Looking for Halloween displays in your neighborhood? This Delco dad made an app for that.
Users can find spooky spaces that scare them and spots that are kid-friendly, and map up to 10 places on their haunt-peeping route.
Festive holiday drives aren’t just for Christmas anymore.
The simple, family-friendly activity can now be done during spooky season, too, thanks to the increased popularity of elaborate Halloween decorating.
A free app created in the Philadelphia suburbs makes the haunt-peeping even easier.
» READ MORE: These Philly-area homeowners spend $5,000 or more to transform their yards into Halloween haunts
FrightMaps lets users browse their area’s biggest front-yard displays, alongside professionally created haunted attractions, and crafts the best driving route for seeing as many as 10 sites in one trip. Decorators can also list their home haunts on the platform.
Mike Kane, a 40-year-old West Chester software engineer, created the Halloween app in 2022 and watched it take off through word of mouth. Within weeks, the app had garnered 40,000 users nationwide, he said, and it has since grown to about 150,000 users.
“It exploded this year,” said Kane, a Delaware County native, adding that this fall the app has been averaging 10,000 new users a week, with as many as 4,200 logging in on a weekend day.
In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, he said, more than 2,000 haunts are in the FrightMaps database.
“Everybody that decorates, all they want to do is to let the community enjoy it,” Kane said. But “they’re not going to sit down and pay for advertising because setting these [displays] up is a $5,000 endeavor, plus the time.”
The FrightMaps app is funded by Kane and a couple of holiday-related sponsors. It is free for all users, though they can voluntarily contribute through the app, and Kane said he has no plans to turn to a subscription model. The app encourages users to donate to St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital through the “Skeletons for St. Jude” program, a national fundraising competition among home haunters.
Using a map or scrollable list, users can filter places based on distance from their home, popularity among other users, and whether they’re a home haunt or a professional attraction. They also can search by keywords, such as kid-friendly or inflatables, to better tailor their experience.
“Most are considered family-friendly, just because they are doing it for the kids driving by,” Kane said. “Twenty-five percent of the houses are that hardcore ‘Oh my Goodness, I can’t believe this is in front of the house’” type of setup.
For the brave Halloween lover, users can search for their fears, including clowns or spiders.
“What I’ve seen as the new trend is being creative,” Kane said. With skeletons and other props, including animatronics, “what clothes are you putting them in? What movie scenes are you putting them in?”
Many home haunts have become more sophisticated than homegrown Christmas displays, according to Kane and other local home haunters.
It was a search for Christmas lights, however, that led to the creation of FrightMaps.
In December 2020, Kane, a self-described “Delco dad,” and his wife took their 18-month-old and 9-month-old sons for a drive to look at Christmas lights near their Broomall home. But just driving around randomly, it was difficult to find homes where owners went big on holiday decor.
“We went home feeling defeated,” Kane said. So Kane created ChristmasPrism, a free app that lets user look for the most ornate winter-holiday displays and attractions and list their own yards.
A couple years later, as Halloween decorations seemed to be getting bigger and bolder than ever, Kane created FrightMaps. He said he had a personal motivation to get the app going, too: “Halloween is my jam.”