All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Horrible Hauntings offers page-long stories about ten famous ghosts, from the Flying Dutchman to the Brown Lady of Ranyham Hall, to the Amherst Poltergeist. With text by award-winning children's author and publisher Shirin Yim Bridges, and appropriately spooky illustrations by William Maughan, the book is a fun, seasonable read for younger children.
The thing is, though, Horrible Hauntings isn't just a book: It's also "an augmented reality collections of ghosts and ghouls." What this means is that, if you have the Horrible Hauntings app (iOS or Android) installed on a mobile device, then if you hold the device above a page in the book, you get creepy sounds, 3-D images of the ghosts, and even a little interactivity. (You can blow into your microphone and fill the sails of the Flying Dutchman, or have the skeletal remains of Edward V and his younger brother chase a ball, for example.) The trailer gives a pretty good overview of how this works:
And it really is easy to use! If the app is open, and your device's camera is pointing at a page of the book, then you will be able to interact with the ghosts. Which is nice! You don't have to hold the book up to a computer's camera, for example, or read QR codes, or anything like that for the technology to work.
A design choice that Goosebottom Books and Trigger (the company behind the app) have made, though, is that if you don't have the app, then you don't see the ghosts at all. For each story, there's text on the left-hand page, and a mostly empty backdrop on the right, which comes to life when you're using the app. On the one hand, that seems appropriate to a ghost story, because it's clever to have the empty pages be "haunted," as it were, by the missing ghosts. On the other hand, this also diminishes the book a little in the absence of the app. While the book holds its own, you can't help but be struck by the fact that something should be there.
I also liked the decision to make the ghosts interactive. After all, the sounds and images can be a little creepy, especially for younger kids, but if they can flick the ghosts around with their fingers, then that's probably a little less scary.
On balance, then, Horrible Hauntings is a clever combination of printed book with supplementary app, and will definitely interest young readers interested in ghost stories, or people interested in book/smartphone (or book/tablet) technologies. My 9-year-old thought it was age-appropriate, and GeekMom's Kris Bordessa's 17-year-old admired the technology.
