Why an artist is putting ‘Spirit Halloween Coming Soon’ signs on vacant buildings in this Ontario city

If you’ve been in downtown Windsor recently, you likely noticed large orange and black signs plastered across the windows and doors of vacant buildings.

They read “Spirit Halloween Coming Soon” but have nothing to do with the seasonal pop-up paraphernalia chain actually setting up shop there.

Local street artist Daniel Bombardier — also known as Denial — is putting them up trying to draw attention to the number of empty locations in the city’s core.

Many of which, he says, look haunted.

Bombardier says he decided to start hanging them up after coming getting ahold of a couple hundred of the signs.

“There’s a lot of famous memes using the Spirit Halloween kind of banner,” he said. 

“Their business is synonymous with utilizing abandoned buildings and closed down shops. And because they’re a temporary kind of ephemeral business, I think they should exist all year round. But that’s, that’s just me.” 

According to Bombardier, the signs illustrate a “poignant kind of juxtaposition.”

“Why is there so many boarded up and closed down businesses in one area that we should all be proud of our downtown?” It was really scary, kind of like Halloween.”

He hopes by highlighting the amount of empty buildings, it will fuel efforts to utilize the business spaces.

“Like some sort of rent subsidy or some sort of incentive to not have them boarded up and abandoned looking. It’s really kind of like post apocalyptic and zombie like. It’s very much like Spirit Halloween. 

Is Windsor’s downtown plan working?

Jess Reimer helped with the project, and says they have more of the signs available for people to use in a similar fashion.

“We encourage people to put them up anywhere