The Science of Haunted Houses

the haunted attraction. Various scary things happen, You encounter tab blaws that are frightening, people jump out at you, there's smoke, there's light, their smell, and you leave screaming and giggling. My childhood home, really you grew up in a haunted No, but my dad loves Halloween, and so as as a tenderhearted five year old, I remember going up to my house and seeing that it had been transformed into a graveyard.

And my dad had because he were to the university, and so he went to the department there and got the you know, whole makeup thing and aged himself and looked like he was like the grave keeper dude. And then he also projected the pit and the pendulum on the side of the house. Okay that the old film, Yeah yeah, with the blade coming down slowly and you know, wow, he went all out, he did. So that is my first impression of what haunted house might be like. Okay,

you I think my earliest. I mean, my family always made a big deal out of Halloween as well, but I don't think we ever really set up a haunted house per se. But I do remember when we were

living in rural Tennessee. Uh, my church group would go every year to see this thing that was called scare Mare, which we us kids are often referred to as prayer Mere because the gimmick was you come to this little rural church out in the middle of nowhere and they put on this haunted house every year and you go through it and it's one of these these fundamentalist Christian haunted houses that that each room shows you that the perils of a sin uh and you know, this is

what's gonna happen if you if you drink, this is what's gonna happen if you listen to bad music, and all the type of stuff you can you can imagine. And then at the end they empty you out into a tent where a preacher sermonizes to you for what felt like an hour or two and that was the end of it. That was the prayer mayor portion of it.

And it was, you know, it was cheaply done, and a lot of it was kind of it was very heavy handed even at that age, but they were still using some of the elements of haunted houses that everyone is kind of used to that everybody does a chainless chainsaw, a dude in a mask, somebody with blood on them, someone jumping out at you out of the dark, that

kind of thing. It's only really been since i moved to Atlanta as an adult that I've gotten to really experience a high grade, professional haunted attraction where they really throw everything together and just wallop all your senses with with frightful images, frightful sounds, frightful smell, etcetera. And I'm talking about the nether World Haunted house right Another World is I think one of the probably most esteemed haunted houses in the United States and is a fine, fine example,

and we'll talk a little bit more about that. But I did want to say that the church, the sort of Churchill haunted houses. Forgive my punt art for the genesis of the modern haunted house, because that's actually how haunted houses start as a charity event. But right now we have in the US over two thousand haunted attractions that charge admission, about a thousand charity attractions, and three

hundred amusement parts that have various haunted houses. Um. And I wanted to point this out because I did not realize this that the average person will show out about seventy two dollars on decorations, costumes, and candy for Halloween, and total Halloween spending was six point eight six billion, second only to Christmas in Christmas decorations. So Halloween obviously is a big deal in our psyche, and uh, haunted

houses I think are the catalyst of it all. Yeah, and and and then always gives me such a it's such a big deal. It's always a big deal to me. But it's such a big financial deal. Then why is Thanksgiving Christmas? Why aren'ty always trying to to wean in on it and get and show up in October and steal some of the spotlight from from Halloween because they're like, hey, as long as you as you are dropping some dime on decorations. Why don't you pick up a nice little

Santa Claus. Yeah, and I'm also off for let's start Halween in September. I kind of started in March, so I was gonna say, like in December. Yeah. Um. But as you point out, Another World is a great example. It's been in the business for sixteen years and it's created by movie professionals Ben Armstrong and Billy Messina. Messina did ffex on Franken Hooker and I think one of the basket Case movies. To give you horror fans a little perspective. Uh, they use original storytelling, so they don't

rely on Hollywood's stereotypes like Freddie or Jason. They have thousands of effects. They create custom props, makeup masks and monsters. They have a ton of puppetry as well, uh, animatronics, and they have more than one hundred nether spawn, which are their actors, some of whom are stunt actors. And uh some of these actors are actually professional feeder actors and some have day jobs. And this year they have actual Beauty pageant winner Mrs Georgia, who transforms herself into

