How Being a Haunter is like Being a Time Lord (a short essay): Most haunted attractions in which the guests walk through, try to maximize guest pathway distance within a minimum amount of square footage. That way guests get the longest possible walking time in the attraction while the haunt occupies the least amount of area.
This is better on rent, raw material usage, and, importantly, the effective use of haunted house performers #haunters
The old rule of thumb for haunt pricing was 1 minute of walking = $1 charge. So a guest who pays $20 for a ticket could reasonably expect 20 minutes of experience in the haunt. I suspect this has changed due to inflation, but you get the idea of why a long walking path is important.
To maximize guest path distance in a minimal amount of square footage, haunts try to lay out the pathway in a way that it bends back and forth constantly, leaving space between the bends for actor access and tech access. You can see an example here:
The grey areas on that floor plan are where actors can go behind the walls to do scares, out of windows, out of doorways, out of hidden panels.
Guests can only see directly ahead and behind them on the pathway (usually not very far). They can't see what's on the other side of the wall. And guests can only move in one direction, forward. So guests only experience the haunt, basically as a one-dimensional pathway. It has lots of twists and turns, but stretched out, they only experience one long linear pathway.
In contrast, haunters (the performers) are aware of all the ways the path bends back on itself and they use that to their advantage. Look again at the floor plan. The very bottom (entrance) has a grey rectangle where an actor can hide. The guest pathway wraps around it. A seasoned actor can scare a group at the beginning of that scene, the middle, the back, and the exit of that one scene.
A guest experiences the haunt the same way humans experience time: one long, forward moving, pathway.
But a haunter is a Time Lord, they see the path as it truly is: