Spirit Halloween Announces Cannabis Brand Incubator

“We already specialize in businesses that disappear after 90 days.”

Spirit Halloween has spent years perfecting the most honest operating model in American retail: move into a corpse, cover the windows, hire everybody temporarily, sell whatever can be carried out by hand, and disappear before Thanksgiving.

The company does not hide this. Spirit’s own real estate department asks landlords for three-month leases, ideally running from mid-July through mid-November. The opening date is temporary. The employees are seasonal. The merchandise has an expiration date. The exit is written into the lease before the first twelve-foot skeleton gets unloaded.

Cannabis companies usually need a strategic review to arrive at the same place.

On Monday, Spirit announced the launch of Spirit Cannabis Ventures, a ninety-day brand incubator designed for cannabis companies with national aspirations, negative working capital, twelve months of unpaid invoices, and a leadership team that still believes the problem is packaging.

“We already specialize in businesses that disappear after 90 days,” the company said in its launch announcement. “The only difference is that we leave the building on purpose.”

The incubator will offer cannabis founders access to distressed real estate, temporary executives, lender-approved growth strategies, and an accelerated curriculum covering every stage of brand development from ceremonial ribbon-cutting to permanent WARN notice.

Classes begin August 1.

Liquidation starts October 15.

A Campus That Came Pre-Abandoned

Spirit selected The Cannabist Company’s Denver cultivation and manufacturing facility as the incubator’s first national campus, citing the building’s turnkey combination of empty canopy, institutional trauma, and loading docks large enough to remove the future in sections.

The Cannabist is closing the Denver operation and eliminating 50 jobs as part of an ongoing liquidation process. The company entered Canadian creditor protection and secured Chapter 15 recognition in the United States after reporting roughly $270 million in obligations to lenders and the IRS. It has already sold operations or permits in Virginia, Ohio and Delaware, while pursuing transactions involving assets in Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, West Virginia, Massachusetts and Maryland. New York was surrendered. Pennsylvania was wound down after buyers apparently looked at it and kept driving.

The Denver layoffs begin September 11, allowing Spirit to open the incubator on September 12 without wasting money removing the employee parking signs.

Cannabist CEO David Hart will serve as dean of the new School of Strategic Transactions, where students will learn to transform an operating company into a series of purchase agreements without changing the optimistic language on the investor website. Hart became CEO in 2024 and still appears on Cannabist’s leadership page, providing students with a live demonstration of how an executive biography can remain fully operational after the surrounding business has been separated into saleable components.

Hart’s introductory course, Building a Better Business Somewhere Else, begins with each student receiving a map of the United States and a red marker. Participants spend the first week circling growth markets. During the second week, lenders erase them.

The final exam requires founders to sell three states, surrender one license, close two facilities, terminate 50 employees, and describe the result as a simplified platform positioned for sustainable growth.

Any student who uses the word “liquidation” is failed for lack of executive presence.

“David understands that a cannabis company does not need operations to retain a strategy,” Spirit’s orientation packet reads. “Sometimes the strategy is simply locating the operations and mailing them to the creditors.”

Hart cut the ceremonial ribbon Monday morning, then immediately sold the scissors to Holistic Industries for $47 million, consisting of $34.5 million in cash and a $12.5 million promissory note, subject to court approval, customary closing conditions, and the scissors surviving due diligence.

PharmaCann Opens the Seasonal Cultivation Department

The incubator’s cultivation program will be led by Brett Novey, the executive who helped turn PharmaCann’s 2022 merger with LivWell into an eight-state expansion story featuring roughly 50 dispensaries and 10 cultivation and manufacturing facilities.

At the time, Novey described the combination as a market-leading platform built for further expansion. By 2026, the platform had developed a remarkable ability to retract in every direction simultaneously.

PharmaCann’s contraction has now produced at least 404 announced layoffs across four facilities: 82 in Dwight, Illinois; 132 in Denver; 60 near Olyphant, Pennsylvania; and 130 in Montgomery, New York. The company also reached a settlement with cannabis landlord Innovative Industrial Properties after defaulting on rent obligations under nine leases, requiring the turnover of properties in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Spirit has converted this record into a certificate program called Permanent Cultivation on a Seasonal Basis.

