The 99 Horror House
Thora Buckner
"It slowly glided down the stairs past us. My dog had all her hackles up and was clearly tracking it, and I felt something like a light brush of wind as it went past us into the living room and disappeared.
Also, supposedly, since dogs can see them. One time, my two dogs and my stepdaughter's dog were all looking up at the ceiling, moving their heads back and forth in sync as if they were following something that was moving."
"I am a scientist and was a firm non-believer in the supernatural or religious ideas like ghosts. It's so easy to discard until it happens to you, until something happens to you for which there is no logical explanation. There is no way to collect any evidence, and so far as I can tell, there is no way to make it stop. This has been ongoing for about 27 years."
"In the middle of the night, my 19-year-old daughter came running into our bed crying and yelling about the woman standing at the end of her bed. It seems it got very cold in her room, and she sat up to pull up the quilt. A woman was standing at the end of her bed staring (beds were original to the house). We laughed and poo-pooed her, but she refused to return to that room, so she stayed in our bed that night and many nights to follow. I did tell her that we were sleeping in the bed where my grandfather died, and she vowed never again to return.
On the second night in the house, my husband woke up and asked who was in the hallway. Thinking it was one of the other kids, he got up to look around but saw no one. 'It was one of the girls in their robes heading for the bathroom.' Except it wasn't. My husband, the nuclear scientist, decided it was just headlights passing by (my beloved voice of reason).
My daughter went next door to the cousin's house to let out the dog and returned with a picture of a family reunion. She pointed out my grandmother and said, 'This is the lady standing at the end of my bed.' She had never met her great-grandmother.
I went down to the basement and chatted with Gramma, telling her that while I loved her presence there, she was scaring the kids. I told her that I loved her, would take care of the house she and my grandfather built, and that it was okay for her to move on. Been quiet ever since."
"I was the youngest and my hands were much larger than the prints. It wasn't a one-off phenomenon either. Maybe a neighbor's toddler was sleepwalking at night, sneaking into our house, dragging a step stool into my room, touching my mirror, putting the stoop back, and locking up on his way out.
Anyway, there was a lot more than that going on, but that's one that couldn't be explained by wind, or house settling, tricks of the eye, carbon monoxide, etc. My advice to you is to just ignore it. The more attention you pay to it, the more frequently the wind will blow your blinds open and slam your doors closed."
"The neighbors had told me that the previous owner's mother lived with them until she passed. So, I told all of this to a friend who has always believed in ghosts and other spiritual/paranormal activity. She wasn't surprised by any of it. She told me the next time I felt her presence to open the front door, show her the light, and calmly tell her it's okay to leave. I did that, and I haven't had any more strange occurrences since."
"I literally saw a piece of paper picked up off a table, lifted into the air, then moved over two feet and dropped. There is no other explanation for any of it. Cats were not in the room to hit the jewelry box, no fans or AC on to move the paper. And yes, I was sober for it all.
Then, all of it just stopped and never occurred again. Don't let the skeptics pour water on your lived experience. There are many mysterious things that happen that we don't fully understand yet. Energy cannot be destroyed; it only changes state.
"Current house, lights flicker until I ask it to stop. Things are moved around. In the kitchen I feel like someone walks up behind me and looks over my shoulder. It really feels like someone is there. I've seen shadows dart down the hallway. It feels like one person. I don't feel threatened. I just ignore it mostly."
"I'd have weird dreams when I otherwise rarely remember dreaming. I decided to do the thing they do in paranormal investigation shows, where someone talks to 'the ghost' and sets ground rules about what is and isn't allowed. I felt so stupid doing it, but as soon as I did, everything stopped. It restarted briefly after a weekend renovation project but stopped without me doing anything. I can't explain it."
Admits one person into one Mini Escape Game attraction. Purchase multiple tickets to play multiple Mini Escape Games. Enter anytime during haunted house operational hours. Subject to waiting in the Mini Escape Game queue line, wait times vary. Limited Capacity.
