Month of the half-living retail
Each fall, Spirit Halloween moves into the stores of the chains that recently went bankrupt. This year that means Joann, Big Lots, Party City and Rite Aid.
The tombstones have changed
Happy fall, and welcome back to the haunted strip mall. Last October we called Spirit Halloween a zombie feeding on dead real estate. As is the case with any zombie outbreak, it tends to spread.
The pop-up Halloween business, which leases empty storefronts for its short selling season, has 1,587 open stores across the U.S. and Canada in 2026, up 37 stores (2.4%) from last year. That follows a slight dip in 2025, when its count fell by two stores, from 1,552 to 1,550.
- In a "Former ___" space
- Other locations
Source: Spirit Halloween’s store locator, 2019–2026, via AllThePlaces.
View data
| Season | Total stores | Change | In a "Former" space | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 1,366 | 621 | 45% | |
| 2020 | 1,404 | +2.8% | 738 | 53% |
| 2021 | 1,414 | +0.7% | 822 | 58% |
| 2022 | 1,455 | +2.9% | 940 | 65% |
| 2023 | 1,506 | +3.5% | 1,214 | 81% |
| 2024 | 1,552 | +3.1% | 1,149 | 74% |
| 2025 | 1,550 | −0.1% | 1,225 | 79% |
| 2026 | 1,587 | +2.4% | 1,320 | 83% |
Spirit is not the only business in the pop-up Halloween world, but it might as well be. In the 2025 season, it took about 98% of all card spending at Halloween pop-ups, by Enigma’s estimates. Its nearest rival, the franchise chain Halloween Express, ran only 58 stores.
Each fall’s top tenant is a chain that just liquidated
Spirit Halloween feasts on both abandoned stores from still-alive retailers and the corpses of those that failed. In the case of the latter, it may take a year or two until their bones are truly picked clean.
Every year, the menu changes. The most common “Former” label each fall belongs to the big chain that liquidated just before it:
- 2023, Bed Bath & Beyond (166 Spirit stores): Its last stores closed July 30, 2023
- 2024, Bed Bath & Beyond again (80): Still on top a year after closing, at half the count
- 2025, Party City (170), with Joann close behind (166): Party City’s stores closed in February and March 2025
- 2026, Joann (153): Its last stores closed in May 2025
- Bed Bath & Beyond 166
- Tuesday Morning 109
- Sears 80
- CVS 35
- Pier 1 Imports 30
- Big Lots 28
- buybuy BABY 23
- Rite Aid 23
- Bed Bath & Beyond 80
- Rite Aid 72
- Tuesday Morning 64
- Sears 60
- CVS 42
- 99 Cents Only 31
- Rue21 24
- Pier 1 Imports 24
- Party City 170
- Joann 166
- Big Lots 113
- Rite Aid 54
- Sears 45
- Forever 21 45
- Tuesday Morning 40
- Bed Bath & Beyond 38
- Joann 153
- Big Lots 102
- Party City 99
- Rite Aid 88
- Sears 34
- Bed Bath & Beyond 28
- Tuesday Morning 26
- CVS 25
Source: Spirit Halloween’s store locator, 2023–2026, via AllThePlaces. Name variants merged. Orange marks each season’s top tenant.
View data
| Former tenant | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bed Bath & Beyond | 166 | 80 | 38 | 28 |
| Tuesday Morning | 109 | 64 | 40 | 26 |
| Sears | 80 | 60 | 45 | 34 |
| CVS | 35 | 42 | 25 | |
| Pier 1 Imports | 30 | 24 | ||
| Big Lots | 28 | 113 | 102 | |
| buybuy BABY | 23 | |||
| Rite Aid | 23 | 72 | 54 | 88 |
| 99 Cents Only | 31 | |||
| Rue21 | 24 | |||
| Party City | 170 | 99 | ||
| Joann | 166 | 153 | ||
| Forever 21 | 45 |
This year’s favorite Spirit Halloween costume is Joann, which filed for bankruptcy a second time in January 2025 and closed its last stores by the end of May. Its former locations now host the most Spirit Halloweens: 153 of them in 2026.
Big Lots (102), Party City (99), and Rite Aid (88), all bankrupt or liquidated in 2024 and 2025, follow.
The graveyard has never been fuller
This season 1,320 of Spirit’s 1,587 stores (83%) carry a “Former” label naming the store that used to be there, the highest share in the eight years of data we have, up from 45% in 2019.
The number of different businesses whose old stores Spirit occupies rose steadily through 2023, then held flat in 2024. In 2025 it fell by about a quarter, even though Spirit was in more former stores than the year before. That was the year a few big liquidations dominated the map: Party City, Joann and Big Lots alone accounted for 449 Spirit stores, more than a third of those with a “Former” label. This fall the list spread out again, with the number of businesses rising by more than a third, back near its earlier high.
- First time on a Spirit store
- Named on a Spirit store in an earlier season
Source: Spirit Halloween’s store locator, 2019–2026, via AllThePlaces. Name variants merged by hand; generic labels (e.g. “clothing store”) excluded.