Students begin by acquiring a facility large enough to supply a market that does not exist yet. They then fill it with automated equipment, high-interest real estate obligations, and a production forecast based on every resident in the state smoking an eighth before lunch.

Week four covers wholesale compression.

Week five covers lease default.

Week six is a mandatory LinkedIn post thanking the affected employees for their dedication.

Novey’s first lecture will be held inside a 190,000-square-foot Denver cultivation facility, where attendees will be taught how to recognize the precise moment a state-of-the-art grow becomes a landlord’s specialized problem.

“Cultivation facilities are like Halloween costumes,” Novey tells the class in Spirit’s leaked syllabus. “They look incredible when the investor puts them on. Then somebody has to figure out where to store the fucking thing.”

Students will also complete a practical exercise called The Vertical Integration Escape Room. Participants are locked inside a cultivation facility with $40 million in tenant improvements, $2.98 wholesale grams, nine defaulted leases, and one controller who resigned Friday afternoon.

The only exit is through a sale to Vireo.

AYR Wellness Introduces Corporate Possession

No incubator would be complete without a course on brand continuity, so Spirit recruited AYR Wellness interim CEO Blake Holzgrafe to oversee the Corporate Reincarnation Laboratory.

Holzgrafe’s assignment at AYR is unusually specific. He was installed as interim chief executive of the existing corporate parent while that entity proceeds through a court-supervised liquidation and wind-down. Meanwhile, core operating assets have been transferred to Arboretum, a purchaser established by AYR’s senior secured noteholders. Arboretum intends to keep using the AYR Wellness name.

The company is dying.

The name has been approved for continued use.

Spirit executives called it the cleanest demonstration of possession they had seen outside the animatronics department.

Holzgrafe’s course, How to Leave Your Own Company Without Changing the Sign, teaches founders to separate the parts of a cannabis business that produce revenue from the parts that contain shareholders, liabilities, and consequences.

On the first day, each student builds a cannabis company.

On the second day, lenders take it.

On the third day, the lenders reopen it under the same name and send the original company a cease-and-desist letter for using its own logo.

Students who successfully complete the lab receive two certificates. One belongs to the operating company. The other belongs to the corporate parent being dissolved in British Columbia.

Neither certificate has voting rights.

AYR’s transition has also provided Spirit with a new costume called The Go-Forward Company. It consists of an AYR polo shirt, an Arboretum name badge, $275 million in secured exit financing, and a rubber mask of the previous shareholder.

From a distance, nobody can tell anything happened.

TerrAscend Builds the Vendor Relations Haunted House

Spirit’s vendor-management curriculum will be hosted by TerrAscend Executive Chairman Jason Wild inside an interactive attraction called Net 30: The Reckoning.

Wild’s company entered Michigan through an acquisition spree that included a $545 million stock purchase of Gage Cannabis. TerrAscend later announced what Wild called a strategic exit from the state’s difficult market. The remaining Michigan entities are now in court-ordered receivership as part of an orderly liquidation process connected to a FocusGrowth loan with approximately $212 million outstanding.

The haunted house begins in a mock accounts-payable department where the lights flicker every time an invoice reaches 120 days.

Participants then enter the Vendor Corridor, where motion-activated cultivators emerge from behind stacks of purchase orders shouting increasingly terrifying phrases such as “following up again,” “please advise,” and “we have still not received payment.”

TerrAscend’s Michigan entities reported roughly $6.8 million in accounts payable and lease liabilities against approximately $5.2 million in assets. Vendors filed multiple actions seeking payment, including Redemption Cannabis, which said it was owed $249,000. FocusGrowth sought receivership in part to protect its collateral from those claims.

Spirit has recreated the capital stack as a live-action maze.

Vendors enter through the front.

Secured lenders enter through a private tunnel.

Only one group reaches the gift shop.

Wild waits at the maze’s final checkpoint wearing a Gage Cannabis lanyard and holding a sign that reads EXTREMELY DIFFICULT MARKET, although the $545 million acquisition receipt is still visibly stapled to the back.

Students are instructed to remain calm while the receiver takes possession of the building.

“This is not a closure,” Wild explains. “It is a growth strategy that has become geographically selective.”

