99% Invisible - Spirit Halloween

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Every fall, a vacant Toronto storefront is possessed by Spirit Halloween, the pop-up shop haunting 1,500 empty spaces across North America. What does this seasonal invasion say about the retail apocalypse? And why are people so drawn to its eerie aisles? Explore the spooky rise of Spirit Halloween—where the scares are temporary, but the obsession is real.Spirit Halloween Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's a storefront at a major intersection in downtown Toronto, at Spadina and King Street. The space is about 11,000 square feet, and it used to house a massive liquor store, right in the middle of Canada's biggest city. For years, I worked down the street, and let me tell you, that liquor store was bumpin'. That's producer Chris Berube. I remember lines out the door before holidays, and setting aside a whole lunch hour just to get a bottle of wine. But in 2019, the liquor store moved to a new, bigger location close by, and the shop at Spadina and King closed. Since then, all 11,000 square feet have been empty. For a long time, I wondered,

okay, what is going to move in there? I mean, this is a big time space right downtown, but in 2019, it sat empty. 2020, still empty. 2021, empty. 2022, okay, you get the point. But it's only empty for about nine months out of the year because every fall, just like clockwork,

the space has been possessed by a spirit, by spirit Halloween. If you live in the US or Canada, you have probably seen the orange, yellow, and black Spirit Halloween signs. They go up sometime in August in 1500 empty storefronts, and by early November, all of them disappear. Spirit Halloween has become something of an institution. If you aren't familiar, I mean, it's pretty simple.

It's a pop-up store full of Halloween stuff. They sell Halloween masks, Halloween costumes, Halloween costumes for dogs, Halloween decorations, creepy robots, and several different kinds of fake blood. And it's successful. Spirit reportedly sells about a billion dollars worth of merchandise every year. For a long time, I resisted going to Spirit because, I don't know, it just seemed like a lot of loud noises and crowds and children running around. And I gotta say, when I finally took the plunge last fall, it was pretty much that. It's like it's set up to look like a crypt. It's just full of those electric candles that kind of look like fire. After passing through rows of plastic gravestones and being yelled at by a terrifying animatronic clown, I discovered this one blue jumpsuit costume that severely creeped me out.

So I see an avatar, which honestly is very disturbing. I can't imagine dressing a child like this. I don't like it. Overall, I'd say the experience wasn't really for me. But I know that my opinion is in the minority here, because there are a ton of people who are obsessed with Spirit Halloween. Today is a very special day, my friends, because today is the day that my local Spirit Halloween store has opened and we are here right in front of it about to go in.

I'm going to give you a full tour of this year's theme, animatronics. There are countless YouTube videos from creators who treat the first day of the Spirit calendar like a high holy day, walking through the aisles of a freshly opened store and exploring the new products. I love this guy. My name is Jackie and I have a YouTube channel called Super Enthused. Jackie's videos of Spirit Halloween walkthroughs have garnered hundreds of thousands of views. Jackie says the reason Spirit has developed a following is the way they've tried to make the store itself feel like a haunted house. One thing I found, like the first thing that hit me was that Spirit kind of let you play with things. They let you stomp on the floor and activate the

animatronics and almost all the others, especially as a younger person, a kid, a teenager. No, no, no, don't touch! Don't touch that! Don't open that! You can't touch anything! You can't play with anything! You're watching you like a hawk if you're going to steal the whole store! But Spirit's like, come in, touch everything, play with all the things!

Spirit's haunted house energy is a big part of the draw, but there's also an element of scarcity. Because the real hallmark of Spirit Halloween is that it's only open roughly three months out of the year. Spirit Halloween has zero permanent year-round locations, and inside these pop-up stores, there's an overwhelming feeling that everything won't be around for long. Here is what I do not get about Spirit Halloween. The last few years have been considered this kind of retail apocalypse, with lots of brick and mortar

chains closing their physical locations. A lot of those retailers have just left empty storefronts across the country. So what does it say about the world of retail, that a seasonal Halloween store is taking all these abandoned spaces for three months a year and making a killing in the process. To understand how Spirit became ubiquitous, I called it the guy who started it. Joe Marver opened Spirit in 1983. And I'll admit, when I met the father of Spirit Halloween, I kind of assumed he'd have a backstory about how he became a Halloween guy.

