On a Monday morning in October, Betty Dick, 80, rolled out of bed around 10 and picked up her sister for a doctor’s appointment down the road.

The ladies went for a late breakfast — or early lunch — at Denny’s, where Betty ordered a stack of French toast with a side of bacon.

Then she went home, let her dogs out in the yard and prepped for an evening of blood-curdling screams.

Ms. Betty, as she’s known to the hundred-something people she spooks alongside every fall, is the oldest actor at Scream-A-Geddon, a haunted house in Pasco County often dubbed the scariest in Tampa Bay.

Here she works seven nights a week among the chainsaw-bearers, the demonic mask-wearers, the bloody-faced contortionists bending to skull-crushing synth.

Ms. Betty’s role is “tarot card reader.” Her craft is stillness. At first, people entering her room think she’s an animatronic, but doubt creeps in. When they get up close, she lets them stare into her icy eyes. Then she jolts and hisses: “I see your future… and it’s short.”

Every time, people jump or gasp or laugh or shriek.

“I just love scaring people,” Ms. Betty giggled during performance prep on Monday. Decades have passed since she left her Alabama hometown, but she’s never lost her drawl. “I love it, I really do.”

“And we love you, Ms. Betty,” said Maddie McGowan, a 22-year-old makeup artist. Ms. Betty was one of McGowan’s first clients when she started with Scream-A-Geddon. For three Octobers now, McGowan has brushed blue paint into the crevices of the octogenarian’s face, but she knows to stop short of applying eyeshadow.

“She doesn’t like people touching her eyes,” said McGowan. “We let her do that at home.”

Ms. Betty became an actor by mistake.

Four years ago, she brought her granddaughter to the horror park to interview for a job. An hour later, they’d both been cast. They worked together for a year, but her granddaughter has moved on. Not Ms. Betty.

“She wanted to act, she didn’t care whether her granddaughter was with her or not,” said Amber Johnson, 28. Johnson, vice president of haunted attractions, said scare actors are an eclectic bunch.

“She petrifies our customers, but out there she makes all of us laugh,” said Johnson, nodding toward the staging area where actors slip into costume. “I have to cross my legs sometimes because she makes me want to pee myself.”

At Scream-A-Geddon, Ms. Betty has found a community, some a quarter of her age, of freaks and geeks and maniacs (in the best way). They’re strangers turned friends who have supported her through the illness of a sibling. The death of a child.

And they’re people who know how to have fun. That’s what haunted houses are for, after all, Ms. Betty reckons.

“The world’s a little heavy right now,” she said, seated among rubber snakes and roaches. “People come here to laugh and let off steam.”

They make her laugh in return.

She’s seen dads cower behind their daughters. Startled dudes run smack into the wall trying to get away. One woman dropped to the floor and wound up with her head stuck in a bookshelf. A team of people had to come and set her free.

Much better than sitting at home, Ms. Betty thinks.

She was widowed in her 20s — her husband killed in Vietnam. She never remarried, but they’d had four children who produced 19 grandchildren and 29 great-grandchildren a few decades later, so she’s never been lonely.

After his death, she went to college and got a job working with computer boards. She’d stopped working nearly 30 years before the gig at the haunted house came about, but retirement never really suited her. Sitting in front of a TV, Ms. Betty has gathered, is how people lose their minds.

“So I’ll be doing this job for as long as I’m able to,” said Ms. Betty, her 5-foot frame engulfed in fog from the smoke machine welcoming the park’s first customers.

Scream-A-Geddon is open every night beginning at 7 p.m. through the end of October, and select dates in early November.

In the off-season, Ms. Betty spends the money she’s earned from haunting on singles cruises, where she likes playing slot machines and listening to live music with her sister.

When she’s missing the thrill of Scream-A-Geddon, she puts on a rubber clown mask and lurks by the beds of her sleeping grandchildren — just for a kick.