People just love to be scared

Why on earth would anyone sign up to be scared this Halloween?

Isn’t real life scary enough? Fake ghosts and dime store witches pale in light of a melted economy and a virus that feels like it’s lurking around every corner, where the graph line that measures new cases in the state is shooting skyward after flat-lining for so long, and new cases are sending students back home to their screens.

But we have a weird relationship with being scared, and fear — which is a cousin to pleasure, feelings-wise — is big business. Despite the pandemic, haunted attractions around the state are pulling in a healthy crew of customers, though don’t count Michael Yachymczyk among the professional haunters. Yachymczyk, the man behind Fat Freddy’s (after a favorite comic book) House of Horrors, is sitting this one out.

“I didn’t want to be that haunted house where it spread,” he said. Online reviews for several Connecticut haunted houses warn would-be customers that they can expect scant social distancing as they wind their way through the attractions. Though Yachymczyk isn’t haunting this year, he can’t stay away from a few of the attractions, where he said people were mostly wearing masks and keeping socially distant from one another.

The test will be this busy weekend and the next — when more people tend to line up to be frightened, he said.

These days, even something as benign as traditional spooking can seem risky. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself, he may or may not have understood the science that bolstered his claim.

Fear — “Is that a tiger?!” — arrives at the part of the brain called the amygdala, which quickly passes the message to the rest of the body, including the brain’s hippocampus, which then quickly decides if the threat is real, or if that tiger is really just a large cat. Because time is of the essence, the brain must, in essence, flip through well-thumbed file cards to make that determination. We rely on cognitive biases — which can fail us dismally. Fear is fun only once you know the context, and realize that the leering witch really isn’t going to steal your children, and the vampire is just your neighbor, all dressed up.

Researchers will one day — if they haven’t started already — look at the mood and tone of the yard decorations that pepper neighborhoods during the pandemic. Though most people seem to have stuck (this is not a scientific survey) to traditional ghosts, skulls, and witches, Matt Warshauer is a Central Connecticut State University history professor who since 2003 has created masterful Halloween panoplies that address social issues. This year, his West Hartford yard is peppered with pictures of people who’ve died from the coronavirus, as well as Black Americans who’ve been killed by police. It is disquieting and jaw-dropping and entirely appropriate to pause and think about the honest-to-God scary stuff.

For the rest of us, market watchers expect spending for the holiday to hit $8.05 billion — with a b —- for an average of $92.12 per person who is celebrating, according to the National Federation Association. Even in staid Connecticut, Yachymczyk says a decent haunted attraction can bring in upwards of $500,000 even to $1 million in a season, “if you do enough promoting.”

Masonry is Yachymczyk’s work, horror is his passion, he says. He went to his first haunted house at age 10 or so, he says, and was so scared he cried, “Why did you bring me here?”

Five years later, he began volunteering at that same haunt. He opened Fat Freddy’s in 2017 in Shelton, and he says he’s going a little stir-crazy this year without it. Fortunately, his neighbors are the beneficiaries of him sitting this one out. They get to enjoy all the props he’s placed in his yard, including his own private graveyard.

“People love to be scared,” said Yachymczyk.

Yachymczyk says safe haunting is entirely doable. It’s all about timing, he said, and making sure people walk through attractions with the friends in their pandemic bubble, and no one else. This year’s haunting could be nothing more than a hiccup, if people wear a mask, stay distant, and enjoy their fear within certain boundaries.

And be warned: Yachymczyk will reopen Fat Freddy’s, starting the last week of September, 2021, perhaps this time in Watertown. If you need motivation to get through what scientists warn may be some really dark days coming up, rest assured: Fat Freddy will rise again.