Haunted attractions that will push you to the edge of your sanity is the tagline that greets you on the Pennhurst Asylum website. Like other asylums-turned-amusement centers, Pennhurst’s marketing focuses on the horror of its history. The ghosts haunting the place, waiting to terrify you, are supposed to be those of the people once admitted there. The website includes pictures of performers as ghostly patients in straightjackets, monstrous hospital staff performing lobotomies, and many a stereotypical image of mostly female patients looking crazed—messy hair, dirty faces, wild facial expressions. Last year, USA Today readers voted Pennhurst one of the country’s best haunted attractions.

When I ended up at a psych ward myself, it was just past midnight in the beginning of September. As two nurses took inventory of my naked body, noting my two tattoos and the scar on my right lower leg, my hair was still wet from my attempt to drown myself in Lake Michigan. Still, I had been hesitant to agree to inpatient treatment.

Part of the reason was my lack of health insurance, but when the admissions nurse removed financial concerns as a reason, I realized I was also afraid.  My brain flashed to the images of psych wards in pop culture that are laced with stigma and fear. And then there’s the decades of documentation showing how real mental-illness patients have been kept in unsanitary, unsafe, and abusive conditions, especially at state-run facilities like Illinois’ Choate Mental Health and Development Center.

Because I’m white and live in one of the gayborhoods of Chicago’s Northside, privilege shaped my experience. I knew I was unlikely to be mistreated at the private hospital where I’d been taken. We each had our own room. The staff wore Pride stickers to show their gender and sexual identities, and the office had a large Pride flag. “If you’re going to be hospitalized, this is the place to be,” the admissions nurse reassured me. Private facilities are radically different from state-run ones. Still, urban legends don’t make such distinctions.

Finally, I nodded. I’d be admitted. She said she’d get the paperwork. Another nurse took me to my room.

“One last question,” he said after he’d gotten me set up. “Are you hearing or seeing anyone that no one else can?”

I shook my head, and he smiled as he left. But I was hearing a voice in my head, just not the kind he was asking for. It was more of an earworm—a line from a movie that kept repeating itself. It was a woman saying, “I can fix it. I can fix it.” Her desperate voice was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it, as though the dialogue was a ghost in my memory. The line, both ominous and consoling, stayed with me throughout my five days in the hospital, the mystery of its origin a way to keep myself occupied during my many hours of rest.

A few days after getting out of the psych ward, morbid curiosity led me to look up haunted houses that have an asylum spin. In addition to Pennhurst, in 2016, Knott’s Berry Farm in California opened a haunted VR attraction called “FearVR: 5150”—a reference to California’s code for involuntary psychiatric commitment—that they begrudgingly shut down after just five days due to protests by mental health advocates.

As I scrolled, I realized that as much as they horrify me in the bad way, these attractions also horrify me in the alluring, macabre way the season intends. As Leila Taylor says of so-called “ruin porn” in Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul: “I know the smell of exploitation, and that they ignore the people who live and work and play there, that they romanticize poverty and economic decay, but I keep looking.”

I kept looking, too, because haunted spectacle can be a portal to understanding. That’s also why I’ll admit to wanting to go to Pennhurst—though I want to see the daytime tours about the asylum’s history. You can’t have a ghost without a person who was once alive. A specter of their lived experience remains under the gory makeup.

That tension also made me think of Floria Sigismondi’s 2020 film The Turning, part of my yearly Halloween rotation of ghost story movies. (As a Halloween lover, Halloween Eve starts for me in September.) I turned it on.  

The movie is adapted from the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw,” about a governess who is haunted by the ghosts of her predecessor and another former employee while caring for two siblings in a secluded estate. It moves the story from the 1840s to 1994, but for most of the film the plot follows James’ story, seeming to make the narrative choice that ghosts are real.

Then there’s a twist.

Near the end, the narrative switches from the perspective of Kate, the governess, to a more omniscient view. We see her disheveled, her hair messy, her eyes red and wide, like the stereotypical crazed women in the pictures on Pennhurst’s site. We realize that Kate is the only one seeing ghosts—because she is mentally ill. She wants Flora, the child she takes care of, to say she is also seeing ghosts. But Flora continues to deny seeing any, even as Kate shakes her by the shoulders and the ceramic doll she is holding drops to the floor.

“I’ll fix her,” Kate says, crying and rushing to pick up the broken pieces of the doll.

There it was. I’ll fix her.

I paused the movie. I had misremembered the line as “I’ll fix it,” but it was Kate I’d been hearing in the hospital. I felt a sense of relief at identifying the voice that had brought me a reassurance that I still wanted to live during those five long days. Knowing that the line came from a character struggling with mental illness made me feel less alone.

During the 1930s, critics and scholars debated whether the governess in James’ story was seeing actual ghosts, or if they were a projection of her madness. If Kate’s psych nurse had asked her whether she was hearing or seeing anyone that no one else could, unlike me, she would have said yes. But one answer doesn’t preclude the other: She can be seeing ghosts and be having difficulty with her mental health.

The fuzziness of that boundary is part of what makes me hold Halloween so dear. Many connect the origins of Halloween to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which is believed to have marked the loosening of the veil between the spirit world and the corporeal one. Being in the psych ward felt like being in this area between worlds. We were ghosts: I knew the rest of the world was there, and many people knew where I was, but we couldn’t communicate with each other. During the 15 minutes of computer time I had each day, rushing onto Instagram felt like using a Ouija board—calling the spirits of friends to me and my spirit to them.

