50 Photos Of The Spooky Corridors

Someone who’s scared of hallways probably has deeper and darker underlying fears than drab or dull interior decorations. For example, they might have bathophobia. As per Choosing Therapy, this phobia is a fear of depth, including areas of deep water, cliffs, railings, bridges, long hallways, tunnels, caves, and wells.

Alternatively, being scared in corridors could be related to stenophobia, a fear of narrow things or places.

Or the hallways themselves might not be the main issue, but the dark. The fear of dark is widely known as nyctophobia, as well as scotophobia or lygophobia. Cleveland Clinic notes that around 45% of children might have an unusually strong fear of some kind. The fear of the dark is one of the most common phobias among kids aged 6 to 12.

"The human fear response is one of the best-understood psychological adaptations that has been researched over the years. Generally, we tend to be fearful of stimuli that may have the capacity to adversely affect our capacity for survival and/or reproduction," Dr. Geher explained to Bored Panda.

For instance, a dark, dank hallway filled with spiders may pose various threats to people. "Spiders themselves can offer lethal bites, for example. Also, spaces that seem unhygienic may well be unhygienic and may well have vermin and other forms of vectors of disease," the professor said.

"Across our evolutionary history, we evolved fears of these kinds of stimuli as such fears helped to keep our ancestors safe."

Dr. Geher noted that even though our evolved fears can help us survive, they can also become problematic.

"Someone may be afraid of a hallway, for instance, that they have to go through to get to their office, as an example. Even if the hallway truly is creepy, it would behoove that person to get over that fear," he told Bored Panda.

"There are various forms of therapy that have been shown to help with a variety of fears—someone with a crippling fear of this kind of stimulus may well benefit from therapy sessions with a highly trained professional."

Most of us have probably heard of the fight or flight response, right? Well, not so fast there! The reality is slightly more nuanced and complex than popular culture and hearsay might have you believe.

In fact, some researchers argue that there are a total of four main ways that human beings respond to stress and threats. These are the well-known fight and flight (which are very decisive actions), as well as freeze, and fawn.

The fight response happens when someone feels that they can overpower the threat in a direct fight.

According to WebMD, some of the signs of a fight response include intense anger, grinding teeth, a tight jaw, the urge to punch or kick someone or something, crying in anger, and a burning or knotted sensation in your stomach.

On the flip side, a flight response centers on the belief that you can avoid danger by running away.

Your body gets flooded with adrenaline so that you can sprint away from any threats, for example, all of those nightmarish creatures crawling or glitching their way across the hallway.

The signs of the flight response to threats include feeling fidgety, a restless body, constantly moving your legs or arms, and dilated and darting eyes.

Meanwhile, freeze and fawn instincts are very different. A freeze response has you stuck in one place when your body, instincts, and mind don’t believe that fighting or fleeing is going to work.

If you’re feeling a sense of dread, have pale skin, your heart’s pounding really quickly, and you feel stiff, heavy, cold, or numb, then you’re likely stuck in a freeze response.

Fawning is the most social and verbal of all the four responses to stress and threats. Some of the main signs of a fawn response include over-agreement with somebody and trying to be overly helpful.

There’s an overwhelming sense that your primary concern is making someone else happy. In grounded terms, this would mean that you try to be excessively friendly with the source of the danger, instead of fighting them, running away, or freezing like a deer in the headlights.

WebMD notes that fawning can be an indication that someone has had a very troubled childhood, e.g., they were neglected or rejected. Fawning is a way to soothe the threat in order to survive.

People who are prone to respond to stress by fawning are usually overly dependent on others’ opinions, have little to no boundaries, are vulnerable to narcissists, have barely any identity, and are generally easy to control or manipulate.

Your body’s responses to stress and threats are useful if they genuinely help you avoid any danger to your health, welfare, and life. However, if these responses get triggered over simple, non-threatening, mundane situations, then you’re in a pickle.

Chronic stress is utterly horrible for your health. If you get freaked out by random hallways all the time, you’re only doing damage to your body, mind, and probably even relationships.

There are lots of ways to handle stress, from meditation and exercise to speaking to a therapist and even relying on medication. In your day-to-day life, when you suddenly feel threatened in a generally safe place, you could try focusing on your environment or reciting a song, poem, or affirmation in your mind.

You could also do mental calculations, visualize yourself overcoming your fears, focus on your breathing, or remind yourself that you are—in fact—safe.

Which of these photos of hallways sincerely creeped you out the most, dear Pandas? Which ones would you hate to walk down and why? On the flip side, which of these corridors would you not mind?

What’s the scariest hallway that you’ve ever personally seen? Let us know what you think in the comments. Oh, and we hope any corridors you walk down today are well-lit and definitely not haunted.

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