About the Manor
Halloween 2026 falls on a Saturday, and millions of people will queue for haunted houses tonight. Most haunts are judged on one thing that's hard to get right: pacing. Goldilocks Manor turns that into a game.
The idea
Researchers at Aarhus University's Recreational Fear Lab found that fun in a haunted house follows an inverted U: too little fear is boring, and too much stops being fun. Every guest in Goldilocks Manor has their own sweet spot, a green band on their heart-rate meter. Your job is to keep each of them in it from the front door to the exit.
The hard part is that scares hit everyone in range. The clown that thrills one guest can send the coulrophobe behind them running for the chicken exit.
How to play
- Build: pick a scare, then tap a dark wall tile beside the corridor. The dashed circle shows its reach. Tap a placed scare to sell it.
- Auto props fire once per guest when someone comes near. Area props raise (or, for 🍬, lower) heart rates the whole time a guest is inside them. Actors only strike when you tap them or press their number.
- Fire an actor with a guest right beside it for a PERFECT (+30%).
- The same kind of scare gets weaker each time a guest sees it (habituation), so mix your categories.
- Stars depend on the share of time each guest spent in their sweet spot. Panic counts against you, and staying in panic too long means they flee.
- Keyboard: arrow keys move the cursor on the map, Enter places or triggers, Delete sells, 1–9 fire actors, and P pauses.
What's real and what's game
Real: the inverted-U finding; the three horror-fan types (Adrenaline Junkies, White-Knucklers, Dark Copers); the ScareHouse mood and EEG study; the Chapman fear-survey numbers; the history timeline; the NRF Halloween spending figures. Sources are listed below.
Game: the heart-rate model, the numbers on every prop, the sweet-spot bands, and the other guest types (the Skeptic, the Screamer, the phobics, Grandpa, the Influencer and the Little Monster) are invented and tuned for play. The Scare Me quiz is for fun only. It is not a psychological assessment or medical advice. If you have a heart condition or real anxiety about fear, please choose your real-world haunts with care.
Sources
- The British Psychological Society, The Psychologist: "The sweet spot of fear" (Recreational Fear Lab, 110 heart-rate participants, Dystopia haunted house, Andersen quote). bps.org.uk/psychologist/sweet-spot-fear
- Neuroscience News: "Haunted House Researchers Investigate the Mystery of Playing With Fear" (Psychological Science study; inverted-U curves). neurosciencenews.com
- Science News Explores: "What's the fun in fear?" (horror-fan types, ScareHouse, pandemic resilience study). snexplores.org
- Psychology Today: "How 3 types of fans benefit from horror". psychologytoday.com
- Greater Good Magazine (UC Berkeley): "How a haunted house can make you happier" (Margee Kerr, ScareHouse). greatergood.berkeley.edu
- Chapman University: "America's Top Fears 2016". blogs.chapman.edu
- Wikipedia: "Haunted attraction" (history timeline). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_attraction
- Disney Parks Blog: Haunted Mansion opening, 9 August 1969. disneyparksblog.com
- National Retail Federation: 2026 Halloween spending survey ($13.5B). nrf.com
- NASA and the Old Farmer's Almanac on Halloween moons. almanac.com
- On LeDoux's "low road" and amygdala timing: tsw.it
Credits
Made for 31 October 2026 as a one-day site on dailyma.de. Its permanent home is dailyma.de/archive/2026-10-31. All code, writing, guests and reviews are original. Typefaces: Creepster and Bricolage Grotesque (Google Fonts). Sound effects are synthesised live in your browser. There are no trackers, no accounts and no ads. Your progress is stored only in your own browser's localStorage.