a ghoul. So you really do see people of all different stripes joining in on this. So for this episode, we we thought, all right, we're going to do an episode on the science of hunted houses, we should both go to another world and actually check it out for reals, you know. And uh, and so I went out. I checked it out, I went through the attraction. I talked to Ben, one of the owners and operators and the

minds behind all of this. And then you went a few days later and you checked out the behind the scenes stuff, So we kind of we kind of double teamed it. I kind of got the user end of it and you've got the behind the scenes. Yeah, it was really cool. Got to see what it looks like about an hour before the door is open, and it really is like putting on a large scale theatrical production

every single night. Um, and we'll talk a little bit more about the different elements, but it was amazing to see all the actors getting into their costumes and I think they've got seven different makeup artists. They've got a room full of masks, which is amazing to see. So the eight year old in me was extremely excited to be able to go behind the scenes and go through the maze and kind of see it in the partial daylight. Oh nice. We attended to grab a mask and sort

of hang out. I was actually I wasn't. Then I kind of got that vibe of like, you know what, that there are actors here doing that. You don't need to dive in here and try to scare people. Right. Well, when I was there, I got a few quotes from Ben, so I thought we'd kick things off here and sprinkle a few other quotes throughout. But here is Ben's answer when I asked him, why, as humans do we like

to be afraid? I think when you feel fear, it's a really up primitive instruct you know, when you're the hunter or the hunter. It's a huge surge of a journaline and people really enjoy that feeling of terror when they know it's safe. I think you're really scared and you think you're really gonna die. It's a bad, sickening feeling. But when you get shocked and scared and then you can laugh about it, it's so you floor feeling everyone phrase.

So that was some fun interview material to get there because you can hear some of the craziness in the background. Because it's right outside side another world on a very busy night. There's their chainsaws, they're screaming, there's laughter. I mean,

it's it's just a pretty awesome place to be. And I think that what he's talking about and what you just described to in terms of people really having fun with it, is directly pointing to the benign violation theory, which we've talked about before, right when we've talked about, especially in our episode on laughter and humor and where that comes from. I believe we call that episode Funny or Die. We've dragged this idea out a number of times, you know, the whole Uh, savor tooth tiger jumps out

at you and attacks you. Uh, you're dead right, But if something else jumps out of you, you're gonna react like it's a savor tooth and then it's not ha ha, you laugh. That's the signal that I thought I was gonna die, but not really. So this was the first time I'd gone through a haunted attraction and in certainly another world following that episode that we did. So I was thinking about benign violation the whole time, and sure enough, I'm seeing it certainly in everybody around me, but even

in myself. You know, I'm scared, I'm falling on the floor because something jumped out of me from the side, and then I'm laughing. Yeah, And I mean it's a cathartic experience, right, I mean, there's no secret why we want this and why we seek out this experience because it really we are sort of built for that safe tooth tiger, right. So um, it's kind of nice to

be able to exercise that in a safe place. And also I wanted to say that Ben Armstrong had really talked about how important safety is and haunted houses, and this is a fine example. They have, you know, something like thirty two surveillance cameras. They've thought of every single safety aspect. When duty cops there on secure, you're ready, you have to wait in a line before you go in, and there's a lot of fun stuff going on with you know, people and costumes kind of scaring you. But

then the the the security is there as well. I imagine that they can kind of scope out who could potentially be a troublemaker when they go in, because you know, you should be there for a good time. If you're there to start trouble, you're the wrong place. Yeah, if you just did a couple of shots at Yaga my start and went through that, that could be trouble um and they are on the lookout for that. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the Haunted House

layout itself. Yes, you were not given a map when you show up, because that's part of it. It's kind of a labyrinth that you lose yourself in for a few minutes, right, and they want to disorient you, so obviously they have um built it so that they can disordento you to the best of their abilities, and they use what they call sixty degree walls or six sided rooms to do this, and also ninety degree walls, and the ninety degree walls are really try to get you

