Spirit Halloween

Spirit Halloween is more than a grammatically difficult-to-pronounce store. It is also an October 31st-themed national chain masquerading as a pop-up shop.

Annually, Spirit haunts vacant big-box stores for a month or so, before disappearing. In the past, Spirit Halloween has occupied the hollow, mortal shell of a Northgate storefront. This year it's on Aurora next to the morally decrepit Hobby Lobby.

Some children, such as my own, enjoyed visiting the monstrous metro station filled with enchanting howls and cackles of robot demons.

Or the animatronic swamp full of not-at-all scary creatures.

See this doll? I was barely scared of this doll. Really, hardly at all, until it started speaking in that baby voice.

Maybe as a child you heard, "if you keep picking your nose, your finger will get stuck." I never heard that, because I never picked my nose. But maybe you did. Worse luck, you will apparently get hepatitis and alopecia as well.

As a child, the Halloween choices offered to me were: I could be either a ballerina or a ballerina. If I chose ballerina, I'd wear my sleeveless leotard and tutu and slippers I put on every Tuesday for dance classes at the Eagles hall. But I'd also get to wear makeup. For some reason. 

Then we would go trick-or-treating at the local mobile home complex, which you might call a trailer park, but we didn't call it that. It was sort of the nicer neighborhood where I grew up. Fun fact: if they eat enough sugar, ballerinas don't feel cold. 

Spirit Halloween, to be honest, is mostly full of mass-produced low-quality merchandise sold for a goodly amount of money. I'd rather be a ballerina. Or go to Value Village and make my own "hipster nerd" costume, once I figure out what a "hipster nerd" might be. I bet they use craft slide-rules, amiright. And hand-made tape on those sustainable glasses?

Spirit also has "Caitlin Jenner" costumes which seemed shitty and needlessly transphobic. I don't have a picture of the costumes because they sucked. You can Google it, but I won't make you. 

In short, I wouldn't return unless somehow starring in a horror movie in which I was forcibly made to come back. And entreated to wear a unicorn head. Uh oh.

Let's hope next year the space is filled, and Spirit Halloween shuffles off this mortal coil to terrorize some other poor road.

Spirit Halloween
Open until the first week of November.
13240 Aurora Ave N Seattle, WA 98133

Web: https://www.spirithalloween.com