Tomorrow is Halloween, and many of us will be dressing up in costumes, eating candy, carving pumpkins and bobbing for apples. We don’t always think about the holiday’s spiritual and cultural origins, but we understand it as part of our lives that we’ve grown up with since we were kids.

But with all of the fun and games comes a creepiness that hard to ignore. Spooky decorations of witches and spiders line houses and hallways and send chills down our spine. During Halloween time, we face our fears- of the unknown, the supernatural, and the creepy crawly. While these sorts of fears differ from person to person, there are nationwide similarities in fear that characterize our nation.

Chapman University has conducted a nationwide study of Americansthat documents and analyzes our fears and seeks to uncover deeper cultural meaning. Data was collected and presented in visual representations that explain what our society fears most.

Top 5 Personal Fears:

Walking alone at night
Becoming the victim of identity theft
Safety on the Internet
Becoming the victim of a mass/random shooting
Public speaking

The study also found that we’re not always rational in our beliefs, or at least informed well enough. The majority of Americans believe that crime has stayed at level rates over the past couple decades, when in fact it has been steadily declining. And even though Americans fear natural disaster, 70 % of Americans don’t have the basic supplies needed for surviving them. It will be interesting to see the survey evolve over the next few years, especially since this year’s was conducted before the global Ebola scare (34% of Americans expressed a pandemic as their #1 fear of natural disaster).

There are much more data available here, but what we can deduce is that fear is inevitable. As Mark Twain once said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.” This fear can be overcome when we confront it head on. Whether that involves dressing up as zombies or running through haunted mazes, or less seasonal activities like skydiving or trying new foods, by facing our fears we can open our eyes to new perspectives and become stronger individuals. (You can even try more unconventional methods like letting yourself crash face first into the ground, like The Great Reed Perkins once did in epic fashion).

So go out tomorrow and get spooked and scream your head off- tackle your fears in the name of Halloween. Just don’t eat any sketchy powdered candy and open lollipops.

- Charlie