Like he stumbled into a crypt full of bats or he stumbled upon a pumpkin that was full of bats. But it turns out his childhood was disappointingly bat-free. Did trick or treating out of my house. I mean, we're going back to 1950 is when I was seven years old. My first costume was Zorro.

Okay, but Joe Marver did tell me as a teen, he attended summer camp at this place with a really spooky name. I went to a camp in Devil's Lake, Wisconsin. In his 20s, Joe Marver moved west to California in search of his fortune. He worked as a clown in Las Vegas, then at a shoe store, and by the early 80s he owned an outlet store in the Bay Area. A haunted outlet store.

It was not haunted. It was just a regular store called Spirit Discount Women's Apparel. But right across the parking lot from Joe's store was a dancewear shop. They sold leotards and tutus, but also a selection of Halloween costumes. And watching their customers gave Joe Marver an idea. They were lined up around the block for the month of October, and it was insane, because our October stunk in the women's apparel business across the street in a strip center. In 1983, the dancewear shop closed,

and Joe Marver decided he could not let those customers go someplace else. So he put the women's clothing in the basement and bought a crop of Halloween costumes. Hmm, I'm gonna go to a trade show. I'm gonna get wigs, makeup, a lot of products that could be for Halloween. That October, Joe completely changed his business for one month only.

And Spirit Discount Women's Apparel became Spirit Halloween. Our staff totally was dressing up in costume, something that might have been a costume that we wanted to sell. And it rocked. It was amazing. The new business model worked right away. In his second year, Joe says he made $100,000. Soon, he was running six stores, and then even more. And it's from these early stores that we get the not-built-to-last quality that's

come to define Spirit Halloween. Now, this predates the rise of pop-up retailers. Back then, there wasn't this modern concept of a cool artisanal clothing shop that's open for two weeks, or a food truck in the parking lot of your favorite bar. Spirit was ahead of all that. And because they were just building for the short term, they used materials that could be put up and taken down really quickly. I remember that the tables for displays

were actually the cardboard boxes that the merchandise came in. Cause he ended up with all these boxes, lots of boxes, you know, maybe a thousand cartons at the time. And you'd pile these boxes up in the middle of the sales floor, drape a black cloth over them. And that was your display table, you know? So ultimate in reduce, reuse, recycle, right?

That's Mike Olson, who started working with Spirit in the 80s. Mike says while the setup was a little bare bones, Joe Marver had a knack for making his stores feel macabre. You know, the aisles were nice and wide and you were just inundated with all the sights and sounds of Halloween. Joe started experimenting with how much he could scare customers without scaring them away. For example, many spirit stores included baby carriages with creepy dolls in the middle

of the action. You had the animatronics, they step on the mat and they scream at you. Customers loved the mix of kitschy and creepy. But early on, Joe hit a major roadblock in expanding the business. Landlords just didn't understand the idea of a temporary store. Mike Olson says they associated the idea with something low rent and unreliable,

like say a firework stand that would pop up on the side of the road around the 4th of July. Very few landlords wanted to rent their space to a business that was going to put down stakes for eight weeks and then leave that space abandoned. He's calling around to landlords and other brokers and they look at you like you had three heads when you say, look, I've got this temporary Halloween thing.

To find locations, Mike Olsen would drive around town looking for shopping centers with empty rundown storefronts until he found one that might take his call. That was it. When you put it like that, it makes it sound like, well, that was super inefficient, but it was really the only way. Mike Olson says the sales pitch in the early days was pretty difficult. So the Sphere team got creative. Mike remembers trying to win over one corporate landlord with this suite of available spaces.

