Dublin Crowds Turn Up for Halloween Parade That Wasn’t

1 month ago 7

Europe|All Trick, No Treat: Dublin Crowds Turn Up for Halloween Parade That Wasn’t

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/world/europe/fake-halloween-parade-dublin.html

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The scariest thing this Halloween? In one city, it was the power of a phony online event listing.

Crowds at night wait by the side of a large street, many looking down it.

Nov. 1, 2024, 3:06 p.m. ET

Hundreds of Dubliners made their way to the city center on Thursday night, excited for a Halloween parade to take place on a mild October evening as they lined up along O’Connell Street, a major thoroughfare.

But they waited and waited (and waited), and a realization settled in: The parade hadn’t arrived. The parade was never coming. The parade never even existed.

There was no parade.

So many people had gathered for the nonexistent spectacle that the local police announced on social media around 8 p.m., an hour after the parade was supposed to begin, that no event was planned and asked the crowds to “disperse safely.”

It seemed like the ultimate trick. How were so many people duped into lining up for a treat they didn’t get, a parade that never was?

The culprit seems to be the website MySpiritHalloween.com, which contains a glut of Halloween event listings, costume tips and game ideas. The site lists Halloween events in multiple places, including in Britain, Ireland and the United States.

That included a parade in Dublin, with a precise location and start time.

The owner of the website, Nazir Ali, said on Friday morning that he had not intended to dupe anybody, claiming the whole thing was a mistake.

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