There’s a startup in Hong Kong that compiles real estate listings of places where murders, suicides, or tragic accidents occurred. And it just launched a new app that lets users track the haunted residences. Not so they can avoid them, but so they can take advantage of the discounted rates.
As Motherboard reported:
When spacious.hk started, it mapped out data points of where these tragic events occurred and laid them over a map of the city. Now, the house-hunting service is taking things a step further by moving into augmented reality with a just-launched app that allows users to hunt haunted houses in real time.
According to the story, Chinese people generally don’t want to live in places where people have died “out of a deep cultural fear of ghosts,” so they tend to sell for less. But “the city’s expatriates—not to mention Hong Kong’s new generation—aren’t usually bothered by living in haunted houses.”
Now spacious.hk’s new app makes it easier than ever for ghost-friendly tenants to find these haunted properties and score housing on the cheap.
Motherboard said that when a user opens the app, “listings pop up on the screen.” The user can also check a specific apartment building—if some sort of chilling event has happened there, spacious.hk’s “friendly ghost icon” will appear. Tapping on the listing reveals details about the apartment and explains why—murder, suicide, etc.—it’s selling for a lower price.
A quick look at the listings on spacious.hk shows that many of the deaths are suicide by charcoal. Here’s a sampling:
- “47 year-old woman in debt and committed charcoal-burning suicide.”
- “Woman committed charcoal-burning suicide due to health issues.”
- “Man in financial trouble committed charcoal-burning suicide.”
- “Old woman committed charcoal-burning suicide accompanied by six pets.”
Charcoal burning may not leave a visible stain, but it seems to leave a digital one.
