By Arpita Aneja
These days, it only seems natural that you’d pay real money to enter a dilapidated building that exists solely to scare you—but that wasn’t always the case. Though Halloween has always been associated with the things that go bump in the night, the commercialized haunted house attracted is a relatively recent invention. Here’s how it came to be.
Read more about the haunted house business, here in the TIME Vault: Monsters Inc.: Inside the Weird World of Professional Haunting
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Introducing the 2024 TIME100 Next
- The Reinvention of J.D. Vance
- How to Survive Election Season Without Losing Your Mind
- Welcome to the Golden Age of Scams
- Did the Pandemic Break Our Brains?
- The Many Lives of Jack Antonoff
- 33 True Crime Documentaries That Shaped the Genre
- Why Gut Health Issues Are More Common in Women
Write to Arpita Aneja at arpita.aneja@time.com