Zombies invading Columbus

(Credit: April A. Taylor)

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If you find hordes of the undead filling the streets near downtown Columbus on June 6, there's no need to be alarmed. It's only the Zombie Walk.

In an annual tradition where hundreds of locals dress up as reanimated corpses, the Zombie Walk will take up an evening at Goodale Park, High Street and the Hyatt Regency Convention Center, with plenty of people in gory makeup and frayed clothing. While it produces quite the spectacle for bystanders, the Walk is, at its core, for a good cause: a half-ton of non-perishable food is anticipated to be collected for the Mid-Ohio Food Bank.

Relying on the involvement of its community, the local incarnation of the large-scale phenomenon has grown substantially in the few years of its existence. The 2009 edition will be the inaugural Walk to coincide with Gallery Hop, and it will be the first one incorporating a post-Walk after party.

Metromix spoke to organizer Kurt Chaney before the trek begins at Goodale Park at 5 p.m. June 6. All are welcome to attend this free affair. As Chaney says, "a large Zombie Walk makes a very good Zombie Walk."

The concept of the Zombie Walk originated recently, in just 2003. How did you first become involved with it?
I used to work for a seasonal Haunted House Halloween attraction in Columbus. We used to operate in Mount Vernon, and the building that we were in had some serious damage happen to it and was ready to collapse, so we found a building in Columbus in the Brewery District. We were trying to think of different ways to promote ourselves in a new area and, in my research, one of the things I saw was the Zombie Walk. From what I read, it was more of a flash mob thing that could be used for a promotional tool—charity and things like that. When I came across that and presented that to the owner of the Haunted House, he wasn't into it at all, so I did a bit more research and decided to take it on myself because there hadn't been one in Columbus.

Is there any special etiquette for this event?
It's free and open to the public, so anytime you open anything to the public you're going to have people who don't stick to the rules. I've tried to make it as rule-free as possible. Basically, common sense things [apply]. Nudity is bad. [Laughs] It's not ComFest or a Sturgis Rally, it's the Zombie Walk. I've tried to make it as family-oriented as it could possibly be. There are a lot of smaller kids that show up. We aren't technically a parade so we do have to obey traffic laws; we have to stay on the sidewalks. I try to ask people to be respectful to the local businesses. A lot of the areas where we walk [have] nice high-end restaurants with glass window fronts. I ask them not to smudge the glass. I definitely ask them not to enter those places of business and harass the public that are eating. 

As someone who has done this for a while, what kind of zombies do you run into most often? What are some examples the weirder stuff you've seen?
We've heard it a lot in the past two years that people show up not dressed like a zombie to see what it's like. Then they end up deciding that they want to participate and run over to some place where they can get quick makeup. So we get a lot of recently bitten undead, very few crawled out of the ground, already dead zombies. The creative ones are the ones I like. We had one that was a Shriner in 2007. The same guy in 2008 staged himself along the path somewhere with a parachute and a whole flight suit and helmet, like he had zombie-jumped out of a plane and landed right there to join the walk with us. We had a hula girl zombie with her snorkler boyfriend zombie. Those are the ones that I like the best, where people take another type of costume and make it into a zombie.

What's the most common reaction you get from the living?
People see it, they double take, realize what it is, laugh and play along. They'll snap pictures with their cell phone and honk their horns at us. It's a pretty good time.

How do you want to see the wide scale phenomenon of the Zombie Walk to grow?
I think it should be in the media more. I would like to see more news stories about the various Zombie Walks and [also] a successful Zombie Walk through multiple cities across the U.S., doing all their Zombie Walks on the same day. I say successful because they've tried to organize a World Zombie Day and they maybe get not even one-tenth of the Zombie Walks across the nation to participate. It just doesn't ever seem to work out, but that would be really cool.

If you're heading to this year's Zombie Walk, be sure to look for the Metromix photographer, who will be there to catch all the action.