I just know that I wanted to get in and break that nut with him. And eventually called my buddy Anne Sullivan down at the Hayward office. I said, Hey, any chance that we've got a severed arm down in inventory somewhere? And she said, you know, I think we do. So she sends that thing to me and I staple it to a piece of cardboard, put my business card on it and then write on there the gentleman's name, hey, lend me a hand. I need your location here. And I put it in an envelope, sent it off to the guy. And he called me back and I got the deal. Ultimately, Spirit was able to solve their problem largely by paying above market rate

for their short-term leases. But another thing that helped Spirit was timing. Big box stores spread across America in the 1960s and 70s with the rise of Walmart, Target, and Kmart. By the 1980s, big box retail stores were becoming ubiquitous in the American suburbs. Those retailers put a lot of mom-and and pop and smaller chains out of business. But for Spirit Halloween, the ubiquity of these big boxes was an opportunity. Because if one of these stores closed, which happened from time to time, landlords were

stuck. These spaces were purpose-built for something like a Kmart, and they were difficult to repurpose. You couldn't just put in a hospital or an apartment complex into an old big box unless you completely redeveloped the property and got zoning laws changed. Mike Olson says Spirit became a favorite for corporate landlords because of their promise. We'll fill your empty boxes for a couple of months while you look for a new tenant and maybe we'll fix them up a little. We've cleaned more floors, replaced more light bulbs, and fixed more HVAC units across

the country than I would think any other retailer at this point. Because when we go into a space, we need that space to look good. And oftentimes, a retailer, when they leave a space, they're not leaving it in a condition that's ready to occupy. This was Spirit's real estate strategy. Sometimes they'd take an old bank or one time a defunct church, but mostly they were laser focused on abandoned big boxes. Anything over 10,000 square feet,

preferably across the parking lot from another popular store. If it had good traffic and it was a corner that had across the street a Lowe's or a Home Depot, then that would be enough of a draw. Now we're at a Walmart just off the highway with highway visibility with an exit. Hello, money. By the 90s, Spirit had a few dozen stores. They even managed to secure the perfect celebrity spokesperson. I even had Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, who we put on our billboards with her picture,

and I got rights to the phone number 1-800-HALLOWEEN. Spirit went national, and pretty soon a big mall brand took notice. Fast forward to 1998, and Spencer Gifts approaches me and says, we would like to talk to you about possibly doing a deal. After 16 years in business, Joe sold Spirit Halloween to Spencer's, a store most Americans will know for their fine array of lava lamps and novelty t-shirts. Joe stayed on as a consultant for a while,

but today, Joe Marver is retired from the company, and he runs a hotel in Washington state. He still dresses up every year for Halloween, and he plays a character for his guests. And I don't do too bad on Elvis voice. People who work for Spirit Halloween talk about a before and an after for the company. Under corporate ownership, Spirit has gone from 65 stores to 1,500, and they moved away from some of the generic costumes they used to carry. Old Spirit would feature largely off-brand costumes. You might've seen jokes about these online,

like the sidekick bros who look suspiciously like Super Mario and Luigi, but today Spirit has the license to real characters from Disney and Marvel and most of the popular horror franchises. Spirit Halloween have corporate owners now and a website where you can buy stuff all year round. But their physical stores are still a temporary operation. Their logo is still plastered on a tarp in front of each storefront.

Their display is still made out of pegboard and they are still only open a few months a year. The biggest thing that stayed the same about Spirit Halloween is their real estate plan. They keep searching for empty big box stores every year. Here's Mike Olson. You know, I'm cruising the newspaper and I see someone file for bankruptcy. Admittedly, I'm immediately jumping on the, you know, say, okay, where are the stores, how big are they, and can I get, can I take advantage of this? Hey, I'm immediately jumping on the, you know, say, okay, where are the stores? How big are they? And can I get to kind of take advantage of this? Hey, I'm a broker. I can admit that. I'll go with that.

You know, it's it's finding opportunities for my client. Spirit has benefited whenever there has been a crisis in the retail sector, first with the wave of corporate closures in the 90s. Good guys in CompUSA and Circuit City and Best Buy was out there, Barnes & Noble, Borders Books, all of the big box, you know, the category killers. Then, there was a much bigger crisis in the American economy. Get to 2008 financial meltdown, 2009, I think the Phoenix metro area at one time had 256 empty retail boxes, big boxes. Take your pick.

