They pay to be frightened in a building whose atoms are, physically speaking, almost entirely nothing. The creaking floorboard under your foot, the door that swings without a hand: solid oak, yes, but the wood is 99.9999999999 percent empty space, a nearly vacant lattice of carbon nuclei held apart by electric fields.
When the board groans, you are not hearing matter touching matter. Nothing ever touches. You are hearing electron clouds refuse each other, a repulsion so total that in a lifetime your shoe will never once make contact with the floor. The whole eerie house is a standoff between fields that will not shake hands.
And the cold spot, the one that raises the hair on your arm and makes you whisper "presence." That is just a place where air molecules are moving slower, carrying less kinetic energy, siphoning warmth from your skin because heat always flows one direction, from you into the room, never back. Your body is losing the argument with the second law. The chill is entropy, invoiced in real time.
The best part is the fear itself. Your racing heart, the prickle of dread: adrenaline, a molecule your adrenal glands assemble from carbon and nitrogen and oxygen atoms forged in dying stars, dumped into a bloodstream so it can flood muscles that will never need to flee a ghost.
Here is the figure that stops me cold, colder than any drafty hallway. The carbon in that groaning floorboard, in the actor's mask, in the very adrenaline flooding your veins, was cooked inside stars that exploded before the Sun existed.
You have walked into a wooden box to be haunted by nothing, while standing inside the actual afterlife of stars.