Every event in town, on your site automagically.
Your readers already know their favorite haunts. Haunts keeps track of what's on at all of them — and turns it into a calendar embed for your site, an RSS feed, and a weekend roundup you can paste straight into your newsletter.
Built for local news sites, neighborhood newsletters, libraries, chambers, and anyone else who keeps a town informed.
How it works
Local calendars are a chore. This is the part you can hand off.
Add your haunts. Walk away.
A haunt is anywhere in town that puts on events — the library, the brewery with the Tuesday trivia night, the community theater, the parks department, the record store that does in-stores, the guy who runs the pickup soccer league out of a Google Calendar.
Add one once and Haunts checks it forever. ICS feed, Google Calendar, Meetup, Eventbrite, or a venue page that hasn't been redesigned since 2011 — if they announce it somewhere, we can watch it.
One embed. That's the whole install.
Paste a snippet into a Ghost page and you have a calendar. No theme surgery, no plugin, no third-party account for your readers. And it works just as happily on WordPress, Squarespace, beehiiv, or anything else that takes an embed.
It writes the boring half of your roundup.
Star the events you want featured. Haunts hands you a clean, formatted summary — venue, time, link — and you add the part only you can write, which is the reason anyone should go.
And an RSS feed, because of course. Pipe events into your newsletter, your Slack, or whatever automation you've rigged up.
It looks like it belongs on your site.
The calendar inherits your theme's fonts and colors — it'll only be purple if your site is. Yes, it works on a phone, or in your existing sidebar. No cookies, no tracking pixels, no consent banner. Your readers stay on your site.
See it live
This is a real Haunts calendar, live right now.
The events belong to Petaluma Voice, a local news site in Sonoma County, California. Their curator picks the sources; Haunts does the rest.
Now haunting: Petaluma, California
Rounding up the usual haunts…
Why it works
Somebody has to tell this town what's happening.
Ask a local publisher which email brings in the most new readers and it's rarely the investigation. It's the one that says what's happening this weekend. Events are useful, they're recurring, and since the alt-weekly folded there's nowhere else to get them — which makes "what to do this weekend" the easiest reason anyone has to hand you their address.
It's also the most tedious thing you send. Forty open tabs, six venue Facebook pages, a library PDF, and an hour on Thursday you'd rather have spent reporting.
So Haunts does the collecting all week. Friday morning, you star what's worth featuring, paste the summary into your newsletter, and spend your time on the part that actually sells a Saturday night — the sentence explaining why anyone should go.
Pricing
Pay what fits where you are.
Prices are in alpha, like the fresh coat of paint on everything else here. What won't change: there's a real free tier, and nothing jumps to $99 the moment you succeed.
Free
for the small and scrappy
$0 / forever
- 5 haunts
- ICS + Google Calendar feeds
- Featured events + the copy-paste weekend roundup
- Community submissions
Regular
for calendars doing real work
$5 / month
- 30 haunts
- Events from libraries, government meetings, ticketing platforms, reservation systems, web pages, and more
- AI dedupe and event categorization
- 🪄 Haunt wizard - paste the link and let us figure it out
Local Legend
the whole town, in one calendar
$15 / month
- Unlimited haunts
- Everything in Regular
- Priority scraper requests
- Social media events
- Let us find and configure your haunts!
Publishing on Ghost?
Haunts comes bundled with SWS Tools.
Tools from Spectral Web Services adds newsletter digests, popups, an ad server, email automations, and a whole toolbox more to your Ghost site — and every paid Tools plan includes Haunts.
FAQ
Before you paste a script tag into your site…
How often does Haunts check for new events?
Every haunt, every night — new events are on your calendar by morning. If something big drops and you can't wait for the nightly run, hit the refresh button and the haunt rescrapes right away.
Can I really haunt anything?
A few sites block automation, and we respect that. Everyone else is fair game.
What happens when a haunt breaks — a feed dies, a venue redesigns their site?
Haunts keeps checking — a dead feed just means no new events from that haunt until it's back. And when a redesign breaks a scraper, I fix the scraper.
Can I hide an event or fix a typo?
Yes! Hide any event, override any detail a source got wrong, fix a typo — your fix survives the next nightly check.
Can I add my own events?
Absolutely! You can do this directly in Haunts, or set up a calendar (such as Google Calendar) you manage and add that as a haunt.
Will this slow my site down? Does it set cookies?
No and no. It's one script tag, loaded asynchronously after your page renders — your content never waits on it. No cookies, no trackers, no visitor identifiers — nothing that needs a consent banner. The only thing it stores is a reader's own view preference (list vs. cards), in their own browser.
What if the same event shows up on three calendars?
That's town life — the venue posts it, the chamber reposts it, someone puts it on Meetup. Haunts compares incoming events and folds lookalikes into one listing. (That's why we run AI dedupe.)
Where does Haunts work?
Haunts was built for Ghost, but works fine on any platform that will let you add some html and load JavaScript. You can find Haunts early adopters on Ghost, Beehiiv, XenForo, and more.
Currently, uploading custom images (instead of using the ones provided by the feed) requires Ghost.
Your town is busier than your calendar says it is.
Start with one haunt. Add the rest whenever you feel like it.
Start a calendarFree, no card, about five minutes.
Like a ghostwriter, but for your calendar.