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.
“It was not a joke, not a scam,” he said. It was “not on purpose.”
Mr. Ali, who owns at least five other websites, declined to say where he was based, but said that MySpiritHalloween.com used artificial intelligence to generate its content. Humans are involved in the website’s search engine optimization efforts to ensure it ranks highly on sites like Google, he said, but much of the information is produced by A.I.
The website, he said, compiled information from about 1,400 Halloween events from all over the world. The nonexistent parade in Dublin was said to be put on by Macnas, an Irish theater group that has previously staged parades and held one this year in Galway — but not Dublin. (Dublin has hosted Halloween parades in past years, but not in 2024.)
That information was readily available elsewhere on the internet but seems to have been missed by many people who saw or were told about the A.I.-generated content, which was also shared across social media by local people and businesses, The Irish Times reported.
“On the face of it, it seems strange that people would believe it,” said Nick Anstead, an associate professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “After all, not one official confirmed the event was happening. But on the other hand, the information didn’t just come from one source; it was disseminated across a network of influencers and presumably shared further among people who knew and trusted each other.”
“Not everything on the site was fake,” he added. “Some of the events cited around the world were real, and it is the conjunction of the real and fake which makes the hoax convincing.”
When he realized the mistake, Mr. Ali said, he removed the event from the website.
“Everyone is blaming us,” he said. “We were very embarrassed.”
But for many people on Thursday, the rectification came too late, as they stood in Central Dublin eagerly awaiting people in costumes but seeing only buses and cars drive by instead.
It did not take long for fun to be made of the hoax, including at Dublin Airport, which posted a picture on X of an empty terminal with the caption “our Halloween parade in full flow.”
Besides listing parades, MySpiritHalloween.com offers tips for enjoying the holiday, including: “Use mini pumpkins as bowling balls and empty cans decorated with Halloween themes as pins. Set up a bowling alley in your backyard or living room for hours of fun.” The site also has itself as being for sale.
Dr. Anstead likened the episode to another internet trend, the flash mob. “People use the sharing and organizational capacities facilitated by the internet to arrange to meet at a single place or time for some kind of coordinated activity,” he said.
“Clearly, this crowd in Dublin was not a flash mob, but it did have many of the same attributes in terms of how it was created.”
Only this time, the mob showed up and nothing was there.
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