A frightening amount of work goes into scaring people senseless at the Haunted Basement. The attraction — and its nightmare-inducing sights, sounds and smells — runs Thursday through Sunday each week in October at the Soap Factory, a contemporary art gallery in northeast Minneapolis.

More than 300 volunteers log 6,000-plus hours taking tickets and portraying the demented denizens of the Haunted Basement, said Lillian Egner, the gallery's program and volunteer manager.

That's in addition to the creative efforts and elbow grease put in by the head carpenter, head costumer, eight other project leads and five guests artists who helped design the 12,000 square feet of terror.

Planning began in February, said Egner, a former Soap Factory volunteer who studied art and art history at the University of Minnesota.

Volunteers spent the spring helping demolish old sets and assisted in building new ones, including a room that spins in place and an intestine-shaped maze that even confounded Egner, over the summer.

The gallery expects 11,000 people at this year's Haunted Basement, a fundraiser for the nonprofit Soap Factory. Yet some visitors — or victims — never even get to experience the entire mind-bending ordeal.

At last count, more than 30 have cried "uncle," the code word to get out at any time, so far this year, Egner said. Last year, the Basement scored 219 uncles out of 8,000 visitors.

Make sure you trust the people you're going with. Because they're going to be your only friends down there. Just know that you're about to go into something that's very unlike any other haunted house. We regularly get complaints from people saying they can't get the images out of their heads or they've had nightmares.

A year ago, I would have said we wanted gregarious, outgoing people. What I've learned this year is that some of the most timid, quiet people ... are some of the scariest people once you put them in costume.

We've had good luck in that department. The volunteers who work at the top of the stairs go through the rules. The actors cannot touch you and you cannot touch the actors. Only one person has ever gotten punched. To be honest, he's pretty scary. We consider that, in a weird way, a compliment for him.

It was particularly satisfying for me because I went with my brothers. They had driven up from Milwaukee. They had heard about this project for three years and now they got to experience it.

I'm not a big screamer. I tend to laugh when I get scared. One of my brothers, who will remain nameless, was the screamer. But that's more in his nature. I could have predicted that.