Guinness: Twin Cities zombies are No. 1

In case you were wondering, our zombies in Minnesota can now rightfully claim they assembled the world's largest gathering. Guinness said so.

The email from Guinness World Records, received Monday afternoon, congratulated organizers of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Zombie Pub Crawl for stealing the title from ... New Jersey? Apparently so. The old record was held by the New Jersey Zombie Walk, which had 4,093 attendees in 2011.

In October, organizers say the Twin Cities gathering drew more than 30,000 zombies. That included the 8,027 who staggered into Midway Stadium, where "every rotting corpse" was counted for the world-record attempt.

"It's really really hard to get a record like that because of the requirements," said Taylor Carik, one of the lead organizers. "But we had a really motivated team on it and they got it done. The other option was to fly out a rep from Guinness but that's expensive."

The pub crawl began with 150 zombies in Minneapolis in 2005 and has almost doubled in size every year. Now they're a familiar sight, an undulating mass flooding city bars and sidewalks on the West Bank with their (fake) blood and muffled chants of "braaaaaaains."

It's also worth noting our zombies were the first. According to the pub crawl's press release:

"The Zombie Pub Crawl is the longest running event of its kind in the USA. There are many copycat events around the world, but this is the original."

(Photo courtesy of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Zombie Pub Crawl)

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