Spirit Spider Spot

October 28, 2024.

Updates have been slow because none of the major stores near me have any spiders! The scant amount of spiders in the wild was shocking! Spirit Halloween had my back, though. Around the Halloween season, Spirit stores begin to appear in unoccupied store spaces and disappear as quickly as they came after the holiday. They sell costumes, decorations, and various creepy memorabilia to celebrate Halloween. I knew I had to strike quickly.

At the entrance of the store stood an amazing animatronic(?) man-spider-thing. She has 8 big glowing eyes and was stood inside a dingy ticket booth set. Her name, according to her tag, is Wanda Webworth, and if you have approximately $270 to part with, she could go home with you. Her anatomy is interesting-- her face is cloaked in wrinkled black skin. The rest of her head and body are covered in brown fur. She has 6 arms and 2 legs. She stands on two-toed feet. She was magnificent.

Also present: standard fare poseable hairy spiders. Always cute, but not very remarkable. These furry spiders seemingly have bleached highlights. Available in a medium and big size.

These spiders are made out of some rubbery plastic material, which coats a malleable, but hard, internal skeleton. Their legs can be bent every which way, and they would hold their position. The "poseable spider" is a fantasy take on a spider, but it was pretty cool. It has an intense, angular look to its legs and head, and red eyes. The "black widow spider" loosely resembles real life widow spiders, but the proportions are not quite right.

These colorful spiders are made of some fragile material and had an iridescent color like an oil spill. Really cool looking. They possess a strange head shape that almost looks like a mask. They seemed pretty delicate and were perched on a low-hanging shelf that looked easy to walk into. Good luck, spiders.

On another shelf sat a bone spider. Super cute. A pretty basic take on the concept, but really adorable. The abdomen of the spider is again represented by a rib cage, which is cute. It has two big, black eyes.

Warning: Non-spider content ahead!

There was also an amazingly cute bone-butterfly. I love that it has adorable feet with toes and it stands on two legs. It is a little horrifying to imagine those wings rendered in bone. But, without thinking too hard about what kind of body those bone-wings are meant to support, this bone-butterfly is cute.

The highlight of my trip, though, were these two skull snails. So, so, very cute. I love slugs and snails, and seeing them represented by skeletons was an amazing treat. It seems so obvious to make a snail with a skull-shell, but I've never seen a Halloween decoration do it before. The bone snail is CUTE and its adorable mantle is represented by... ribs? Bones. It is made of hard plastic and has some random screws drilled in through the bottom of it, maybe to securely attach the shell to the body. The skull snail is made of some vinyl-like material encasing a soft foam core. It is soft enough that one can squeeze the snail, which causes it to release a puff of air. It is very detailed and I like the green color of its skin. It is soooo adorable.

Spiders again.

There was also a gross baby covered in spiders. I don't have much to comment on this one. Hopefully it likes being covered in spiders?