10 spooky iOS apps for Halloween (photos)

Free Halloween Sounds Pro gives you 16 frightening sounds to scare friends and trick-or-treaters. You can select from a blood-curdling scream and a maniacal laugh to a howling wolf and a creaking door by tapping on the icons, and you can play more than one sound at a time. The Spooky Soundtrack button at the bottom starts atmospheric organ music and randomly plays the various sound effects over it--perfect for setting up outside your front door to greet trick-or-treaters on Halloween night.

To kick your Halloween effects up a notch, grab the 99-cent DJ Halloween app. It features 16 sounds, both frightening sound effects and spooky music. Tap an icon to play it on a loop, and combine various sounds to create your own Halloween mix.

There are a number of 99-cent jack-o'-lantern apps, but the aptly named Jack O'Lantern app is free and lets you create virtual pumpkin faces on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It's perfect for those who don't like to get their hands dirty with slimy pumpkin guts or who like to plan out a jack-o'-lantern design before making the first incision. Just draw on the virtual pumpkin to create a face, while ignoring the banner ad at the top. To start over, double-tap the pumpkin.

The 99-cent iMut8r app will turn you into a zombie. Or, to be more precise, it'll let you snap a picture or import one from your photo library and add a number of zombie effects to your mug. You can select various effects for your head, nose, eyes, mouth, and so on, and you can adjust and and move and fade the effects so they look quite realistic. There is an iPad app, which provides a large canvas to get your zombiefied image just so.

For a more turnkey approach to assembling an army of zombie pics, give the free ZombieBooth Lite app a try. It turns a picture into a living, breathing zombie with the press of the button. Your picture will move and grunt and growl, and if you tap the screen, it will bite at your finger.

The free Scary Camera app features four camera lenses and numerous overlays to create horrifyingly fun Halloween pics.

If zombie pictures and Halloween soundtracks don't scare you, then perhaps you need to get yourself to an honest-to-goodness haunted house on All Hallows Eve. Let the 99-cent DarkHaunts Haunted Site Locator app know your location (or search for another) and it'll produce a list of haunted sites in your area. From my spot in southern New Hampshire, it spit back a list of spooky spots in Salem, Mass. and Boston, including cemeteries, an old jail, and haunted hotels. Tap on an item on the list and you'll see its address and a brief description about its haunted nature, along with a button to find the location on a map.

It's Dracula for the text generation! The iDrakula app is a multimedia modern telling of Bram Stoker's "Dracula." The story is told as a series of texts, e-mails, and voice mails. You get the first five days free, and then the rest of the tale will cost you $1.99. New messages arrive each day at midnight.

Curl up this Halloween with your iPad and the graphic novel, "30 Days of Night," a vampire tale set in Alaska where the sun doesn't shine for a month, giving creatures of the night amply opportunity to terrorize town folk. The 30 Days of Night app is a bookstore app that stores your comics. You get the first comic, 30 Days of Night: Beyond Barrow #1, for free. Additional comics typically cost $1.99.

Sometimes there is nothing scarier than a good telling of a ghost story. If you are going camping this weekend, be sure to download the 99-cent True Ghost Stories from Around the World app to up the ante when the sun has set and your friends are sitting around the campfire. This app contains thousands of user-submitted ghost stories, some audio stories, and it lets you upload your own.