My kid wanted to go into the plywood one at the county fair, the one with the strobe lights and the rubber bats, so I paid the twelve dollars and we went in.
There's a guy in a mask who jumps out of a fake wall. There's a fan pushing cold air through a hose so it feels like a hand on your neck. There's a soundtrack of thunder that never actually rains. Everything in there is designed to make your body think it might die: the dark, the sudden movement, the low sounds you feel more than hear. It's a machine for borrowing fear and giving it back with the lights on.
My daughter screamed and grabbed my sleeve and laughed at the same time. Squeezed my arm so hard it left marks.
Here's the thing nobody tells you before you go up. The air we're all breathing, the whole envelope of it, is thinner than the shell of an egg around this planet. Below it there's rock. Above it there's nothing at all, and the nothing goes on effectively forever. Everything that has ever screamed, or laughed, or grabbed somebody's arm in the dark happened inside that thin skin. There is no second one.
So we paid twelve dollars to be afraid of a man in a mask, in a plywood box, on the one warm surface in all that cold, and my kid held onto me like I could keep her safe.
I let her think I could.
That grip on my sleeve is the only real haunting in the building.