Iowa City friends grow annual Halloween attraction into Zombabes & Co. Fear Factory haunt startup

IOWA CITY — These days, a group of nurses from the University of Iowa’s neurology floor ask slightly different questions among themselves than they used to.

“Where’d that bag of bones go?”

“Can you hand me that piece of skin over there?”

Iowa City resident Dana LoTempio and her friends — all current or former co-workers — first forged their friendships through the trauma bonding of working together in one of the most challenging departments in medicine. Now, their friendships thrive on scaring others in their personal time.

Since 2011, LoTempio’s home has served as the place for colleagues, community members and neighborhood friends to gather for Halloween.

This spooky season, after 14 years of growth, the annual female-led home haunt presents old favorites and a few new surprises under an official name: Zombabes & Co. Fear Factory.

With scary masks, fake gore and a twisted sense of humor, the home haunt takes hundreds of minds each year off the nonfiction tragedies plaguing the world — even if only for a day.

“It’s that opportunity to be something that you aren’t every day. Honestly, the world right now usually sucks, and it’s scary,” said LoTempio, haunt owner and organizer. “What better way to let all that fear out and make things that are bigger and larger than life come to reality on Halloween? There are real horrors out there, and if we can take our mind off that for one day, I’m all for it.”

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How it started

It started with refrigerator boxes and laundry detergent in Miami.

As Dana was growing up in Florida, her father, Dan LoTempio, made a crawling maze with boxes completed by creepy crawly accessories and hand prints from detergent — back when detergent was made with phosphates that made it glow under blue lights.

With holes cut in the boxes, Dana’s older brother used to scare her as she navigated. Today, her father helps extensively with engineering displays and animatronics.

“We were small potatoes,” Dan said. “(Now), it just keeps on growing, and I don’t expect it to stop. She’s possessed.”

When the family moved to Georgia, Dan made the maze again to scare his kids and others in the neighborhood.

And decades later, after Dana moved to Iowa City, she recreated it in her own basement for friends and family to enjoy. The year following its 2011 debut, it got a big upgrade in the backyard, where Dan procured metal conduits and built a bigger maze under large tents.

“It really exploded after that first year in the basement (in Iowa City,)” Dana said. “We went from that little thing in the basement straight into this big production.”

But this time, her colleagues and neighbors wanted to help, too.

This year’s display

Before long, the Frankenstein of assorted specialties and ideas took on a life of its own and kept growing.

With a garage jam-packed with props, scenes vary and evolve each year. Most of them are handmade with impressive skills.

If you go:

Address: 114 Green Mountain Dr., Iowa City

Hours: Oct. 25 from dusk to 9:30 p.m.; Oct. 31 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. (Best effects are seen after dark.)

Website: Find Zombabes & Co. Fear Factory on Facebook

Cost: Free

Details: Navigate family-friendly haunted scenes spread over a yard including a graveyard, butcher room, doll room, Stranger Things room and more.

The number of props and sets is far too large to count. Dana no longer has room for Christmas decorations.

The starting point, a cemetery graveyard out front, looks professionally done with completely handmade sets that turn Styrofoam, calligraphy skills and spray paint into dozens of graves — some of which come to life with jump scare features.

Out back, more adventure awaits.

The butcher room is beloved, with a zombie chef who stirs a pot. Audreys, the carnivorous and sentient plants from “Little Shop of Horrors,” await more human blood for dinner. Nearby, the “Stranger Things” room will return for its final year, as the show wraps up its last season.

The doll room remains a favorite year after year with creepy dolls and a repurposed child’s playhouse. One doll, rigged with an oscillating fan and rubber band, snaps her head back periodically for an extra jump scare.

“It scares the absolute pants off everybody,” Dana said.

Frankie, a teddy bear whose entrails are on full display, resembles Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear, the pink stuffed villain in Pixar’s “Toy Story 3.”

“He’s been through a couple divorces,” Dana notes from his backstory.

Each trick-or-treater has a different element that scares them most — dolls, clowns, snakes, the spider room. But for many visitors, gore-laden props like a kicking body being chainsawed in half is what gets them the most, Dana said.

Horror crafters this year are excited about a few new props in progress. As some of the nurses work on a skin patch quilt made of realistic looking latex, Dana is working on a zombie puppet that eats its puppet master.

All of them, naturally, will accompany an older zombie member of the prop department who remains a legend after being lit on fire in Dana’s garage years ago.

“As nurses, we can rig almost anything together if we have to, because we have to sometimes,” said Monica Smith, a member of the founding group of friends. “How hard is it to mess up a scarecrow for a Halloween prop? Nobody’s going to die.”

With spray foam and doctored Dollar Tree skulls, Dana’s children are making a catacomb mural resembling the underground ossuaries of Europe. Meanwhile, Dan is working to electrify one skeleton on a stake, animating it to jump up and down at its post.

Why it keeps growing

The display first opened to the general public in 2018. Since then, hundreds from the neighborhood and the city have flooded the displays each Halloween.

Today, the effort involves thousands of dollars in personal funding and donations from friends, all of whom spend months setting up scenes over about three-quarters of an acre. The original group of founding nurses and nurse practitioners, called “The Big 5,” has grown into a volunteer force of about 25.

Dana’s friends have enlisted their children, and her children have enlisted their friends.

“They just love Halloween. They love the community feel of it,” Dana said. “Looking at it as a way to connect with others is what makes me love it so much.”

Much of the growth each year is self-imposed pressure to be bigger and better, compounded by positive feedback from visitors who bring more creative ideas every year. This year, Zombabes will be adding scare actors for the first time.

For Teresa Grove, one member of the Big 5, it embodies the evolution of Halloween from her childhood. Growing up, she remembers children trick-or-treating unaccompanied door-to-door and teenagers spending October weekends hopping between haunted house fundraisers by The Jaycees.

“You were gone until people stopped answering their doors,” she said.

But today, as “trunk or treats” become more common and parents are admonished to inspect candy, the Zombabes tradition brings a different type of gratification than other haunts and traditions.

“Every October, I know I’m going to spend some real time with my best friends. It’s something I block off,” Grove said. “What makes (Zombabes) different is Dana and her passion — there’s no money to be made.”

Handling traumatic patient injuries together was how the nurses became good friends, Smith said. Now, recreating scary things is how they maintain the friendship.

Jill Fisher, another founding neuro nurse, was attracted to the annual effort for the friendships. Now, she stays for a love of all things brains.

“I have a brain pen, brain T-shirt and a brain in a jar someone got me for my birthday. I like to be very creative,” she said. “This ties it all together.”

Unlike the other big holidays, Halloween brings her joy because it’s a holiday that remains stress-free.

“I think I associate other holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving with stress. Whose family are we going to have dinner with? Is this person going to be offended if we don’t spend enough time with them?” she said. “On Halloween, I can do what I want, where I want.”

As the group forms an official LLC, Zombabes & Co. Fear Factory sets its sights on growing the effort through a more publicly accessible commercial location in the future.

The house’s history

LoTempio’s current home, 114 Green Mountain Dr., was the scene of a brutal 2019 murder.

There, Roy Browning Jr. stabbed his wife, JoEllen Browning, multiple times before she could speak with a bank official who would have told her about Roy’s secret high-interest loans, falsified accounting records and a drained savings account. In 2022, Roy was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

But you will never see the true crime case depicted as a horror scene in Dana’s setup.

“I feel like I have a responsibility to honor her in a positive way,” she said.

Fortunately, she has since learned that JoEllen loved to throw parties. Today, Dana is sure she would approve of what the yard has turned into every October.

Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.

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