Spirit Halloween

About

Spirit Halloween is an American holiday retailer owned by Spencer Gifts which sells Halloween costumes, props and decorations in temporary store fronts seasonally and online year around. The company's unique operation of occupying older storefronts seasonally has become a central part of the commentary involving the Spirit Halloween stores on Twitter and Reddit.

History

In 1983, Spirit Halloween was founded by Joe Marver when he opened the first location in Castro Valley Mall. In 1999, Spirit Halloween was purchased by Spencer gifts and grew to 60 seasonal locations nation wide. As of August 2019, Spirit Halloween has expanded to over 1,200 locations in the United States.^[1] On December 28th, 2015 Imgur^[2] user meetybeefy included Spirit Halloween in their rundown shopping center starter pack (shown below, left) Three years later, on December 22nd, 2018, @tammygolden^[3] tweeted, "The government has only been shut down for 2 HOURS and already there's one of those Halloween stores in there" which led to various photo edits of the Whitehouse with a Spirit Halloween sign on the front (shown below, right). The tweet gained over 10,000 retweets and 65,600 likes in a year.

On August 29th, 2019, Twitter user @Jessica_Dickens^[4] called Spirit Halloween "the hermit crab of corporations" (Shown below, left). Many Twitter users and Redditors created posts surrounding the fact that Spirit Halloween temporarily takes over old stores. Two days later, Twitter user @primawesome^[5] tweeted, "I left my car unlocked while I ran into the market and someone opened a Spirit Halloween in it" (show below, right). The tweet gained over 1,700 likes and 200 retweets in two days.

Fandom

Spirit Halloween has created a cult following with many YouTubers filming excursions to Spirit Halloween. On September 22nd, 2017 the Beyond Family uploaded a video of their trip to Spirit Halloween which gained over 10.2 million views in two years (shown below, left). The next month, Florida SaeSana uploaded another family trip to Spirit Halloween video which accumulated over 40 million views in two years (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References