In the room I stood paralyzed. My vision struggled to adjust to the endless darkness surrounding me while the voice in my brain yelled, ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE, NOW.’ A sliver of moonlight slipped through the edge of the window and pierced the heavily dilapidated space before landing on a shattered portrait whose corpse-like face stared into my eyes. Hysterical laughter like the cries of newborns shredded my eardrums and threatened to devour my soul. I pounded against the door even as my fists ached until I burst into the next room where I encountered faceless mannequins and puppets hanging from the ceiling. Cold fingers suddenly seized my ankle, and a pair of pale eyes met my gaze. I screamed and immediately ran. My trembling body and racing heart were all out of rhythm. Adrenaline surging through my body, I fled desperately until I finally reached the big red sign that flashed EXIT.

I was only eight years old when I entered that haunted house all alone. That’s when my amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, pushed the alarm button to warn me of potential danger and activated my flight response to make me run as fast as I could. The amygdala perceives stress in our environment, and even the unexpected sound of a water bottle falling onto the ground can set off a fear response. In a more intense scenario, an aggressive-looking dog charging towards you can trigger the flight response to send you running for your life. When the amygdala considers a stimulus threatening, it sends signals to the hypothalamus (the area of the brain that controls and produces hormones) to pump adrenaline, just like how those frights in the haunted house had sparked a chain reaction in my body that released stress hormones to prepare my body to either fight or flight.

I thought to myself I would never enter a haunted house ever again until my school hosted its own Halloween Disco. Because all my friends were going into the haunted house, I had no choice but to also go so that I wouldn’t miss out on any of the fun. That ‘fun’ ended up being zombies swinging upside down at me as I was crawling under tunnels of cloth-covered tables, helpless before the unknown dark ahead. Something grabbed my leg, and I had a flashback of the horrid memories from seven years ago when disembodied ghosts grabbed my ankle. My amygdala activated my natural instincts again, but this time I wasn’t the child I was back then. I knew these monsters were all just an illusion, so instead of flight, my amygdala chose to fight. I kicked and punched wildly, almost flipping the table over, as my amygdala did everything it could to preserve my safety. 

Afterwards, even though I promised that I would never participate in any haunted houses ever again, I ironically ended up in charge of planning my school’s Halloween Disco for middle schoolers because I was the house captain. The amygdala, which also forms memories from strongly emotional experiences, made me think back to all the terrors I had in those haunted houses. I wanted these kids to genuinely enjoy the experience instead of being traumatized, so instead of a traditional haunted house, I created a trick-or-treating event where people dressed up as ghosts would give mild scares before handing out candies. I made sure there wasn’t anything like ankle grabbing that might reduce anyone to tears like it had done to me. 

I was initially worried whether something this different could be successful, so I was thrilled when all those kids ran up to me asking if they could go in again for a second round. I’m proud that their amygdalas were activated not to run or fight for their lives but to create memories of joy.

Charlene Wang is a junior at TES. In addition to playing the piano and building Legos, she is an avid devourer of fanfiction and loves to play games with predatory monetization systems like Genshin Impact. She likes biology but especially enjoys studying neuroscience and neural pathways.