About 15 years ago — no one can quite remember the exact year — the Sudduth family put together its own hayride and haunted house on family property in Steens.
“We just wanted something for the kids to do around Halloween,” said Tami Sudduth.
“It was just a hayride, with one tractor pulling a trailer and the barn set up like a holiday house where some of the adults would jump out and scare the kids,” said Curt Smith, Sudduth’s son-in-law.
“We never really expected it to turn into this,” Sudduth added.
The “this” Sudduth refers to is what is now known as “Haunted Hicks in the Sticks Hayride and Haunted House,” which is held on the two Saturdays prior to Halloween. What once was a family event turned into a neighborhood event and now reaches far beyond the small Lowndes County community.
“This past Saturday we had (visitors) from Tupelo, Northport, West Point, Aberdeen, Amory, Vernon and Columbus,” Sudduth said. “The word seems to have spread. Every year it seems to get bigger.”
How popular has the event become? The hayride, which transports visitors through the “graveyard” to not one, but two, haunted houses, begins at dark. Saturday, people arrived as early as 4:30 p.m., some waiting as much as three hours for their turn.
“We have concessions and show movies for the people who are waiting,” Sudduth said. “Nobody seems to mind. It’s part of the event. We started with one tractor and trailer, and now we’re running three tractors with three trailers nonstop until everybody goes through.”
Smith said Saturday, he finished the last tour at 1:34 a.m.
“I rode that trailer for 6 1/2 hours,” he said. “It’s tiring, but what we’re able to give back to the community makes it worth it.”
The loose-knit group of friends, family and neighbors — Smith said it requires about 50 volunteers to run the event — decided to start charging admission seven or eight years ago. A small portion of that money goes to the cost of staging the event, but the bulk of it goes to people in need in their community.
For the $10 admission, visitors begin with a half-mile hayride, disembarking at the graveyard where they follow a route to the first haunted house. From there, it’s back on the hayride to the bottom of the hill, where they again set out on foot to the main haunted house. Along the walking route, there are eight scenes visitors encounter, each involving some scary feature.
“We start getting together in August to throw around ideas,” Sudduth said. “We change it up every year. It’s not super-organized. There are no committees. We just show up and each person takes charge of a scene, decides what it’s going to be and the rest of us help out getting everything ready.”
Smith said what first started as a family event seems to have become a community fixture.
“Nobody gets paid and there’s a lot of work involved,” Smith said. “We couldn’t do it without all the volunteers, so it is something the community has bonded over. Everybody helps out, whether it’s letting us use their tractors and trailers or working on the lighting or carpentry, anything else that needs to be done. It’s grown a lot bigger than any of us ever imagined, but in a lot of ways it’s still what it started out as — something for our kids and neighbors to enjoy.”
The hayride ticket booth and staging area is located at 1192 Sudduth Road in Steens.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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