more through the maze itself. UM, but the sixty degree walls the six sided rooms are really cool because they have lots of corners to hide actors in what they call scares, and it's easier to disorientate or disorient customers and create mazes, and then it gives a different feeling

um of more familiar construction. And we talked about this a little bit in our last podcast about maps in our configuration of neurons and how they really like the X Y access the horizontal on the vertical not so much something coming at you diagonally, and they're going diagonal on all of these rooms. We're not used to dealing with those rooms. I mean, no matter how crazy the architecture in your house is, chances are you're still dealing

with square or maybe in some cases rounded structures. Right. So when they're thinking about the set design of this already, they've kept this in mind, this sort of natural scare tactics of coming at you from diagonals and from all different places. Um. And then they have something called scare forward and through put. And this is sort of like more on the business side, because through put is the rate of people that go through the haunt, and it helps to keep lines a little bit lower and keeps

multiple groups from crashing into each other. Yeah, I mean, because not a very straightforward and boring but essential business level. You need x number of people to go through there at a certain rate if you're gonna make money, and if you don't, because if you're not making money doing this, I mean, all right, it's all fun and games, but but it's not a business. And really, you know, a delightfully twisted way. You kind of have to think of

a haunted attraction like a slaughter house. You have a bunch of cattle and you need to steer them through the attraction at a certain rate without any hiccups. You need to keep them moving. You don't except, of course, you don't want the cows to freak out. You want the humans to freak out, but to a point. And then if the freak out goes a little a little too far, then you need to be able to remove

them so that the flow can keep going. And if you are someone who is going to go through a haunted house and you've got a little bit of scarity pants, here is a tip. You will want to stay at the front. And I know that sounds counterintuitive. I know that's that's because this is the thing every year my wife and I did do this when when we go to another world, we're like, yes, we're gonna get up there at the front. Were the brave ones. We love

this stuff. Let's do it. And then we indever, Let mean, we still get you know, the Jesus scared out of us, but we'll inevitably find ourselves in the situation where we arrive a little too early, and then we spot the monster in the corner, just standing there waiting to get the people behind us, and we're kind of like, jump out of me, I want it, man, We'll see. That's

the whole strategy. It's called scare forward. And what they're doing is that they're they're really going at the sides of the group and the back of the group because the idea is again to get that through put out there and to push the group forward. So if you are in the front, you're probably not going to get you know, an actor or a google or a monster two inches in front of your face like someone in the sides or the back of the group would. So

they're hurting you. They're essentially you're being herded by monsters through a slaughterhouse. It's true, you are, and um, you know, we should mention this is probably obvious, but there are bunches of scare pockets throughout that maze, so little alcoves and again that's why the six sided rooms are so helpful, because this corner's helped to hide people. Uh, and they have a number of interesting ways to hide people. A lot of hiding in plain site. Is it a statute

is it a person? I can't tell unless it moves, or there'll be something that looks like a person and you're you're watching it like all right, buddy, I'm onto you. And then bam, werewolf jumps out at you from the corner, and which is really cool. We'll talk a little bit more about camouflage and a little bit um, but let's take a quick break in when we get back, we will talk about modes of manual manipulation. Hey, you, we're back. We're talking about the science of haunted houses, of course,

as in haunted attractions. And I'll mention this again but if you want to check out Another World online and see their cool website, go to www dot fear world dot com and you can see all sorts of clips and images and some wonderful write ups about their attractions. Yeah, and they are doing an excellent job, I have to

say of manual manipulation. In other words, taking our five cents is and and of course you could argue that we have many more than five senses, but there's main five senses in manipulating them through all sorts of things like our site in our orientation, yeah, sight orientation. This is kind of like I guess in a way the obvious one, but but some of the subtler ways they do it may surprise you. I mean on a very

basic level. Yes, you're walking through these dimly lit corridors and things are happening, and a lot of like especially in other world, a lot of stuff is happening. You're you're distracted by little details, say like some sort of a ghastly frame and a picture on the wall that seems to be watching you, some sort of holographic bit of art here, actual skeletons just I mean, they do a wonderful job just on the layout of the place.