View data
| Season | Businesses named | First time | Named earlier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 182 | First year of data | |
| 2020 | 229 | 113 | 116 |
| 2021 | 247 | 98 | 149 |
| 2022 | 328 | 150 | 178 |
| 2023 | 348 | 135 | 213 |
| 2024 | 347 | 105 | 242 |
| 2025 | 265 | 76 | 189 |
| 2026 | 366 | 127 | 239 |
Most seasons, more than 100 businesses have transformed to a Spirit store for the first time. This year’s newcomers include Painted Tree and Bargain Hunt. Since 2019, Spirit has occupied the former stores of 986 different businesses, from national chains to single-location shops.
- Chain closed all stores
- Chain still operating
Source: Spirit Halloween’s store locator, 2025–2026, via AllThePlaces. Chain status from news reports (Retail Dive, CNN, WWD, WRAL, TheStreet), as of October 2026. Value City Furniture excludes 5 stores labeled American Signature Furniture, its sister brand.
View data
| Former tenant | Spirit stores, 2026 | Chain status |
|---|---|---|
| Value City Furniture | 22 | Parent liquidated all stores after Chapter 11, early 2026 |
| Painted Tree | 11 | Closed all 60+ stores, April 2026 |
| Eddie Bauer | 7 | Store operator filed for Chapter 11 and moved to close all stores, 2026 |
| WSS | 7 | Still operating; closed about a third of stores |
| Bargain Hunt | 6 | Closed all 92 stores, March 2025 |
Musical chairs
Half of this fall’s stores are at an address Spirit did not use last year. Moves are short: the median was under 2 miles, and only 3% of last year’s locations that closed left their area entirely. At least 40 stores have returned to the same address every year since 2019, including a former Sears in Westminster, Maryland, and a former Macy’s in Casper, Wyoming.
The map
The maps cover Spirit’s 1,497 U.S. stores; the other 90 are in Canada. Per person, the most haunted state is New Hampshire, with 9.2 Spirit stores per million residents; Idaho, Arizona, Colorado and Oklahoma follow at 6.5 to 7. Arkansas is lowest among states that have one, at 2.2. California (201 stores) and Texas (136) lead in raw numbers.
- Houston has more Spirit stores than any other city (14)
- In El Cajon, California, you can trick-or-treat between two Spirit stores on the same street, less than a quarter mile apart
- The loneliest Spirit is in Fairbanks, Alaska, 230 miles from its nearest sibling in Wasilla
- Hawaii has four Spirit stores. Washington, DC, has none.
Back from the dead, for one month
In October, the average Spirit Halloween outsells the average store of the chains it replaced.
Most Spirit stores make their first sale in August, but about three-quarters of the chain’s card sales come in October.
Source: Enigma card data, projected. Spirit: October card sales summed across its store records, divided by its 1,550 stores. Former tenants: average across each chain’s stores with September and October sales.
View data
| Store | Avg. October card sales per store |
|---|---|
| Spirit Halloween, 2025 | $313K |
| Joann, 2023 | $209K |
| Big Lots, 2023 | $178K |
| Party City, 2023 | $161K |
An average Spirit store took in nearly twice what an average Big Lots or Party City store did in its last normal October, and about 1.5 times a Joann store.
Over a year, it brings in a fraction. The old store was open for twelve months. Spirit’s whole season comes to roughly a fifth to a quarter of what a Joann or Big Lots store took in over a year, and about half of a Party City’s. For a landlord, Spirit fills a dead box for one strong month. It does not replace the year’s revenue.
Few hauntings last. Of the 166 Spirit stores in former Bed Bath & Beyonds in 2023, only 38% were still Spirit stores a year later, 18% two years later and 13% this year.
The next costume
Every October, Spirit dresses up as last year’s retail failures, and the next costumes are already arriving: Saks OFF 5TH’s parent Saks Global and Eddie Bauer’s store operator both filed for bankruptcy this year and moved to close most or all of their stores, and by fall Spirit had moved into 13 former OFF 5THs and seven former Eddie Bauers. Next year’s top spot will go to whichever big chain goes dark before then. Somewhere, a Spirit scout is already measuring the windows.
Methodology
- Prior-year figures reflect our refreshed 2019 to 2026 dataset and may differ slightly from last year’s post.
- Store locations for each fall season (2019–2026) were collected from Spirit Halloween’s store locator (stores.spirithalloween.com) using AllThePlaces, an open-source project that archives retail location data. The “Former” labels are Spirit’s own wording; we merged spelling variants of the same business. A store’s location counts as the same across years if it is within 100 meters, or has the same street number within 1 km.
- Sales: Enigma card transaction data, 2023–2025. Spirit’s figure is its October 2025 card sales summed across its Enigma store records, divided by its 1,550 stores; each former chain’s figure is its average store in its last normal year (2023). Figures are Enigma estimates.
- Population: U.S. Census Bureau, 2025 state population estimates.