One way to deal with the scared by occults dilemma is that Sims are always scared of the occult sims that they don't know - once they get to know them, they're not scared anymore. So if you want to do a story of an occult that goes around scaring sims, you can do it as long as you aren't friendly - could be either sims they're not introduced to, or sims where the friendly bar is below a certain point. It would make it really easy to have the occults you want be scary, but you can easily change that by just introducing, or cheating a relationship or whatever.