So you're looking at that kind of stuff, But then there there's also other visual things, lights, lasers, moving fog, moving monsters, and it all creates this chorus of confusion. Yeah, And of course the lack of light is is the hallmark, and the reason for that is because if you're plunge into tote old darkness, then you're not quite sure what's going on. And so there are different parts of the

Haunt that are that are darker than others. But I did want to just give a quick overview of our site that of course we have rods and cones in our eyes. Cone cells perceive color in bright light, and rod cells perceived black and white images and work best and low light. So who has something called rhodopsin And rhodoption is a chemical that's found in the rods, and rhodoption is really key to the ability to see during the night. And it's the chemical that rods used to

absorb photons and perceived light. And when a molecule of rhodoption absorbs a photon, it splits into a retinal and an option molecule. This is important because these later recombine naturally back into redoption at a fixed rate, but the

recombination is very slow. So the reason I'm pointing this out is because when you expose your your eyes to bright light, all the roodoption breaks down into this retinal and option, and then if you turn off the lights and try to see in the dark, you cannot because it has to try to recombine line. And that's one of the disorienting effects of playing with a light in

a haunted house. And here's a fun fact. Okay, the retinal used in the eye is derived from vitamin A. So if a person's diet is low in vitamin A, there's not enough retinal and the rods, and therefore there's not enough reduction. So people who lack vitamin A often suffer from night blindness. Okay, so if you you want to really be on to be prepared for your venture through the haunted house, you want to bone up on your vitamin you want to just stuck up on that

vitamin A. But I thought that was interesting. I mean, that's also like great because I know I'll be driving at night occasionally when I can't help but drive at night, and and I feel like I can't see anything. So maybe next time I need a bone up on the vitamins. There you go, There you go before you drive, before you go into a haunted house, and drive into a haunted house. Yeah, yeah, which is an entirely different attraction from the future. But there's also different ways that can

manipulate your eyesight. And I saw one um example of this online from a past another world um year. But they had a room that was covered in illuminated dots, So everywhere you look there's just dots, and you could not see the edges, you could not see anything. And I thought, well, that's fascinating because that's really like obscuring your ability to actually pinpoint your orientation, which is so important and allow you to have sort of a fixed

established place in the room. And it's really frightening to even watch the clip of someone coming at you with dots on, of course, because they're they're melding into the background, you know, I do you know you mentioned this to me yesterday and I'm like, I don't remember the dots, but now I do. Think I went through the attraction the year that they had the dots, because suddenly there's a person that's covered with dots coming at you as well, and that kind of course throws you off balance, as

does their use of sound. Yeah, there is a lot of noise going on in the haunted house, and those clip and the clips that we played, you could certainly hear the outdoor noise and on the inside you have creepy music, you have loud noises coming from elsewhere in the hunt. A course, you're hearing chainless chainsaws rearing up. I mean, that's a staple. There's just no getting around it when it comes to chain saw usage at a

haunted attraction, And it's all just creating this cacophony. But then there they're also these kind of moments of not quite silence, because you're not gonna get really silence. It's not a really sound proof environment, but they'll be like a calmn, I guess before the noise comes out of your specifically like an air gun or or an airhorn

going off right next to your head. You know. Thinking about the sensitivity of our ears, because we talked about this and the Ignoble podcast, and we talked about how if you're hearing is delayed, if you hear yourself talking, it's delayed just a fraction of a second. That can just change everything in the machinery in the way that

you perceive sound. And um, it made me think about the fact that your your ear is really important in actually detecting the gravitational field as well and giving you a sense of orientation. So when you have all these different elements of sound coming at you, that can really disturb um your sense of where you are. And I was also thinking about something called the butt kicker that they use. I love the name of it. It actually

vibrates the floor. Oh yes, yes, okay. And also in the other world, when I was talking to you, Ben. He said, they've experimented with sub sonic frequencies, but they decided not to use them because they have some odd effects on people. Okay, change them in the Monster's that kind of thing exactly, you start to grow hair everywhere. It's it's it's not pretty. They definitely play with your balance a lot. They're they're squishy floors. There's their floors

that feel uneven. There's there's kind of a metal bridge over actual water that's shaky, to say nothing of the solid bridge that goes through a spinning cylinder. That old effect is uh that always gets because that just throws your balance off completely because the surface you're walking around isn't moving, but visually you're seeing the room spin. So you react as if the room is spending and you're reaching out right. And then of course you get another element.

