With the new fall season, and especially October, every girl in the world wants to do all of the basic activities. This can include pumpkin and apple picking, hay rides, haunted houses/theme parks/mazes, just to name a few. I will most likely not carve a pumpkin, but I'l go pumpkin picking anyway. I will in no way, shape, or form eat an apple of any variation, but I'll tag along for the ride and the cute Instagrams. And although I have tried and tried again to be brave, for some reason the thought of anything haunted leaves me paralyzed with fear.

I grew up watching scary movies with my friends and my family, and I realized I could handle it as long as there wasn't that much gore. If you really wanted to get me freaked out, throw a mask on an insane serial killer and I won't sleep that night. So when I got to high school, I thought that going to different theme parks wouldn't be so bad.

Sophomore year of high school, I'm going on an October month-aversary date with my boyfriend at the time, and he tells me we're going to a corn maze. So in typical 16-year-old fashion, my mom drives us on our date, and I think that everything is going to be fine. I put my big-girl panties on, got on line for the corn maze, and I waited for it to be our turn.

Well, we get to the front of the line, and screams from the other side of the fence start freaking me out. I panicked, I asked if we could leave, started hyperventilating, and the man working the entrance told me I had no choice, that the only way out was through the maze. So we walk through the entrance, and I immediately start to violently cry. I see someone start walking toward us in a mask, and while screaming my lungs out, I put the upper half of my body inside of my boyfriend's sweatshirt, stand on his shoes, and I told him that the only way I was going to be able to get out of there was if I was carried.

Now, although he was a football player, I'm sure my constant thrashing and screaming did not make it easy for him to carry me through the maze that felt like it lasted, honestly, a lifetime. This experience was so traumatic for me that I don't remember most of it, and I must have blacked some of it out. I will remember sounds though, like a chainsaw or yelling or screams, but the latter I'm not sure if it was from me or someone else.

We finally get to the end of the line, I get myself untangled from my boyfriend's clothing, and I am prepared to walk the last six feet on my own out of the maze. Suddenly, a huge figure gets off of the ground that I somehow did not see. Then I'm looking into the masked face of Michael Meyers, the face that haunts my nightmares, my arch nemesis, and I nearly fainted. I felt my feet leave the floor, my boyfriend is tossing me over his shoulder, and we are running full speed for the exit. He brings me to my mom's car while I am still sobbing uncontrollably, and I had to be swaddled and cuddled for hours while I continued to cry off and on. My PTSD was so bad that I couldn't sleep that night.

For an update on how much I have not matured in the haunted house department, I am now a senior in college. I go to school in Massachusetts and am conveniently close to six flags. My friends have talked about going to fright fest, or another haunted house in the area that is rated one of the most terrifying in Western Massachusetts. At the first mention, I started profusely sweating and getting jittery. It's almost mid-October, and so far, so good. We have yet to make any plans to go. The topic hasn't come up again, and I'm hoping by the time it does I will already be on vacation for a week. You can take the girl out of the corn maze, but you can't take the nightmares out of my mind.