80-Year-Old FL Scare Actress Relishes Role As Tarot Card Reader

DADE CITY, FL — When 80-year-old Betty Dick brought her granddaughter, Juliana, then 18, for an interview at Scream-A-Geddon, an interactive scare park in Dade City, she didn’t expect that she’d also leave with a job.

The Plant City resident, who worked at Jabil in St. Petersburg, where she helped build computers, had been retired for years, at that point.

“And I wasn’t doing much with myself,” she told Patch.

Dick hesitated at first, then asked the Scream-A-Geddon hiring team, “Do you know how old I am?”

The owners told her not to worry, she said. “They said, ‘That’s OK. We’ll find a role for you.’”

During Dick’s first Halloween season at the scare park, she played “a demon dog” in the Demon’s Revenge attraction.

When she returned the next year, she had a broken foot, which made working as a scare actress difficult.

“I had a hard time walking and standing a lot,” she said.

Rather than Dick being forced to sit that season out, those running Scream-A-Geddon found another part for her: the tarot card reader in Bloodwater Bayou. She’s taken on this role, which allows her to remain seated throughout her shift, ever since.

In her scene, she’s surrounded by bookcases, which shake behind her when she secretly presses a button as people walking through the attraction approach.

“I’ll wait until they get almost right before me,” Dick said. “I’m just sitting there still. My eyes, I don’t move them. I don’t move nothin’ and they think I’m a statue, that I’m one of the figures.”

They’re usually surprised when she first speaks to them.

“I holler at them, ‘You don’t belong here,’” she said.

At the end of her scene, Dick tells guests, “You don’t belong here. This world will not accept you,” and warns them, “I see the future. Yours is short.”

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She’s seen grown men scream and jump when she unexpectedly calls out to them.

“It scares the crap out of them sometimes,” she said. “I’ve seen some of the guys pee in the pants.”

There have also been countless “little kids who are amazed because they thought I was a statue. I’ve seen some of them run into my wall trying to get out of there,” she added.

Dick also recalls one woman falling to her knees and crawling around the table where the tarot reader sits.

“She got her head stuck between my bookcases - I don’t know how she did it - and she was screaming, ‘She’s alive! She’s alive!” Dick said. “I wanted to laugh so bad but couldn’t because of my character.”

Her work with Scream-A-Geddon is perfect for the senior, who was born in October and has always loved Halloween.

A self-described “military brat,” the Alabama native spent much of her childhood overseas, mostly Germany and France.

“There wasn’t much trick-or-treating or things that are done in the United States over there,” Dick said.

So, she embraced the spooky season as an adult raising her own children.

“I would always take the kids trick-or-treating and put on little masks in the house and jump out and scare them,” she said. “That’s always been a thing with me and my kids. ‘Let’s go to grandma’s. She’s gonna scare us.’”

Working at Scream-A-Geddon is fulfilling for Dick.

“It gets me out of my house and gives me something to do,” she said.

It also brings in some extra income that she uses to take her daughters on vacation. After her first year at the scare park, they spent a week in a rented cabin in Tennessee.

“When you’re on Social Security, you can’t do a whole lot the way you want to do,” she said.

Most importantly, though, Dick loves the chance to interact with people - from her younger coworkers to those visiting the scare park.

“People love to get scared. It makes them happy and I just love to see people happy because there’s too much going on in the world,” she said.