This year, even more than usual, I celebrate the way Halloween honors the space between the two planes of existence—a reality that psych ward patients, and many others, live with daily. Though exploitative haunted houses and other popular culture offerings might suggest otherwise, mental health patients are real people who experience not only illness but also joy and desire.

I think back to the karaoke night we had on the ward. Most participated. Even individuals who didn’t speak or engage with the rest of us because of their psychosis sang. They became present, even if it was just for the few minutes of the song. It feels odd to say we had fun in the psych ward, but we did.

Erasing the stigma around mental illness and psych wards won’t happen all at once. But I’d like to propose a new Halloween tradition to help us on our way: that when we look for the ghosts around us, we pay attention not only to the ghosts’ cries, but to their songs too.

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Fear gets a bad rap. It’s a so-called negative emotion, one that supposedly stands between us and our dreams. It is certainly true that pure fear doesn’t feel good, but that is the whole point of the emotion. Fear tells us to get the hell out of Dodge because Dodge is a bad place. Fear evolved over millions of years to protect us from danger. So, yes, a feel-bad emotion, but also, and perhaps paradoxically, the engine in a whole range of pleasurable activities and behaviors—which inspire what we can call recreational fear.

Once you start looking for it, you’ll find recreational fear everywhere. From a very early age, humans love being jump-scared by caregivers in the form of peek-a-boo, and being hurtled into the air (and caught). They get older and take great pleasure in chase play and hide-and-seek. They are drawn to scary stories about monsters and witches and ghosts. They perform daredevil tricks on playgrounds and race their bikes toward what, from a parent’s perspective, is certain and violent death. A little older and they get together for horror movie nights, stand patiently in line for roller coasters, and play horror video games. Indeed, most of us never quite lose our peculiar attraction to recreational fear—even if we eschew slasher flicks or dark crime shows brimming with murder, death, and gore.

So even though Dodge may be a bad place, we still keep visiting it, at least from the safe distance of play and make-believe. How come?

One hypothesis is that recreational fear is a form of play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns important skills and develops strategies for survival. Playfighting kittens train their ability to hold their own in a hostile encounter, but with little risk and low cost, compared to the real thing. Same with humans. When we play, we learn important things about the physical and social world, and about our own inner world. When we engage in recreational fear activities specifically, from peek-a-boo to horror movie watching, we play with fear, challenge our limits, and learn about our own physiological and psychological responses to stress. In other words, recreational fear might actually be good for us.

To investigate whether that is indeed the case and why, my colleagues and I have established the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University, Denmark. We do lab studies, survey studies, and real-world empirical studies to understand this widespread but scientifically understudied psychological phenomenon.

The Recreational Fear Lab conducts investigations to understand the scientifically understudied phenomenon of fear—and why it might actually be good for us. Courtesy of author.

In one ambitious research project, led by my colleague Marc Malmdorf Andersen, we set out to investigate the experiences of guests at a very frightening haunted house—Dystopia Haunted House in Denmark. We mounted surveillance cameras in the house’s scariest rooms, strapped participants with heart rate monitors, and distributed a bunch of questionnaires. The surveillance footage allowed us to see how guests responded to frightening events, such as a chainsaw-wielding pig-man chasing them down a dark corridor. The heart rate monitors told us about their physiological responses to such events, and the questionnaires allowed us to understand how they felt about it all.

They told us they perceived their experiences as a kind of play, supporting our notion of recreational horror as a medium for playing with fear. But we also wanted to go deeper into the relationship between fear and enjoyment. You might think that relationship is linear—the more fear, the better. But when we plotted the actual relationship between fear and enjoyment, it looked like an upside-down U. In other words, when people go to a haunted attraction, they don’t want too little fear (which is boring), and they don’t want too much fear (which is unpleasant). What they want is to hit what we call the “sweet spot of fear.” That doesn’t just go for high-intensity haunted attractions either. When you hurtle a kid into the air, you don’t want it to be too tame or too wild; when teenagers joyride their bikes, they need just the right amount of tummy-tickling arousal; when you pick a horror movie on Netflix, you try to go for the one that sits just at the right point on the scare-o-meter.

So, there is pleasure to be had from these vicarious visits to Dodge, but are there any other benefits? In several past and ongoing studies of the psychological and social effects of engagement with recreational fear, we’ve seen it improve people’s ability to cope with stress and anxiety. For instance, one study—led by my colleague Coltan Scrivner—found that people who watch many horror movies exhibited better psychological resilience during the first COVID-19 lockdown than people who stay away from scary movies. Presumably, the horror hounds have trained their ability to regulate their own fear from playing with it. We know from another Dystopia Haunted House study that people actively use a range of coping strategies to regulate their fear levels in pursuit of the sweet spot, and it makes sense that we get better at using those strategies through practice.

You can think of recreational fear as a kind of mental jungle gym where you prepare for the real thing, or as a kind of fear inoculation. A small dose of fear galvanizes the organism for the big dose that life throws at it sooner or later. So even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun—it may be good for us. My colleagues and I even have preliminary results to suggest that some people with mental health issues, such as anxiety disorder and depression, get relief from recreational horror. Maybe it’s about escaping anhedonia—emotional flatlining—momentarily, and maybe it’s about playing with troublesome emotions in a controllable context. For fear to be fun, you need to feel not only that the levels are just-so, but that you are in relative control of the experience.

With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear. They’ll end up in Dodge sooner or later, and they will be better equipped if they’ve at least pretended to be there before.

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