Haunted Ghost Camera

no ghost detected?
what we see
Who is in our living room
I hope he's friendly
she must have been an editor
flappers love it at my house
he looks like an old farmer
I guess we disturbed the flapper
Haunted 1024x1024 icon
Photos develop over a few seconds
snap the photo when the dot is in the center. move the camera around the room
When the apparition detector beeps, you'll know something is nearby

I was inspired to build this app when I saw the post for teh shipaton contest. I love Halloween and with AI image generation able to produce custom images quickly, I thought it would be the perfct opportunity to build something fun.

You photograph a place (or a person). When it lands, a stranger may be in your grain, your blur, and your light. Not every frame is occupied. When one is, some of them have names.

Then you can ask i a question. Hold the mic. The spirit box transcribes the question on the phone and answers in a voice that fits what you asked, or it goes quiet. Keep the plate or send a short clip. Three hauntings on install. After that, Monthly Haunting ($4.99), Annual Haunting ($19.99), or a Summon Pack of five ($2.99), all through the RevenueCat SDK. No ads. Entertainment only. We never claim a real haunting.

I built it using Swift. The shutter is gated on device so the wrong photo does not leave the phone. Admitted plates go through a Firebase function for image-to-image development, then come back as the plate you shot, not a separate sticker. The reveal flickers from the original frame to the developed one. Spirit Kit turns speech into text on the phone, then an AI consult writes a fictional reply and a short voice clip, with a real chance of silence, plus lights and haptics. Purchases are the RevenueCat iOS SDK on StoreKit: haunted_monthly, haunted_annual, and summon_pack_5. Project ID proj497c241f. Bundle ID com.zerodelta.haunted. First public App Store release was September 14, 2026.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was AI safety. We didn't want the liability of producing an image with a child in it - so we built an on device filter that detects children and if it is likely, that image never leaves their device. Our app will show "no ghost detected". This was we have removed the liability of children in any images using the safest possible method.

Version 1.0 is live on the US App Store. RevenueCat is in the shipping binary. A real App Store Annual Haunting has already come through. The demo is the loop: shoot a room, wait, reveal, ask, send.

I learned a ton about AI image modification and liability reduction. I learned how to build an admin dashboard that allows AI model changing based on cost/expenses / fail safe redundancy. I learned how to integrate and setup the payment packages.

Next for Haunted is more named presences in the roll, more ghost hunting tools, and Android if it gets traction. We had no idea how many ghost apps there were, but the majority used stickers. Ours has the ghost interact with the surroundings. Thats the magic of AI

Hunt sound is built for virality. The beep rises as you point at the lock, so a filmed hunt has a sound people replay and share. It is a fictional effect, not a real reading.