Around the corner tucked away inside the Shriekeasy you will find the Secret Skull where the mighty tiki totem will ask you questions to reveal your special tiki cocktail. Drink included with purchase. IDs will be checked on site. 13th Floor reserves the right to refuse service to anyone. No refunds. Check-in at the Ticket Booth.
In a dark corner in the halls of 13th Floor Denver, you will be lured into a secret bar, where you can take a break with a refreshing shot before braving your way back into the madness. Must be 21+ to enter. IDs will be checked on site. 13th Floor Denver reserves the right to refuse service to anyone.
Is one time just not enough? Purchase a Respawn Pass to go through the main attraction a second time to relive the scares. This pass can also be purchased at customer service with proof of purchase of original ticket.
It's no secret that many of us here at Ars are genuine fans of horror. As a child, I would compulsively devour horror short stories and watch classic movies on late-night TV, like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) or I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Then I'd lie awake at night in terror, convinced a werewolf was lurking just outside my bedroom window. (In reality, it was a trick of light and shadow against the curtains.) That's the central paradox of horror: we both fear the experience of watching a scary movie, or reading a terrifying book, and compulsively seek it out.
According to Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University in Denmark, we seek out being afraid in controlled settings as a means of confronting our fears in a safe environment. Clasen specializes in studying our response to horror in books, film, video games, and other forms of entertainment, and he is the author of Why Horror Seduces. It's one way we can explore "issues of morality and evil and the contours of our own psychological landscape," he said. "We find and challenge our own limits. And we may even practice coping strategies. It does not make us fearless, but it does seem to make us better at regulating fear."
Like me, Clasen has a lifelong love of horror, even though as a child he was terrified of scary stories. "I would have nightmares and would sleep with the lights on," he admitted. That changed in his teenage years. "What psychologists call a hedonic reversal took place," he said. "I started feeling this weird attraction [to horror] that I couldn't really understand." He devoured the writings of Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft. While earning his various degrees in literature, he found a rich collection of dark gothic material in the English literature canon.
Eventually, the horror genre became his specialized area of research. "I think some of my colleagues feel that what I do is kind of morally dubious, but they let me do my stuff," he said. "Horror provides us with a means for peering into the dark at no risk and almost no cost. It's a way of simulating threats. The challenge is to take an almost trivial observation like that and explain it scientifically."
In a more recent study, published in Poetics last month, Clasen collaborated with two of his Aarhus colleagues. All three co-authors are fascinated by the cognitive science of religion, seeking to uncover why invisible supernatural agents play such a huge role in religious belief systems around the world. Horror taps into the same impulse. Co-author Uffe Schjodt studies so-called "dysphoric rituals," which are rituals that are psychologically or physically painful, like walking on hot coals or sticking needles in the skin. Co-author Marc Malmdorf Andersen studies different forms of play, while Clasen has a hypothesis that, for many people, horror is a form of play.
For their study, the Aarhus team took advantage of the annual Dystopia haunted house in Velje, Denmark, housed in an old fish factory and run by a group of horror enthusiasts, with as many as 300 volunteers pitching in for the entire month of October. In many ways, a haunted house is the perfect laboratory simulation. "We can't invite people to the lab, hide behind a cover, then jump out and yell, 'Boo!'" said Clasen. It's unethical, for starters, but also less immersive. And it turns out that immersion is pretty key to generating fear.
A haunted house "is designed to situate you as the protagonist in a horror story that unfolds in the empirical environment and in real time," he said. "If you buy into that premise and feel you are personally invested in the things that happen, just like when you're playing a computer game, the emotional response is going to be so much stronger. Many of the fear-regulation strategies people use serve the function either of sustaining immersion or breaking immersion."
The team asked people attending the haunted house if they would participate in the study; in the end, there were 280 participants. Those who agreed had to choose which coping strategy to employ: try to maximize their fear or minimize it. (The paper describes the two groups as "adrenaline junkies" and "white-knucklers," respectively.) Clasen et al. found that satisfaction levels were roughly similar in both groups, regardless of whether participants chose to lean into their fear or try to tamp it down.