Good mourning on this drafty Halloween.

During evenings in October, Angie Hansen can be found dressed in a soiled baby-doll dress and pigtails, screaming for help in a blood-spattered morgue.

Ms. Hansen, a Brooklyn actress who performs at Blood Manor, a haunted house in Lower Manhattan, said she doesn’t do it for the money.

“I enjoy watching people get scared,” she said. “It’s like that first drop on a roller coaster. It’s an adrenaline rush.”

When we stopped by Blood Manor’s backstage last Wednesday, Ms. Hansen and some of the 60 other professional tormentors who haunt the halls there were putting on faded clown costumes and bloodied lab coats, or using makeup brushes and blow dryers to put the final touches on black eyes and latex wounds. They would soon take their places among the house’s torture chambers, 3D maze and zombie strip club.