There is an old warehouse along Suzhou Creek in Shanghai, things here go bump at night, decapitated ghouls and Nosferatu float around in creepy darkness. It’s a night full of shrieks in a house full of hair-raising, heart-throbbing creatures and gadgets.

They call it “Shanghai Nightmare”, which is the first American style haunted house in China; it has received more than 10,000 visitors over 5 weeks since it opened. Gan Quan which is the Co-founder of this said that it had received 800 guests every single day (day, night) which is also twice of the number they had expected and planned for.

Last Saturday, things had gone bump even outside the house and the ghouls could have flown under the open sky. But unfortunately, the planned Halloween party had to be cancelled out of safety concern, the 26-year-old Gan said.

This 107-year-old 500-sq-m haunted house has contained: ghouls, ghosts, a stomach-churning, “beheading room” and other props such as a jailhouse door and also all the scary gears to maintain a scary ambience.

As the light went out, the intrepid visitors were blanketed in darkness upon setting foot in the first corridor. And there were 13 horror walkways, starting with one on which a girl in a nightgown crawls across a darkened hallway. And then there were horror rooms full of rogue surgeons, dead teenagers and cockroaches on the walls.

Lin Li, a 19-year-student had been scared several times during the time in the dark room with all those bodies popping out everywhere. The whole idea is cool, especially the day before Halloween, Li said.

Gan said that this haunted house was unlike anything that people have seen in China. The house tells a story. It combines art, thrills and a touch of magic and it brings together some of the most stunning audio and visual effects in America.

China has its own tradition ghosts and ghouls, Gan, who grew up in the US, with his partner Charlie Xu saying that they built this Nightmare in Shanghai to give Chinese a real tastes of Halloween.

The Halloween House idea came from Gan’s visit in Shanghai in October in 2008 and he found the people of Shanghai are ready for it and it to have a promising market for Halloween parties.

Taobao, the biggest online commercial site, shows us the sales of the most popular Halloween prop, the pumpkin light, reached 100,000 last week and 2,000 masks were sold across the counter in two days in Shanghai. People turn to online shopping since Halloween goods and customers are usually difficult to find in stores, said one prop buyer, surnamed Zhang.

Also some Taobao shops promoted tombstone-shaped chocolates, vampire bats and spiders to meet consumers’ special needs during the last week of October.

Also Shanghai’s comic artists have been bitten by the Halloween bug. Young artists from Changning Folk Culture Centre were planning to organize a ghost-themed evening party of cross talk.

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