I took my daughter to a "haunted house" called Thrillvania in Terrell, Texas. Admission cost $31 per person — that's $62 to walk through some soldered-together mobile homes and watch people in costumes jump out and yell "BOO!"

I know it's more than that but you get the idea.

After we finished the tour, my daughter looked at me hopefully and asked, "Do you think the house was really haunted at some point?"

I told her maybe. I didn't have the heart to tell her I lived in Forney while the place was being built — before it was moved to Terrell — and it was far from haunted.

My daughter knows about haunted houses. As "Ghost Hunters" junkies, we try to stay in haunted hotels, visit haunted restaurants, and take ghost tours whenever we get the chance.

We put together a ghost tour of Dallas last year for her birthday. I scoured the Internet for ghostly places in our vicinity and came up with quite a few, including some right in our own backyard, meaning Lakewood and White Rock Lake, not really in our backyard.