You're trying to feel your way through the room, but then you're feeling creepy crawley things. The sense of touch is really important, and I wanted to point out to that the animatronics Another World spray a lot of air and water at YouTube. Yes, you're suddenly you're missed by stuff, and if that's combined with some other sense elements that we'll get to in a second. Then it can be really disturbing because you're like, ah, that thing just threw

up on me, what is this leaking? I mean, we can't have the response anyway if something gets honest it's wet, because sure, maybe it's raining, but it could be urine. Yeah, exactly. And actually they do have a bathroom. Uh did you go through the bathroom area? Oh, yeah, where they have the toilet plucked from my dreams, from my nightmares. It's a toilet that is covered an excrement and yeah, and they've got little bits of rice that come up from the ceiling from I think it's like a air duct

or something. They rearrange that toilet every year. So one year in particular, one of the earlier years I went. You had to crawl through a tunnel and when you emerge on the other side, you emerge right in front of that foul toilet. Yes, again, plucked plucked from my nightmares. But again you're that's the sense of touch that you're feeling, and we take it for granted, but it's really effective

because it's exciting. The five different types of nerve endings in your skin that govern sensitivity, heat, cold, pain, and pressure and itch. So when you are going past those dangling tentacles, your body is trying to figure out what exactly it is. Is it a threat? And it's important to mention on this touch business though, when we're talking

about the reception this touch this, I'm checking my finger here. Um. One of the big rules of any haunted attraction, professional or even just semi professional, it's it's kind of the reverse of a gentleman's club. The monsters do not touch anyone that works that's coming through the attraction. The monsters will not touch you. They may come close to you, they may sort they jump out at you, but they are not going to grab you. They're not going to

reach out and mess your hair up or anything. Now. I actually got to get behind one of the animatronics too, and um, it kind of manipulate it to see to the point where it goes past someone or or come forward to someone. It was pretty cool. Like the big grabbers grabbers. Yeah, now I have been grabbed by those. But then but then again, it's not a person grabbing you. It's a large inflatable puppet grabbing you. So it's it's

a different thing and it's soft. Yeah, but even though the monsters cannot touch you, lots of things touch you in this particular hunt, right, the actors will not touch you, but the other things, like tentacles, I feel like they were baby dolls on strings. There were. They were large, inflatable black substances. So you're you feel like you're squeezing your way out of the belly of some humendous leviathan. Yes, which plays to our fear of small spaces, are in

close spaces and custrophobia. They warn the heck out of you before you go into it. It's certainly not a place for the claustrophobic, for someone who is affected by strobe lights or or anything of that nature. Now, one of the walls that you kind of have to shimmy

through actually does push back. So if someone were having a problem with that and they can shut it down at a moment's notice, Yeah, I think you move that wall straight act so um and actually I think that you yourself could do you just push it, But it looks like as though you know you have to show me through this little um bit of room here. So I did want to mention that probably one of the most grotesque aspects for me, at least when I was

going through the Haunted house was the smells. Yeah, the smell. I asked Ben if he could give me a couple of examples of what they use, because of course, this is a huge mode of manipulation when it comes to us humans, and it's you and Ben Armstrong. You're in the middle of nether world prior to it opening. We go through the back where to this little room where he shows me where he's got all these sents that he can spray to freshen up, as he says, place. Um.