Many brands didn't survive the financial downturn or lost out to Amazon or other online retailers. And Spirit has taken many of their old storefronts. Yeah, we could take old Sears boxes, old Kmart boxes. You've probably seen those, you know, the 40,000 square foot Toys R Us box or the 30,000 square foot Bed Bath and Beyond. This kind of guerrilla adaptive reuse

has led some critics to call Spirit the Grim Reaper of American retail. In fact, the whole thing has become a joke online. Yeah, we're part of the meme universe. You probably see the memes out there that whenever the government shuts down, for example, someone hangs the Spirit Halloween banner, superimposes on the White House.

As a business, Spirit is doing well for itself. But I wanted to know what urban policy folks think about it. Rachel Quednow is the program director at Strong Towns, an organization that advocates against suburban-style planning. And she doesn't like what spirit represents. If our cities are thinking about like, what is a long-term benefit for us financially, for our residents, then we shouldn't be thinking

about pursuing, you know, really short-term, massive businesses like this. A 2023 report from the commercial real estate data company CoStar says the United States has more than 50 square feet of retail space per person. A 2023 report from the commercial real estate data company CoStar says the United States has more than 50 square feet of retail space per person. That's much higher than countries like Australia, which have about 11 square feet. European countries have even less. And in Rachel's opinion, the success of Spirit is something that only happens because we

have a bunch of big companies that build big boxes and then leave them empty. Honestly, for all the huge big box stores that are now sitting vacant, I think the best case scenario is to knock them down, let them return to the earth, particularly if they're on the edge of town where it's hard to access without a car. I don't think that's a viable model to hope that we could transform all these stores into something new, especially when there's more and more becoming vacant every day. For his part, Mike Olson doesn't agree that there's some big overabundance of retail space.

In fact, he says right now, it's kind of a low point in the market for Spirit. We're in a completely different era. We're at a point where it's difficult to find spaces because there hasn't been much in the way of new construction for retail across the country. And what retail is out there happens to be mixed use, you know, retail on the main floor, apartments or office above. If Mike's right, Spirit still manages to find hundreds of empty storefronts every year. The days of Spirit's real estate team driving around and begging landlords for space, those are over.

Today, larger corporate landlords expect Spirit's calls every year. And those calls start as early as January. That's because Spirit is just a regular part of their business now. Look, we are no different than any other retailer out there right now, because they're doing the exact same thing.

I guarantee you, it's just on a slower scale. Every retailer is a temporary tenant. It just depends on how long they're temporary. Sears was temporary for 130 years. Other tenants, well, they're temporary for two years. You know? But that's the reality of retail. Ultimately, Spirit isn't the reason

for empty big box stores. There are bigger factors at play here. I don't think that there's something inherently wrong with Spirit. It's more like a symptom of a bigger problem. Most of our cities today, unfortunately, are really structured to invite those large scale developments. Our zoning codes, our rules around parking requirements,

our tax structures are set up so that when the Walmart at the Target or the big supermarket wants to come to town, we bend over backwards. I think it's easy to find some gruesome metaphor for spirit. To say it's like a vulture or a zombie or a grim reaper. But actually, I think spirit is more like a hermit crab. It finds these different shells, and it discards them as it goes along. Sometimes the shell is an old bank, or a giant big box, or an abandoned liquor store.

It just uses these spaces because they're there. As to why Spirit is popular, I mean, there's no mystery here. Halloween is fun. It's the only holiday where you get to buy a present for yourself. And it's the only night of the year where it's socially acceptable to dress up and just be whoever you want. Oh my gosh, okay, maybe I have to get this. This is a costume.

And the costume is guy who works at Spirit Halloween, so it says Spirit Crew Workshirt. There's a patch that says Spirit and Skeleton Crew on the side. Ooh, that's awful tempting. Alright all you ghouls and goblins, do not touch that dial. More with Chris Berube after this. So we're back with Chris Borube. Hey Chris. Hey Roman. So you have a little bit more to this story? I do.

