As we flip our calendars from October to November, I look forward to turkeys, parades and family football games while waving goodbye to carved pumpkins, costumes and haunts. For me, it’s an effortless divorce to depart from a holiday that revels in frightening people, since scary movies and haunted houses, are all things I religiously attempt to steer clear of.

I have never been one to step out of my comfort zone and expose myself to situations in which I do not have control. I have zero interest in having my hair stand on end for no reason. I prefer to engage in activities that do not place me face to face with the grim reaper when choosing a casual weekend activity. Once however, against my better judgment, I broke my own personal code and it was a mistake. I am not a thrill-seeker, but I wanted to attempt to understand the hype.

During my senior year of high school, I was convinced by some friends to take a trip to the Eastern State Penitentiary, an abandoned prison located in Philadelphia.

The prison opened in 1829 and held some of America’s most infamous criminals such as Al Capone. It was later closed down in 1971 and not re-opened until 1991 when the city started giving haunting Halloween tours in order to raise money to fund daytime, historic tours that began in 1994.

Today, the “Terror Behind the Walls” tour continues to be staged every fall and is one of the most visited haunted attractions in the country.

I was dumb enough to give it a whirl.

It was a mistake.

As the child who could barely make it through “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” due to my absolute fear of the Abominable Snowman, I came out of the penitentiary both bawling and questioning why I would ever spend $29 on something where I prayed the entire time it would soon end.

Despite my loathing of the experience, some of my friends had basked in the terror.

I was confused.

We all know people who identify as thrill-seekers, or what Frank Farley — the former president of the American Psychological Association — calls them: “Type T personalities.” These are the sort of people who are more than willing to bungee jump off a cliff and who are genuinely eager to sit through “The Shining.”

After studying these “Type T’s” for years, Farley came to the conclusion that often, people of this nature are born this way. He found that the amount of dopamine and testosterone a person naturally has, as well as the amount of white matter in their brain, all play a roll in how flirtatious a person is with thrill. Farley believes that people who choose to engage in haunted attractions do so for the same reason skydivers choose to jump out of the plane.

“There’s almost nothing else, including sex, that can match it in terms of the incredible sensory experience that the body is put through,” Farley said about what many call the “adrenaline rush” that comes from fright.

It is not so unrealistic for “Type T” people to push themselves as far as they possibly can with unnerving experiences, sometimes even grazing death. They crave the hand sweat and the burst of blood thrusting through their entire bodies that ends with satisfaction in overcoming the obstacle.

And the more one is exposed to a fear, the less afraid they become. Each time they survive one of these experiences, they are able to rationalize that perhaps the situation wasn’t even dangerous. Therefore, people who enjoy being scared end up being better with frightening situations as they have made themselves more adept to handle them.

Unfortunately for me, I do not savor the feeling of my body erupting in goose bumps and therefore my metamorphosis into a “Type T” will likely never happen. Thankfully, I have recognized this and no longer accept invitations to haunted attractions during the month of October.

Happy November everyone.

Alex Archambault is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. You can email her at ararcham@syr.edu or follow her @Alex_And_Raa on Twitter.

Published on November 2, 2015 at 9:57 pm