He also had some devices that continuously emit orders. But um. Basically, he showed me a couple of his select odors and they were swamp, mildew, rotting vegetation, which I said, all of them. I said, Oh, that's that's not too bad. That's you know, I can live with that. And then he kind of went and he sprayed the hospital smell, and then I went, that's the worst, because it really does kind of get under your skin a little bit.

And he said, oh, you think that's the worst. And that is when he doused the entire hall in a big spray of what is called circus animal and that sounds lovely, right, great, yeah, and you and you were like, I used to working at a big deal exactly. I was like, I can take that. What hit me in the face smelled like the anal glance of an elephant. It was probably the worst smell I've ever smelled in

my life. Now, of course he doesn't humigate the place with that, but he just puts it in certain pockets and it gets to mellow a little bit. So I really had the more pungent experience. And it is still in my car and on my clothes and on my handbage. You held your handbag up for various co workers to smell this morning and I didn't wretched. So we I may need to get a new computer bag, but we'll see.

But that is a huge part of it, because you know, one of the things I noticed is that when I smell that, the receptors on my tongue even were activated

because I felt like it was in my mouth. And we have talked about this before that this is a huge warning system for our bodies that when we smell something that's disgusting or we taste it, we automatically recoil and our bodies tell us that there's something dangerous because it could be something putrid, something poisonous, something that's going to harmless in some way. And so the brain is saying, be wary of this. You can look into it, but know that it might kill you. And certainly we can

grow accustomed to many foul odors. Is our brain gives us that chance to all right, check it out, and if you're comfortable with it, then we'll will allow you to not register it as much. But certainly you're not gonna have at that kind of time as you make your way through hunted attraction to grow accustomed to circus animals. No, you're not. You're just gonna like quoa. That's that's problematic.

My body is telling me there's a problem here. So I thought that's kind of cool how they set the stage there in terms of how are manually manipulating your senses, but also they are psychologically manipulating. And this begins, uh at the very moment that you park your car and you get out of it. For some of us, it actually begins before you get there. I have to say, because not everyone goes to the trouble of reading the text on the website. But they do an awesome job

every year. Just give you a little taste. There too, haunts each year at another world. This year it's Banshees and the high on Banshees. The cell is the ancient evil city of Ys has risen from the ocean off the coast of Ireland, bringing with it a plague of Banshees. These foul islets winged monstrosities feed on the darknergery of dying humans, seeking battlefields and natural disasters where life hangs

in the balance. And then the Hive is really good because the cell On that is, during the height of the Cold War in nineteen sixty two, Robert Willington Hughes, a filthy rich genetics researcher, sealed up his staff and followers in an underground bunker called the Hive. So so if you if you do like me, and you go to the website first you get that in your hand, you're like, all right, giant insects, irish myths and Banshees.

I can get into that. And then when you get there, you get your ticket, you get in line, and the monsters are prowling the parking lot. That's all right, And so they're beginning to tell that story that you are in fear or you're in danger, and you should be fearful of what's about to happen. And what I think is so interesting about frightening narratives, and we've talked about this with children too, is that it's it's kind of playing to this knowledge that at the end of the

day we're all pretty much doomed. Life is fleeting, and yet you get to go through this exercise and storytelling and come out on the other end. Now, one of the things that I think is really great that they do is misdirection. This has a huge psychological impact. Yes, And actually I asked Ben I'm strong about misdirection when I went out to the Haunted Attraction, and this is what he had to say. Everything in here is very

much like Slide of Man. You want to create a strong role, a sound effect to draw their attention than the creature can strike. You have to strike from multiple directions. We use things like camouflage suits or mirrors or darkness or special lighting tricks to conceal the actor. Sometimes the actors who have been in plain slide is the statue.

Sometimes they're invisible in the environment so it's all about confusing you with visuals, with sounds, with everything anything we can employ to keep you, you know, unaware of the environments with the actually strike, that's what we're gonna do. So yeah, it's kind of like a card trick. It is a look over here because I'm doing something else over here. Be distracted by this grand movement because there's

something sneaking up behind you. Uh, and it has the eyes of a monster something else they use as camouflage. And we've mentioned that before. And there's a great clip believe it's the Travel Channel that did a bit Another World and it shows a row of skeletons and you can see the people are moving through and they are perceiving this as one unit of just skeletons on the all.