I mean, I feel like in talking about the last few years of Halloween, there've been a couple of trends in America. Of course, there's been, you know, the ubiquity and the spread of Spirit Halloween and other stores, you know, there's also Spooker Superstore, Halloween Express, all these other ones. But there's also been another consumer product that has been just everywhere the last couple of Halloweens. So it's been meme to death.

It's become this kind of obsession for people around Halloween in this country. Roman, are you familiar with the giant skeleton? So I've seen these around. So how actually tall are these? These are about 12 feet tall. So if you don't live in the US, maybe you haven't seen these,

but if you're in America, they're kind of unavoidable around Halloween now. So in 2020, first Halloween of the pandemic, everybody was wondering, you know, we're under lockdown. It's like, are we going to do Halloween this year? And that's the year Home Depot decided, we're gonna roll out this new product. It is a 12 foot plastic skeleton

you can put in your yard with light up eyes. It costs about $300. And a lot of people, including me, were wondering like, given the price, given the size, would anybody buy these? And they sold out immediately. Like they were just gone, unavailable these? And they sold out immediately. Like they were just gone, unavailable. 2021, they sold out again.

There's like articles in newspapers that are like, when's the skeleton coming back? Where do you buy the skeleton? And it's hilarious cause like, this is all from a company that is not known for like Halloween stuff. Like Home Depot, I mostly associate with buying lumber. Yeah, I mostly associate with getting frustrated

and not knowing where to go to find a thing. Yes, Home Depot is Byzantine, yeah. But like this thing has been such a success, like, you know, it's probably one of the more famous things about Home Depot right now. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, the skeleton, it feels like it has become just like a part of Halloween now.

And I've seen them all over the place. Like I've seen them outside of chiropractor's offices, which ha, ha, ha, very funny, it's a skeleton. There was one in Midtown Manhattan, for no apparent reason, that I kept running into. But I've always had a lot of questions about these. Like I've always wondered, is it kind of a nightmare to own one of these skeletons?

You mean like for the other, you know, 11 months of the year, like where do you store them? How do you upkeep them? That kind of thing. Exactly, and personally, I would be most worried about judgment, I feel like. Like what would neighbors think if you had this giant skeleton in your yard?

Like is it allowed also to have something this big just on your property? So I was wondering, what is it actually like to own a giant skeleton? So I called up a friend of mine. My name is Bobby, and I am a proud owner of the 12 foot Home Depot skeleton. Bobby Lord, you may know him from the world of podcasting. He used to work on Heavyweight,

and he does the music in the mixing for Science Versus, a show that we love over here at 99PI. Yeah, I absolutely adore both those shows. at 99PI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I absolutely adore both those shows. So Bobby, you know, Bobby likes Halloween. His wife, Deidre, she loves Halloween. And when they heard about the skeleton first, they were interested, but they were initially kind of hesitant.

It's prohibitively expensive, unless you're insane, about Halloween decorations. And we were very blessed to have a bunch of awesome, funny friends who pitched in as a wedding gift for us, got it for us as a wedding gift. I was among those friends. It was... Yes, I didn't know if you wanted me to break the...

No, it's okay. It is okay to say this. So not only is Bobby your friend, you're involved in this story. You're the reason why this story is happening right now. I don't think it's good journalism, necessarily, but... Yeah, despite my misgivings, I and a group of like 10 people went in together and bought them this gigantic home-to-go skeleton for their wedding. When you guys bought the skeleton for us,

he arrived in the most hilarious box I've ever seen in my life on our front porch. It was so hard to just even open the box, move the box, get the stuff out of the box, and then I had to break down the box. And it was like, when you're breaking down this massive cardboard box, it was like, you know, cardboard is like pretty, pretty strong material, especially when it's that big. This is becoming like a white elephant for him. Like, I'm getting a little nervous for Bobby at this point. Yeah, I was, I gotta be honest.

