East Carolinian

Issue date: 6/3/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Carlton Purvis

The mall was turned into a graveyard playground Wednesday as several students and alumni began an impromptu game of kickball -- dressed as freshly reanimated corpses.

The game began as a late night idea on Tuesday. In less than 12 hours it became a plan to bring some fun to a dead campus.

Most of the zombie-students were graduate students from the School of Art and Design's sculpture guild.

"We were all just sitting around playing a zombie board game and we had a zombie head from a party and were kicking it around," said Jesse Morrisey a sculpture grad student. "Then we decided, 'Hey that seems like a good idea.'"

For their attire, most pulled out old Halloween costumes. ECU graduate Alex Knox came dressed as an unfortunate sorority girl who died in Ugg boots and a ripped sundress.

By adding copious amounts of blood, some peeling latex flesh and a thousand-mile stare, they went from a group of ECU students to a mindless flock of roaming brain-eaters.

At around 1:30 p.m., Morrisey, Knox and around a dozen sculpture students, past and present, limped and groaned onto the mall equipped with their gruesome but fake human head kickball.

"Well basically, the rules are the same as kickball, but you can only move at zombie speed," said Morrisey before turning to reveal remnants of an arm that may have been severed in some pre-death accident.

With much attention from passers-by, they stayed in character for the hour-long match -- even turning to pursue the living if they stopped too long to take pictures.

As one student walked by, he said, "Those are definitely not theater students. Theater students aren't this out of their minds."

Even ECU's theater students may not have a budding international audience.

Sashi, an intern from India working at a New Bern hotel, was in Greenville with his friend, George Hancock, to find a traditional Indian restaurant and check out the university's campus.

"This was especially interesting to him," said Hancock. "He didn't know what a zombie was. I had to kind of explain it to him."

Sashi was a few feet away taking pictures and video with his digital camera. He stepped away from the simulated carnage, grinning.

"They don't have anything like this in India," he said.

Sculpture is known as one of the more demanding concentrations in the School of Art and Design and the old adage "work hard, play harder" applies to this group.

"We do stuff like this from time to time. We just like to have fun," said Morrisey.

Every Halloween in the sculpture yard, they have an iron pour where they melt down scrap iron to put into molds. Current and past students come to participate. They also participate in an annual kickball game against other art guilds.

"They pretty much kill everybody," said Missy Hardy, a friend of the group.

Richard Dudley, one of the few undergrad zombies, said, "We're a pretty close-knit group. I don't know what we would do if we didn't have each other."



This writer can be contacted at news@theeastcarolinian.com.

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