There are countless haunted houses affer varying degrees of fright across the Maritimes this week, but one museum in Fredericton is offering Halloween fun for those with a lower tolerance level for fear-inducing sights.

Science East, a children’s science museum in the city’s downtown, used to be a jail. This week the centre is staging a so-called low-scare haunted house.

“The building is a little bit spooky anyways, before we even do anything to it,” says Michael Edwards, the programming director at Science East. “In a ways we have to tone it down.”

“It’s more aimed for the children and younger ages,” says science educator Becky Geneau. “We want them to come in with their families.”

Those willing to dig a little deeper will have no trouble spotting signs of the building’s spotty past. The children’s playground used to be the jail’s exercise yard and the location where three of five hangings were conducted.

The barbed wire remains and the jail doors inside are intact, and can still be locked.

Some notorious criminals stayed in the jail cells in the basement, and Edwards says that history has proven unnerving for some.

“Every summer when we hire summer students there’s always some who will not go down to the basement themselves to switch on or off the lights at the end of the day because they’re a little spooked out by the building as well,” says Edwards.

Museum staff admit the sound of whistling in empty parts of the building can make them jump, but Edwards says the building is 170 years old, so the pipes or wind or some other scientific explanation is likely to blame.

“But when you’re in the building by yourself and it’s dark and you’re switching off the lights, that’s not the first thing that jumps to your mind, the scientific explanation, that’s for sure,” he says.

“It would have been a miserable place to be so we know that it hasn’t always had the most positive history, so that’s why it’s nice we’re doing something very positive with it.”

The museum says it may offer an adult-themed haunted house in the future, but this year the scares will be child-sized.

Click here for more information about the haunted house at Science East.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Nick Moore