Pranksters redecorate Google’s SF office park in ‘Spirit Halloween’ signage

When black cats prowl and pumpkins gleam, may luck be yours on Halloween! Yes, the time for trick or treat is almost here, and some people are already embracing their trickster side.

One such person is Danielle Baskin. She is an entrepreneur from San Francisco that has a taste for pranks, and together with her friends, she thought of a creative way to send a message:

‘There’s so much real estate in San Francisco, but simultaneously so many people looking for space,’ she says.

Baskin crafted a Spirit Halloween sign, which she then placed over the one at Google’s Embarcadero campus with the help of some of her friends. They made it look like the Spirit Halloween store was temporarily using the empty space.

‘Today we opened a Spirit Halloween at the vacant Google Headquarters,’ says Baskin in a tweet she posted accompanied with a photo of the sign being placed.


One Twitter user asks the question we probably were all wondering—how did people react? Apparently, the place was almost completely empty, so there were almost no people to react to the mischievous act.

The only ones there were Google security, who found the prank rather funny. Premise security was also there, however, and they did not have the same positive reaction. They ended up confiscating the flag with no information on where it was being taken to.

This is not the first rodeo for Baskin when it comes to pranking big tech companies. Another one of her pranks included erecting a full-on tent at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference. The joke did not end there, though, as she also listed the tent on Airbnb for $200 a night, a ‘real deal’ as she called it.

All in all, Baskin's harmless pranks seem to get a lot of love and attention on Twitter. The Spirit Halloween one amounted to 790 retweets and almost 5000 likes. Admittedly, it is refreshing to see some light humor inside the serious world of technology.