St. Pete dad launches website mapping Halloween-decorated houses

State of play: Fright This Way, a website Caton built using ChatGPT, features interactive neighborhood maps pinpointing decorated homes across the city.

• Click on a house, and a text box pops up with the address, scare level, descriptive tags including "clowns" and "ghosts" and, for some listings, photos.

Driving the news: Caton got the idea during evening walks with his three young boys in their neighborhood of three years, Old Northeast.

• The enclave's all-out decor has long made it one of St. Pete's hottest trick-or-treating destinations.

Yes, but: "There are plenty of people who want to go out and see cool decorations and maybe don't have a nightly routine" of it, he said.

• So Caton, who has a background working in tech, set out to make it more accessible.

How it works: Caton mapped the first 30 or so Old Northeast houses based on his nightly walks, but his goal is for the website to take on a life of its own.

• There's a button to submit your own home or a neighbor's. Users can also heart and add photos to listings, or "haunts" as the website refers to them.
• And while it hasn't happened yet, there's a button to report listings if, say, you didn't want your house included on the site.

By the numbers: As of Thursday, the website had logged nearly 300 haunts in 52 neighborhoods from Pinellas Point to Woodlawn to Jungle Prada.

• Old Northeast had the most, with 85 haunts. Then it was Crescent Heights (43), Crescent Lake (17) and Shore Acres (15).

Pro tip: 17th Avenue Northeast in Caton's neighborhood "has to be the best block in Pinellas," he said.

What's next: Caton launched the website only a few weeks ago, so he's thinking of this year as a test run.

• He plans to keep it going as long as people keep using it.