Scare up some good ideas for Halloween

Whether you're a hardcore haunted house fan or you just want to find a spooky hayride or an eerie pumpkin patch, there's probably a haunted attraction within a few miles of your own backyard.

Of course, like everything else these days, the Halloween season has embraced technology. It's now possible to go on the Internet, punch in your ZIP code and find haunted houses within a tank of gas from home... and sometimes even down the block.

The Hauntworld.com site is serving up a free directory of more than 1,000 haunted attractions throughout the country-from "professional" haunted houses and hayrides to home haunts and even haunts on steamboats and semi- trailers.

"On Hauntworld.com you can look through every haunted house in the state, narrow it down to the ones you're interested in and visit theirweb sites before choosing

where to go," said Larry Kirchner, the website's founder and an aficio- nado who has personally visited over 200 haunted houses.

The directory provides location information, dates and hours of operation, ticket prices and more, provided by the attractions and by the site's visitors. Hauntworld.com's users can review the haunted houses and can even rate them on a scale of one-to-10 skulls... that's right, not stars but spooky skulls.

Most important, according to Kirchner, the directory features links to the websites of the attrac- tions.

"If a haunt doesn't have a good Web site, you should probably steer clear," he points out. "If you say you are the best haunted house in town and can't even show a good picture or a video it's probably not pretty good."

And if you want to get in on the act yourself, Hauntworld.com even features forums where you can chat

with others about building the ulti- mate home haunt in your house and yard. Perfect for that home ghoul who wants to jazz up the garage.

Just who would want to convert the rec room into a torture chamber of horrors?

"I own a haunted house myself . . . We started Hauntworld about 10 years ago as a place for haunted house owners to communicate and it kept getting bigger," said Kirchner, who also runs "Haunted House Magazine," a quarterly print magazine devoted to the spooky subject and to the ins and outs of running your own haunted attrac- tion.

"When I was a little kid I would prefer to see 'Wolfman Versus Fran- kenstein' or 'King Kong Versus Godzilla' than cartoons. Wolfman is still my favorite monster, fol- lowed by the Creature From the Black Lagoon," he added.

Indeed, for some of us, Hallow- een comes more than once a year.