Fall brings cooler weather, pumpkin spice everything, and the urge to go and get lost in a corn maze.

But getting lost might not be as fun as some people think. In fact, for many families it is just as scary as that other October staple - Horror movies! 😱

“We thought this would be fun,” the woman said on the phone with the police, according to a NBC News story about the misadventure. “Instead, it’s a nightmare. I don’t know what made us do this.”

Though stressed, the family was never in any real danger. The maze staff were still on site, waiting for them to finish, and would have gone in to find them if needed. And the family simply could have walked through the corn “walls” to the field edge at any time. But panicked parents and kids aren’t that unusual. Anxious corn maze calls to 911 happen more often than you might think. 

Mazes are supposed to be fun—even the getting lost part, says Brett Herbst, who has been designing mazes in Utah and across the country since 1996. Herbst says there’s an art to making a maze: It must be engaging but not so tricky that people quit. “If you make it too challenging, you lose some people,” he says. While some visitors call the cops when they can’t find their way out, the bigger risk is people getting frustrated and cheating, he adds.

The modern corn maze—in which visitors are usually tasked with finding an exit or solving a variety of challenges—is a fairly recent invention, created only in 1993. Don Frantz, a creative director who had worked on Broadway and the Super Bowl’s halftime show, thought of the idea while admiring cornfields from an airplane. He recruited British designer Adrian Fisher to carve a dinosaur named Cornelius the Cobasaurus into a three-acre Pennsylvania field. Workers pulled stalks by hand to create the design.

Corn mazes are as popular as ever, according to Herbst. In areas hit by drought, however, some farms have had to think outside the box. In 2022, At’l Do Farms outside of Lubbock, Texas, used a mix of sorghum, sunflowers, pearl and foxtail millet, cowpeas, sun hemp, and radishes to create their maze. Herbst and some other farmers have also opted to complement their corn mazes with versions made of sunflowers. The key element, he says, is that you can’t see over or through them too easily. 

While some 911 callers might disagree, “Getting lost is a lot more fun than what you’d initially think,” says Herbst.