in the kitchen and scream nonsense,” Stewart said. “Sometimes, I come out and mess with the crowds in line.”

As an actor, Stewart said it helps to be able to read people.

“If they are scared, I’ll be louder and more in their face, but if they aren’t, then you just have to have fun with them,” he said.

Bowling Green resident Jason Berry is Stewart’s friend and co-worker who harasses his fiancée in the haunted house.

Berry said some people are just hard to scare.

“I don’t know if they are just trying to act tough in front of their girlfriends, but the funniest guys are the ones who actually hide behind their girlfriends,” he said.

Keeping a straight face while watching other people’s reactions is a tough task, Berry said.

“That’s what the masks are for,” he joked.

Berry recalled a time when he scared someone so badly that she fell on the floor and crawled away.

“She grabbed her friend and pulled him on top of her. He was trying to get away from her, so he was just dragging her along,” Berry said. “I lost it. I was on my hands and knees laughing.”

While the actors are sometimes amused by reactions, some customers become terrified beyond control.

Glasgow freshman Blake Perkins, an actor at Skeleton’s Lair Haunted Woods and Hayride, said customers peeing themselves is a typical night at haunted houses.

“Seriously, I’m not exaggerating,” he said. “A lot.”

Perkins admitted that a lot of crazy things happen throughout his nights at work.

“I was chasing a girl, and her father grabbed me and told me to stop or she would pass out,” he said. “I didn’t really know how to handle that, so I just left her alone.”

The idea of completely terrifying someone is an adrenaline rush for some actors, said Bowling Green senior Travis Bilbrey, co-owner of The Massacre.

“You get some type of power trip from seeing someone afraid,” he said.

Stewart said he enjoys weirding people out just as much as scaring them.

“I was messing with the crowd last week, just picking up hay and chewing it,” he said. “I was carrying an axe and threw it on the ground to get mud on it, then licked it off just to see people’s reactions.”

Perkins said his job isn’t always about scaring people.

“It’s more about making them laugh and entertaining them,” he said.