New Apple iPhone app conjures up haunted houses

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Stuck at home this weekend, feeling that seasonal urge to fear for your life? There's an iPhone app for that.

The Haunted House app brings zombies dead for centuries into the 21st century by allowing iPhone users to find information, directions and descriptions of haunts.

The iPhone application store -- which has created a cottage industry of amateur and professional programmers looking to cash in on the user-generated software -- wants holiday shoppers as much as the next retailer.

Europa Pictures, a Monongahela, Pa.-based app-creation company, has partnered with HauntedHouse.com to tap into the Web site's haunt directory. The Haunted House app uses iPhone GPS technology to determine your location and then assemble a list of nearby haunted houses.

The sites appear as blood-red pins on a map of the region. Tapping a pinhead presents a description of the haunt, along with specific locations and a Web address. Directions to the haunt from your current location are available, too.

And during the entire process, faded images of ghosts and ghouls momentarily invade the screen.

David Dennis, senior developer at Europa, said writing the program was of "average difficulty" compared with the more than 30 other apps the company offers.

Dennis began writing the program in August with Apple's Objective-C programming language. He runs the company with his partner, William McCue.

The Haunted House app retails for $2.99, a higher price than most of the other Europa products. It's also a bit of a departure from the company's repertoire, which is mostly devoted to trivia.

Europa's biggest seller: a Bible trivia app.

Contact Erich Schwartzel at eschwartzel(at)post-gazette.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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