Like as soon as we pulled the trigger on this, I was like, what a great idea. They're gonna think this is so funny. And then I became anxious like right away. Like, am I signing up these people I care about for just a terrible experience? Totally. When you start like putting it all together

and putting all the pieces together, in your head are you like, oh no, we've made a terrible mistake? Or was it like, this is amazing, this is changing my life for the better? Funny that you say that, because I do think at one point it occurred to me that it might be a mistake. Like the type of thing that you think is so funny and then you're actually doing it and you're like, oh my God, this is so big. It really is so big.

And then we had just moved into this house like two months prior into a new neighborhood. So I think part of you is thinking like, God, is everyone going to hate us or be annoyed by us? So they put it up. They named the skeleton, Tommy Lee Bones. So he's up there now, but they've got these worries. Thankfully, it seems like people in the neighborhood are pretty into the skeleton. Nobody has complained so far.

And they've had the skeleton up in their yard now pretty consistently for about two years, partly because there is nowhere reasonably to store a 12-foot skeleton in the off time. So for Bobby and Deidre, so far, they've been putting the skeleton in the backyard in the off season, and they've been putting the skeleton in the backyard in the off season and they've been putting different seasonal clothing on him depending on the time of year.

So he's had a Hawaiian shirt and shorts for the summer, you know, things like that. We also put a big Santa hat on him for Christmas last year, which by the way, they don't make a Santa hat big enough for the 12 foot skeleton. So my wife bought four Santa hats and we kind of cut it and constructed one super large Santa hat. And then it was a big to do to like get up there and tape it to his head and stuff. So for the most part, they love the skeleton. It's been a great experience,

but he does admit there have been a few drawbacks. Like other than being committed to large-scale crafts, like, what are some of the drawbacks here? Well, okay, the maintenance issues, you know, predictable. You've got to do some upkeep. You have to replace parts once in a while. Uh, Bobby says it has scared some children. He has a cousin or a nephew who's been a little bit unnerved by it. But actually, it's funny,

because the most disappointing thing about the skeleton, it's not, like, the negative reactions from people. It's not the stuff I was worried about. According to Bobby, it's actually how little people have reacted to it. I naively thought like, oh my God, we're gonna be like basically a tourist attraction in the neighborhood.

We're gonna be, we'll have like a Google map. People will be coming from miles around to see the big skeleton. That same Halloween I saw, like within one square mile of us, like literally like 12 people have the skeleton. And then also they're all doing it better than us. Like they have more decorations around him and like cool costumes on him and stuff.

So no, a lot of people have the big skeleton and it was not as, we weren't as unique as I thought it might be. So the problem is that this wasn't weird enough. 12 foot skeleton has become too mainstream. It's too popular. Exactly, and then there's this like arms race to have the best decorated skeleton.

So, Roman, is this not in some ways the most human tragedy that we search for novelty, we push for greater achievement, and then we normalize even these, you know, most remarkable of human accomplishments? The most remarkable human achievements. I mean, I don't know if I'd put 12-foot skeleton in that, but, you know. I think there are many people who have bought the skeleton who might disagree with you. Thanks, Roman.

Thank you Chris. 99% Invisible was produced this week by the cadaverous Chris Berube and Jaka Merdonado Medina edited by Skellington Prime. Mix and editing by Mar Scream Gonzalez. Music by Swannn Rial Monsters. Fact checking by Skara Bullens. Our executive producer is Cathy Boo. Our senior editor is Delaney Halloween. Our digital director is Kurt Goulstad. Our intern is Taylor Shredrick. The rest of the screen includes Freddie vs. Jason DeLeon, Emmett FitzPeryl, Stabriela Gladney, Christopher Here's Johnson, Lasha Madonna the Dead, Vivian Slay, Joe Murder of Crosenberg, Nina Ptokula, and me, Roman Mars Attacks.

The 90% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Katie Klein, Ben Frisch, and Katie Thomas. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And spooky, scary, Oakland, California. You can find us all on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server, where the cadaverous Chris Berube will be posting extra material from this week's episode. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99PI.org. You