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.