How To Prevent Animation Notifies From Being Called In A Main Menu?

My project is a first-person game, with a notify on the character’s running animation that plays a footstep sound. For some reason, when my main menu level loads this sound will play, sometimes more than once, in spite of the character not being present and the input mode set to UI-only. Any idea what causes this and how to fix it?

To put it a different way, why does the first-person character blueprint get called regardless of the actual level set-up, and how do I prevent that from happening?