Scary Spaces?

When reading the first two chapter thingys in Toni Morrison's Paradise, I felt like there was a particular emphasis on the feelings associated with the different places, specifically scary places. Like, what the hell makes a particular hallway scarier than another one? Risking the chance at someone throwing this horribly embarrassing story back in my face at some point in the future, sometimes when I'm at home and it's late at night and all the other lights are off, for god know what reason, I freak out and run like a baby into my room and shut the door. For whatever reason, going down that long hallway in the dark scares the shit out of me, and I'm twenty one years old. In the first "chapter" (Ruby) it's more of a fear of unknown space, I think it refers at one point to "out there" talking about the unknown. This is a little more understandable, and I realize usually when this is referred to it's talking not specifically about space, but about the situations, conversations, people, and everything else that's different than the place you're at. But I felt like the people in this town, the only black town or whatever the hell it is that makes it so exclusive, they people in it were actually afraid of the other places, afraid of the spaces that didn't fit into their tiny town, including the Convent. And granted we (annoyingly enough) haven't figured out what the hell is going on in there, the fact is, the Convent falls under the "other space" category, making it an immediately enemy, maybe even turning it into a "scary" place, to them at least. I felt like the landscape almost was alive, became a character of it's own. In the next pseudo-chapter (Mavis), when she's driving before she reaches this mysterious convent, she's driving down all these roads searching for California. She's not scared of the unknown, she's going because she needed to get the hell out of that shitty life she had before. Which brings me to my next comment, how people think physically moving can wipe away all your problems. I mean, let's face it, for almost all people, the problems in their life are because of the decisions they've made, or at least have some direct consequences directly related to themselves. Why does it occur to everyone that moving to a brand new place and starting over (the premise of every D-list horror movie that's come out in the past 10 years by the way) would fix that? I mean, I guess I get that you wouldn't have to deal with everyone knowing about whatever terrible thing you're running away from, but you still have to deal with all that shit, and new shutters on a new house really aren't going to help with that. It's like the idea that a person is the only thing with memories, which isn't true. Go to any house that's being sold, you'll see marks from their kids growth spurts, or nicks in the table from countless dinners eating together by another family. Houses, and places, have memories and pasts, and I feel like that is completely overlooked when people have this grand idea to move across the country and "start over." Short of building a new house from scratch, all you have is leftovers.