Hannah Jones/Winonan

Halloween is a peculiar holiday.

After all, I can think of no other occasion on which people go out of their ways to experience the emotion of fear.If we truly enjoy being scared, why not schedule a test for every day, allow the fire alarms to go off randomly for a month or knock out all the streetlights on the way back to the dorms?

This is something I understood even less as a child. I scared easily, and often, and I hated it. This caused me to sit out on a lot of traditional Halloween activities: scary movies, ghost stories and of course, haunted houses.

Well, I’m bigger now, and I was determined to figure out what all the fuss was about. I had seen a few scary movies—through the cracks between my fingers—and I thought the next logical step was to try out a haunted house and find out what everyone liked about them in the first place.

There happens to be one such an establishment in Onalaska every year, so a few friends and I made the trip and stood in line for a good hour or so before we made our way to a red-lit gateway and showed our tickets. The threshold led to a large structure labeled “Shed of the Dead,” and already I could hear loud thumpings, scrapings, blasts and screams coming from inside. I remained outwardly calm while chewing my own tongue. Couldn’t I just take a test instead?

Halloween has its roots spread wide over a slew of pagan festivals, but 12 century celebrations in Europe link it to a Christian ritual set to take place before All Saint’s Day on Nov. 1. Supposedly, this night was a time when the souls of the dead could once and for all take vengeance on those who crossed them in life before their cathartic ascent to the next life on the following day.

In order to protect themselves from cheesed-off dead acquaintances, people used to disguise themselves in masks and bake sweet treats called “soul cakes,” hoping to either mislead or appease those who would take a detour to get even before leaving the mortal world.Thus, people dressed up in costumes and made delectable desserts in the face of a terrifying folklore, an oddly chipper sight to behold given the grim implications of the occasion.

Nowadays, instead of trying to avoid the vengeful dead, we seek them out. An animatronic mummy sat up from his grave to tell us the rules of the haunted house: no photography, no touching the monsters and absolutely no refunds. I gulped. No going back now.

The corridor was narrow, making it necessary for the four of us to proceed in a single-file line. None of us, however, wanted to go alone, so we made a human train by taking the shoulders of the person standing in front of us. Like a gigantic, nervous caterpillar, we proceeded through the gate and wormed our way around a corner into the dark of the “Shed of the Dead.”

The dead were aplenty: angry ghost-children with butcher’s knives, mad scientists with cleavers clearly not meant for use in any science lab and clowns. Big, toothy, ugly clowns.

Deranged, homicidal little girls are one thing, but clowns give me the creeps in normal daylight situations; this was a claustrophobic corridor decked with strobe lights, thumping, abrasive music and crashes and clanks coming from just behind. The experience was uncomfortable—or would have been, had my group and I not started dancing.

Much to the confusion, I’m certain, of the haunted cast and crew of the shed, my fellow adventurers and I jumped and bobbed and cheered like we were simply taking our conga line across a wedding reception.

We wound our way through halls of horror at our own, funky pace, even showing off our moves to the maniac with the chain saw at the end of the trail. He revved his machine menacingly. We whooped and pumped our free arms in the air, continuing past him and dancing our way out of the shed.

Maybe that’s the candy core of Halloween, the heart of all the hype over self-induced terror. Maybe we subject ourselves to fear, creating it on our own terms, to turn it into something fun and festive. After all, when early Europeans took the cakes out of their ovens and donned their masks, perhaps they were doing the exact same thing.

Contact Hannah at [email protected]