But of course there's an actor who is called a bone clone who comes jumping out at the passers by, and again it's playing with that idea of benign violation, but also playing with your mind's ability to perceive what is real and what is not real. Now you know you mentioned the bone clone jumping out. It's important to note that another key rule that's been is big on with his monsters, with the human human actors. Is that you have the monster jump out at you, certainly, but

then they retreat away. Now part of that is of course not involved not touching the person, but also you need to get the once the shock has been made, you don't need the person analyzing the monster even in dim light. That's too. You know, less is more retreat, that's true because then your brain has more time to think about this. It's the benign part. It can bring it down and on what was that? What was going on there? You know, your minds still running with the questions.

And I saw that too with the bungee stunts. The people whould come out on the bungee cords and return down at you from above and then retracting back into the darkness. So you talk about this fear factor, we should probably review the old a magdala when it comes to fear, because this is that almond shaped clump of neurons in your brain located front and center, and it is really vital for instantaneous emotional processing. So it's not just for fear too, it's also for love and pleasure.

But when it comes to fear, if you have say Freddy coming at you, you think Freddy's coming at you, or you're another world and there's a glual coming at you. What is happening is that you're a magdala gets juiced. It unleashes your brain and embody energizing cocktail of hormones, and of course while this is happening, information is also

traveling to your prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that's really responsible for a consciously evaluating danger, and it tells you, hey, it's okay, this is just a person in a mask. So the problem, though or not sexually, it's not the problem is the catharsis um. It's actually the result is that you have all of these things going on in your body and has to come off of that fear high. And that's again where we're experiencing something really important in terms of acting at

our own fears or going through the process. I found it interesting too that supposedly the whites of the eyes, the more of the whites of the eyes that is visible, even if the individuals wearing a mask, the more of the amigo kicks into action, because it's like, well, someone's coming out at me, wide eyed and crazy. I need to respond to it. Whereas if they're you know, their eyes are shut, then they're probably just gonna bump into you. And if they have kind of droopy, sleepy eyes and

they're probably not that dangerous. They've actually there's been research on this before too. I believe there's a researcher who set up her own haunted house and did this with her her research students and tract the white of the eyes and the amount of fear that person perceived from what her actors, her ghouls were communicating to the people

coming through the haunted house. All right, so here's one more clip from Ben Armstrong where I was at talking to him and asking him about the use of the five senses and whether he's really hitting all five senses, and he had to hit a pretty finances. Let's see, you can see it, you can hear it, you can feel it, you can smell it. We haven't had monsters you have that you're supposed to lick. That's about it.

But you know what he gave me ideas maybe next year, So yeah, we'll we'll probably never get lickable monsters in the the haunted attractions, but it's it's a wonderful idea. It is a. It's a very interactive idea, and which kind of brings us to this idea of what the future of haunted houses might look like one day, especially if you melded the virtual reality technology. Yeah, to a certain extent, you see a lot of haunted house elements

in some video games. I mean you have the whole survival horror um genre or subgenre of games, stuff like Resident Evil, Silent Hill Um, and then some sort of hybrid games in recent years like head Space, which is like a sci fi horror action but also a survival are kind of product. And these will typically also some of the Doom games fit into this area. You're inevitably going through cramped hallways that are dark and dimly lit.

