The harvest moon makes an appearance through the shredded clouds. It can be seen over the ears of corn that brush the sky. The wind cuts through the rows, corn rustles, rubbing together to make a sound like… well… like corn rubbing together. Nevertheless, to the disoriented mind it’s something sinister. If this sounds like a Halloween lark, simply drive 15 minutes down I-70 to the Shryock family farm, where there awaits a 15-acre corn maze made annually by Mike Shryock and his cousin. Expect company.

“We get about 16 to 17 thousand (visitors) per season,” Shryock says.

That’s roughly 2,000 every weekend, for those mathematically disinclined.

The maze sees a diverse crowd for its mid-Missouri location.

“We get a few people from out of state who stop by,” Shryock says. “You get to meet all sorts of people.”

Maddie Bagwell, a freshman at High Point University in North Carolina, is living proof of this claim. Here visiting friends at MU, Bagwell slated Shryock’s for Friday night and surpassed expectations.

“It was really exciting. I had never been to anything like that before so it was really new and fun,” Bagwell says, though she also admitted to “jumping at every unusual rustling of the corn.”

Bagwell experienced the maze at night, which may forgive her skittishness.

“It is way darker and spookier, (which) makes it more fun because you can’t see anything in front of you,” she said. “If it were just me on my own, I’d be lost the whole time!”

Shryock understands her point of view.

“I think everyone’s lost at some point,” Shryrock says. “Then, on a more serious note, we have a series of workers out there helping people so nobody ever gets really lost.”

No doubt Bagwell would be glad to hear it. She was duly impressed with the maze’s complexity.

“I was expecting it to be really undeveloped but (it) was extravagant and complicated,” she says. “(It) was really well set up. It definitely looked like a lot of work was put into it.”

Bagwell is correct. Designing a corn maze is no mean feat.

“We use global positioning to transfer the design to the field,” Shryock says. “We have some computer software on the farm for navigation purposes. We use it to plot a series of navigation points within the field. It takes anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 navigation points.”

The next few steps are done manually.

“We put a flag in the field, (then) put a number on the flag,” Shryock says.

This is done when the corn is about two feet tall.

“When it gets a bit higher, we cut the trails on a lawnmower using the GPS,” Shryock says.

In the past, the maze has featured everything from a Missouri tiger to a St. Louis Cardinals logo to Mount Rushmore.

“We just kind of brainstorm as a family during the winter and the spring and come up with a theme,” Shyrock said. “We have a different theme every year.”

This year, the field features a giant picture of Grandma Verna along with the words “Happy 90th Grandma Shryock.”

“Everyone that comes knows we have a family farm,” Shryock says of the design. “It was our grandma’s 90th birthday (this year) so we thought people would get a kick out of that.”

Throughout the maze, there are trivia questions to answer that go along with the year’s chosen theme.

How can a little-old-lady-themed maze possibly be frightening? Try it after dark.