Tamaron Hall injured herself by screaming too hard at the Brighton Asylum Haunted House in New Jersey over the weekend, the
NBC "Today" show cast revealed.
At the urging of the production crew, Hall joined other "Today" show people Willie Geist, Al Roker and Natalie Morales among the ghouls, zombies and demons in the Brighton Asylum hallways.
"I have a deep muscle tear from screaming for 20 minutes," Hall said on "Today," telling co-host Geist that she went to the emergency room after returning home and realized she wasn't feeling well.
Frank Farley, a psychology professor at Temple University, told "Today" that screams serves multiple purposes for human, whether riding on a roller coaster and running through a haunted house.
"It is scary, but it's a safe thrill," Farley told "Today." "(Screams) can be a signal for help; they can be an expression of emotion. Screaming is one form of expressing fear. Screaming is almost like emotional contagion. (It's) what we do in social situations that have scary qualities."
Trips to haunted houses are common place this time of year leading up to Halloween and are supposed to be fun. In Ohio, though, Christian Faith Benge, 16, died last week while going through a haunted house Middletown,
according to ABC News.
The girl's mother, Jean Benge, told ABC News, though, her daughter was not "scared to death," as stated in earlier media reports but died from a medical complication and did not want to blame the haunted house experience. She told the network that she and paramedics performed CPR on her daughter before she was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead.
Christian Faith Benge was born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a condition that means that her abdominal organs moved into the chest because of a hole in the diaphragm, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, noted ABC News.
While the condition was fixed, the long-term effects left her with an enlarged heart and one nonfunctional lung, her mother told ABC News.
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