Whatever happened to Minneapolis’ Zombie Pub Crawl?

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For many years on the second Saturday of October, the streets of downtown Minneapolis crawled with thousands of zombies oozing blood, shuffling from bar to bar and moaning something about braaaains.

The Zombie Pub Crawl was an instant hit when four friends founded it 20 years ago. At its peak, an estimated 35,000 rotting Minnesotans participated in the festival. Copycat zombie crawls festered across the country in cities big and small.

But after 2019, the Minneapolis event, at least as we knew it, quietly vanished.

A reader, who recalled dressing up as a flesh-eating coroner to attend one of the zombie bashes, has been wondering: Whatever became of the original Zombie Pub Crawl?

To find answers, he wrote to the Strib’s Curious Minnesota project, which investigates audience questions.

The event’s demise can be explained by shifts in pop culture and the public’s growing disenchantment with hard drinking, along with the more mundane challenges of planning a behemoth festival in Minnesota that gathered large amounts of people outdoors.

“It just kind of went the way a lot of trends do,” said one of the co-founders, Chuck Terhark. “Even in the last couple years of Zombie Pub Crawl, people were way more into healthy living and exercise, and those are not core tenets of the Zombie Pub Crawl at all. It wasn’t long for this world at that point.”

When Terhark and pals Taylor Carik, Ken Tyborski and Claudia Holt came up with the idea for the bar crawl, they were all 25 and had just watched “Shaun of the Dead.” Other zombie flicks such as “28 Days Later” and a remake of “Dawn of the Dead” had also sparked the zeitgeist in the mid-2000s. AMC’s “The Walking Dead” would premiere a handful of years later, cementing our cultural obsession with the undead.

The four friends planned the first crawl in northeast Minneapolis in 2005, advertising the event on fliers and on Myspace. They would have been thrilled if a few dozen zombies showed up. About 150 did.

As the gathering grew in those early years, its location migrated to places like the West Bank neighborhood, St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis. Organizers had to apply for city permits and arrange for hundreds of portable bathrooms, 150 off-duty cops and a $5 million insurance policy, Terhark said.

More than a bar crawl, it morphed into a full-blown festival, boasting carnival rides and live music. One year, there was a memorable performance by the late rapper DMX that almost didn’t happen. DMX — who had been paid in advance — failed to show up on time, and Terhark and his fellow organizers were sick with worry, fearing a zombie insurrection.

The rapper eventually arrived, three hours late. “He was wearing one shoe, and he fell out of an SUV as it careened up the outfield of Midway Stadium,” Terhark said. “Then he got on stage, and he was great.”

In 2014, interest swelled in the event. It set a Guinness world record for the largest gathering of zombies, numbered at 15,458 participants. (This was a vast undercount but satisfied Guinness’ persnickety requirements for measuring mass participation records, Terhark said. Police at the time estimated the crowd was closer to 35,000, which matched ticket sales.) Nonetheless, the record still holds today.

The event’s success ushered in more logistical headaches for the planners, who agonized over conditions beyond their control. Terhark remembers scouring the weather forecasts for weeks leading up to the event. The elements determined whether the organizers made a profit or went broke, he said. He’s proud that despite its ups and downs, festival organizers never lost money.

“We landed the plane without ruining anybody,” he said. “But it was a bit of a cluster for many years.”

It seems every hipster in the Twin Cities who came of age in the mid-2000s to 2010s can recount an insane story from the annual party. Terhark remembers a zombie being impaled in the leg while trying to scale the wrought iron fence at the Nomad World Pub.

One of Carik’s favorite memories of the event took place in a packed Otter’s Saloon in Northeast. A zombie was singing karaoke to “Rebel Yell” by Billy Idol but had changed the refrain, “More, more, more,” to “Brains! Brains! Brains!” People were standing on tables and chairs because the floor was at capacity, cheering and singing.

After he finished, a young zombie shushed the crowd and ordered them to listen. “It’s 9 o’clock, and we all have to go to the next bar!” he proclaimed.

At that point, a guy started whipping around a quart of fake blood like it was a sprinkler. Everyone chanted, “Next bar!”

The spontaneity and organic nature of the Zombie Pub Crawl are what made it thrilling for fans. People today, however, are less likely to subscribe to that “show-up-and-see-what-happens culture,” Carik said. In a sea of smartphones, we prefer to vet venues and happenings on Instagram and TikTok instead of taking a chance on the unknown.

The official Zombie Pub Crawl was trademarked, and the organization used to send cease-and-desist letters to other outfits that billed themselves under the same name. But as the cultural trend of zombies waned, so did ticket sales for the pub crawl. Interest in the event started to shrink — not just among fans but among the organizers, too. Terhark stuck around until the end with a few new partners while the other founding members stepped back.

The four young creatives who planned the original festival have now settled into middle age, most of them parents of young children. And many of the bars that hosted the mayhem — from Grumpy’s on Washington Avenue to Palmer’s Bar and the Triple Rock Social Club in Cedar-Riverside — have shuttered.

Carik, who now teaches at Augsburg University, has tried to amuse his students with stories of the Zombie Pub Crawl. They don’t believe him.

He sounds like an nostalgic elder, wistful for the weird. “You’d never in a million years do anything like that today,” he told me. “What else will ever be like that?”

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