They'll be like a sparking fuse box on one wall, and then something will jump out of you from the side. They can't hit you on all the sensors, certainly, but they can, you know, they can make the controller vibrate in your hands. They can do stuff with with with your site, and they can do stuff with sound, and like I said, do a limited extent, they're experimenting with the haunted attraction area. Yeah, And when I talked to

Ben Armstrong about this. He said that of course, as as different technologies come online, they'll be interested in that. But he said that core to the experience to their haunted house is the fact that you have actors and they are really uh sort of underscoring this play between real and not real, and that having the actors makes

it a much more immersive experience. So even if we were to get to the point five ten years from now, putting Google Classes on, Google Vision on and walking through a haunted house, you would still want to have that live person element um because without it it's not quite

as immersive. It is interesting that you mentioned the virtual reality augmented reality goggles and how that could be used for haunted attraction, because you can imagine a future where instead of going to a haunted house, you get these goggles, you put them on, you go through your own house,

and it creates these virtual frights in the area around you. Certainly, any of the virtual reality, dream augmentation, dream control technology that we've discussed in previous episodes, pretty much all that could conceivably get a horror or a haunted house twist to it. You know, I can imagine some far future where someone had would have the option of dialing up a nightmare yeah, or having some sorts of um specter projected onto contact lenses that they're wearing. So I mean,

really every day could be Halloween. Yeah, all right, So there you go, Haunted Houses once again. Big thanks to another World Haunted House and specifically been Armstrong for taking the time to chat with me, to spray Julie down with animal sense, and you know, just for sharing his enthusiasm for Halloween and for haunted attractions with us and with you guys. And again, if you want to check out their website, go to www dot fear world dot com And if you live anywhere in the Atlanta area,

go check it out. It's a great attraction and it's open generally through all of October but then also into the first week of November as well to get that that Halloween hangover crowd. Yeah. I also wanted to mention to you that Ben is really steeped in mythology and this is what you can tell. This is an act

of love for him every single year. And I did ask him what some of his influences are and he talked about an economicon um as being early influences, an alien also as a teenager, so you can you really do see a lot of that, his worldview, his influences in the attraction. Yeah, you mentioned Pumpkinhead when I talked to him, he's he's not a guy who's doing it just to make a buck. Because every year you see

haunted houses pop up in any large metropolitan area. Some of them last years, some of them last two years. But it's hard work. It's a year round thing that these guys engage in. So the mere fact that these guys have been doing it strong for sixteen years, let you know that they're they're doing it right, and they're doing it because they love it indeed. Yeah, alright, so let's see. Do we have time for a listener mail

or should I send the robot away? All right, robot, you can come here with a short one, just a short one, all right. Here we have one from our listener, Emily. Emily writes in this is high, Robert and Julie. I was listening to your episode about cats, and when you mentioned purring, it reminded me that there is a song by Arteker called gail or d a y L. Who knows how you pronounced any of their their tracks, which features a sound that always makes me think of a

purring kitten. Uh So check that out. You can find that clips of that online. D a E hell, and it does kind of sound like a purring cat trying to perhaps manipulate the listeners. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, I know I've heard some tracks where people actually throw in purring noises before, but this isn't one. It's more of a mechanical thing that sounds like a kitten purring. And then we also heard from Adam. Adam writs in and says I wanted to thank you guys through excellent

episode on the Amazing Mind of infants. As a recently new Father nine twelve twelve, I found this topic to be thoroughly entertaining and informative. Watching my little dude gaze about the world won't be the same. I will be thinking about how he is absorbing all sorts of sensory information simultaneously wondering why a blurry alien figure keeps snuggling hovering over him. Thanks for the magnificent episode, Adam. That's awesome. Yeah,

and he's referring to this theory that's out there. It's a little bit wild, but that the fact that um infants don't quite have everything sorted out in their eyesight, that they're seeing a vision of us that would resemble

an alien. Yeah, it's pretty creating over there alright. Well, So, if you guys would like to check in with us, especially if you want to share your thoughts on the science of haunted houses, haunted attractions, let us know which ones you've really enjoyed, your earliest experience with with with them, et cetera. Uh, get in touch with us. You can find us on Tumbling and you can find us on Facebook. We are stuff to blow your mind on both of those, and you can also find us on Twitter, where we

tweet under the handle blow the Mind. And you can also drop us a line at blew the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com