Why do people love to be scared? Are lives so boring that a good scare now and then is a necessity ... just to get the blood flowing?

Judging by the number of Stephen King books sold and the number of people who flock to theaters and video stores to watch horror flicks, getting scared is definitely still in vogue. As if the stock market’s crash didn’t provide enough scare for us this year!

Every Halloween it seems that some groups capitalize on the fright principle and convert an abandoned house or barn into a “haunted house” for a few nights, inviting the public to come by for a good scarin’.

A few years back, my husband and I and another couple decided to visit one of these local haunted houses that was reputed to be one of the best around.

When we finally got to the place, we found that half of the county was already in line waiting to pay their $5 to get scared. Eerie music was wafting out of the upstairs windows of the rickety old house and strategically placed flood lights cast their spooky glow.

The skeptic in me asked, how scary was this experience really going to be to traipse through this attraction with a ton of other laughing, jeering people?

So the four of us got back into our car and headed to a pizza parlor where we ate and chatted until nearly midnight.

We then made our way back into the country to the haunted house to see if the crowds were gone.

As luck would have it (it seemed like luck at the time), everyone but the workers were gone and they were preparing to shut it down for the night. Hating to turn our money away, they consented to let our foursome take the tour before closing.

We stepped inside the place and tried to adjust our eyes to the dim, blinking green lights. We spotted a casket on a table, complete with corpse inside, which began to sit up and slowly move in our direction. I laughed at the sham and gingerly backed up toward a Frankenstein dummy near the wall that was holding a spare head in one hand. To my alarm, the “dummy” was no dummy, and began reaching for my own head with his other hand.

The rest of our group had moved on into the next room so I screamed and ran after them with Frankenstein on my heels. In my fright, I accidentally ran right up the back of our friend Jerry who was directly in my path of retreat. Strapping six-foot-five Jerry laughed, thinking his wife Georgia was acting frightened and clawing her way up his back.

When Jerry turned and saw that his wife was still standing beside him, he became so spooked about what could have been clinging to his back that he took off screaming an running through the house. I was right behind him emitting blood-curdling screams.

The sight of two scared nincompoops like ourselves took the rest of the fright workers so by surprise that they, too, were spooked into fleeing their own haunted house.

In nothing flat, Jerry and I found ourselves out the back door of the house, stumbling through a fake graveyard by the back step, with several ghosts and goblins from inside still trailing us.

Later, when everyone’s pulses slowed to normal, we saw that there was in fact nothing to fear except fear itself, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt once said.

My husband said it was the last time he’d ever take me to a haunted house. He said the decorations inside were fantastic and well thought out and I couldn’t remember seeing a single one of them because I had run through the house in fewer than five split seconds.

Now every Halloween when I see haunted houses advertised, I ask my husband if he wants to go. He always laughs and reminds me of the time that I wasted the $5 and ran screaming through that house. What a spoil sport! The money wasn't wasted, I got a good scare out of it.

Chris Wilson is senior staff writer of the Monroe Journal. She can be reached at chris.wilson@monroe360.com.