Downtown Denver experiences zombie infestation!
Photo courtesy of 'tehpigster' (flickr.com)
In light of the Halloween spirit and the October atmosphere, the city of Denver hosted its very own version of Night Of The Living Dead with 16th street as it’s setting. The Zombie Crawl is an annual event that is fairly new to Colorado residents, where the people of Denver were invited to stagger and stumble their way to Skyline Park at 1125 16th street where the zombiemania began.
Four years ago Zombie Crawl Organizer and zombie enthusiast, Daniel Newman, started the event for his birthday. Back then Newman and 50 other fellow zombie fanatics were the only ones in attendance, this year the zombie crawl has grown tremendously and the city had hoped to compete with the Seattle Zombie Crawl Record of 4,233 zombies. The massive expectations were met when Denver smashed the world record with over 7,000 documented zombies swarming the streets of downtown.
People of all ages dressed in their bloodiest zombie attire and congregated for a massive party starting at Skyline Park. The creativity and friendliness of the participants is what made the Crawl such a successful event. It was a safe atmosphere and everyone more or less was in it for good “clean” fun. Themed zombie costumes like Michael Jackson, Robocop, Space Zombies, Spiderman, and characters alike were the highlights of last year and made respectable updated reappearances this year. The zombified Michael Jackson was suited up in his red leather jacket and performed the zombie anthem “Thriller” in front of his fellow zombies. People of all ages were able to participate for free so there was fun for everyone. An eight-month old zombie even won a prize for being the youngest member of the undead.
The zombie crawl is an all ages free event so city officials were anticipating a large amount of people getting into mischief. People were allowed to carry fake weapons to “defend themselves” from the zombie threat to add a more interesting element for more hardcore zombie fans. This caused a few problems for officials and the event got a little out of control. A number of rules had been made in order to make the event a little safer for everyone, and to compensate for the amount of people; special cameras that counted zombies entering the event had been created to keep track of attendants. Also extra security was assigned to the Crawl to manage some of the chaos that comes with events like this.
The Zombie Crawl started at Skyline Park at 4:00 p.m. where activities that preceded the event and went throughout the day kept the undead of downtown Denver occupied. The zombies then paraded down 16th street mall up to Glenarm and then back the same way to Skyline where the event continued throughout the night. As day turned into night, and the moon rose high in the sky the zombie madness only got more outrageous; attendants were so enthusiastic about the event it seemed like it would never end. It was almost as if downtown Denver was experiencing a true hostile infestation of the undead!
The zombies left their mark on the city, staining light rail and mall ride transportation systems with fake blood that oozed down the sides of the vehicles. Thankfully, there were enough volunteers in attendance that helped the clean-up effort move along quickly. Overall, the zombie crawl was a great success and the undead are in anticipation for next year. This is quickly becoming a popular tradition for Denver, so you can be sure to expect more fun and frights downtown in the years to come.
