R.L. Carpentier, writer

Last night my wife and I took our daughter to a massive multi-themed haunted house. A few things to understand before we go any further. First, none of us had ever been there before and had no idea what to expect. Second, it was rather costly to get tickets. Third, my daughter is ten years old.

Even before we left, my daughter was scared. She kept saying over dinner that she didn’t want to go and that we were making her go. The former was true…again the cost. I assured her that she could just wait outside, but her argument to that was that she “didn’t want to miss out.” I then told her that it was fun to be scared. She was not having that argument.

So then we get there and it is huge. The queue to get in was long and fortunately not so many people were there. When we finally got into the proper line, my daughter was in tears. She kept repeating over and over that she was scared. It didn’t help when actors came through the line to give people a little scare, causing her to freak out. Then the one guy found her a second time and gave her a proper scare. It’s hard not to laugh when you’re a dad.

After more than an hour of waiting we get into the final line waiting to go in. My wife is actually holding our daughter now as her fear is so great. We’re trying every kind of reassurance possible and it’s not working. The reasoning part of her brain is not working. And then we go in…

I’ll zoom back out to twelve hours later as I’m writing this the morning after. My daughter is a bright kid, but still clings to childhood innocence and naivete, which to me is precious. Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and Easter Bunny are still realities, so the idea of monsters thrives as well. As a father, I appreciate her perspective. I can still remember believing in everything also. Probably for a lot longer than I should have.

We go into the haunted houses (yes 13 of them). My daughter is scared at first, especially the first couple of actors that jumped out at us (they got me too). But as we continued through, she adapted to what she could expect. She grew accustomed to the world she was in and learned to go with the flow. By the end, as I predicted, she was laughing, although she still slept in bed with my wife and I got the guest room.