Why Do Some Of Us Like Haunted Houses?

Less than you might think, according to a study recently published in the journal Emotion. After having a voluntary scary experience, the researchers found, people were in better moods and had decreased brain activity overall.

“We think it’s very similar, at least at a physiological and neurological level, to the runner’s high experience, where you’re really pushing yourself and your sympathetic nervous system is in go-mode,”

So, some of us like to get scared because it makes us feel good?

Explains study co-author Margee Kerr, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies fear. Once you’re out of the scary situation — one where there was never any real threat to begin with — feel-good endorphins course through the body, she says. “It is a reprioritizing of energy, of focus into the body. You’re grounded, not being caught up in thinking.”

With that, there are two major haunted houses in Buffalo.