This just in: Reports of ghoul infestations have been flooding the Trulia offices. Agents and house hunters everywhere are reporting sightings of zombies, vampires, and ghosts in neighborhoods across the United States.
To dig up the truth, our maps team compiled the data and added a brand-new Unnatural Hazards filter to our local map search. So if you’re looking for a new home, you can find out if there are any living corpses near Cape Cod, Mass., bloodsuckers lurking near Brooklyn, N.Y., or specters hovering around San Diego, Calif.
Zombies
Anyone who’s seen his fair share of zombie films knows zombies rise from the grave. So to calculate the risk of zombie infestation, we used cemetery locations from the U.S. Census and mashed up the data with OpenStreetMap‘s tagged cemeteries to create a detailed cemetery base map. Then we calculated degrees of risk based on the minimum distance to a cemetery for every block group in the country. Live near a graveyard? You’ve been warned!
As you can see by the map below, Lower Manhattan has been completely overwhelmed. Who knew zombies had such good taste?
Vampires
Vampires tend to congregate in areas where their favorite food is readily available (hospitals and medical centers). With a little help from our friends at Yelp, we determined which areas are most at risk for vampire attack.
A steel turtleneck might be a good investment in SoCal this time of year, judging by the example below. Los Angeles should just go ahead and change its name to Los Vampiros.
Ghosts
Experts note that spectral sightings are most likely to happen in spooky-looking places. With that in mind, we’ve identified the spookiest, and therefore most ghost-infested, places across the country. (It was a very scientific study and not at all random.)
You’d think Miami wouldn’t be the best place for pale creatures, but ghosts always manage to surprise you.
Could there be a haunted house in your neighborhood? Are there vampires in your neck of the woods?
Find out if hordes of the undead are shambling through your streets by using the Unnatural Hazards filter on Trulia’s local maps — and share your findings in the comments below.
