I've composed a Craigslist ad for a room in a particularly spooky apartment complex in Hamamatsu, Japan:
"New roommates must be willing to cook from a steel cauldron. You must be clean but eager to live among cobwebs. Nightly attendance expected at house screenings of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Psycho."
These haunted house-themed apartments are creepier than any decked-out creaky-porched home you're likely to find in the U.S. this Halloween weekend. Devilish pumpkins peer down from a distorted roof next to an unlucky black cat.
And according to the Gawker-owned gaming site Kotaku, they were constructed in an average, middle-class residential neighborhood. Someone in Japan just really loves Halloween—a holiday that has only recently been celebrated in that country.
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141030040500im_/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2014/10/Haunted_house_2/8a404d899.jpg)
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141030040500im_/http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2014/10/Haunted_house_1/a4413e4c5.jpg)