A Redemption representative bangs on the glass.

The class proceeds to the next module.

FLUENT Adds Another Interim CEO Costume

The incubator’s leadership department will operate differently from the other programs. It will have no permanent instructor.

FLUENT announced in June that David Vautrin would step down as interim chief executive and that Chief Legal Officer Matt Mundy would become interim CEO while the company advances toward its proposed all-stock acquisition by Vireo Growth. FLUENT’s Etain subsidiary is also scheduled to close its Chestertown, New York cultivation and packaging operation in August, eliminating 37 jobs for economic reasons.

Spirit responded by installing an Interim CEO Costume Counter near the front entrance.

Executives may rent the costume for four to six weeks. The package includes a quarter-zip pullover, one carefully worded employee email, an approved quote thanking the board, and temporary access to a calendar containing nothing but lender calls.

Vautrin wore the costume during the Vireo announcement. Mundy received it June 12. Spirit expects to have it cleaned and available again before the FLUENT shareholder vote.

The counter also offers a Leadership Continuity Wig, designed to make a company appear stable while the CEO title moves through the organization faster than wholesale distillate.

Students in Mundy’s course, Legal Is Operations Now, will learn how to lead a cannabis company during the narrow period between signing the acquisition agreement and discovering which employees the buyer considers a synergy.

FLUENT’s transaction includes targeted cost reductions, noncore asset sales and the conversion of $30 million in senior debt into equity immediately before the acquisition. Vireo CEO John Mazarakis praised FLUENT’s efforts to right-size the business before closing, which is corporate language for asking the seller to remove the bodies before the walkthrough.

Spirit awarded Mazarakis a platinum loyalty card.

After agreeing to buy FLUENT and PharmaCann’s 17 Colorado dispensaries, he is now eligible for one distressed cannabis platform free with every five acquired.

Demo Day Is a Fire Sale With Lanyards

Spirit Cannabis Ventures will conclude with Demo Day, where founders pitch their companies to lenders, receivers, private-credit funds, and whichever MSO is currently shopping with stock instead of money.

Traditional incubators ask founders to present revenue growth, customer acquisition costs, addressable markets and a path to profitability.

Spirit requires only four slides.

The first shows a celebrity.

The second shows a map with fifteen states highlighted.

The third contains the phrase asset-light despite the company owning 400,000 square feet of cultivation.

The fourth is a QR code linking to the court docket.

David Hart will evaluate each company’s ability to sell itself by jurisdiction. Blake Holzgrafe will determine whether the brand name can survive the corporate entity. Jason Wild will score the acquisition plan, with bonus points awarded for entering a market at the top and describing the exit as disciplined capital allocation.

Brett Novey will inspect the real estate and estimate how many workers can be laid off per acre.

Matt Mundy will make sure nobody accidentally calls any of this bankruptcy.

Applicants must demonstrate sufficient runway to remain open through Halloween. Companies still operating on November 2 will be disqualified for mission drift.

The grand-prize winner receives a three-month lease, a secured note bearing 14 percent interest, and a custom Spirit Halloween banner reading: EVERYTHING MUST GO-FORWARD.

Second prize is a meeting with Chicago Atlantic.

Third prize is another meeting with Chicago Atlantic.

Graduation Day

Graduation will take place November 1, when Spirit closes the incubator exactly when it promised the landlord it would.

The shelves will be emptied. Temporary employees will receive the final date they were told to expect when they were hired. The signage will come down. The keys will be returned. Nobody will issue a press release claiming the Halloween market failed to appreciate Spirit’s differentiated platform.

The cannabis graduates will remain in the parking lot.

David Hart will announce that the company has entered an exciting new phase focused on fewer states, fewer facilities and significantly fewer people.

Brett Novey will unveil plans for a smaller cultivation footprint strategically concentrated inside other companies’ grows.

Blake Holzgrafe will dissolve the graduating class and transfer its diplomas to a lender-controlled entity using the same name.

Jason Wild will purchase the parking lot for $545 million in stock, then announce a strategic exit after discovering October was an extremely difficult month.

Matt Mundy will become interim landlord.

By sunrise, Spirit’s banner will be gone. The incubator website will still say COMING SOON, the investor deck will continue forecasting explosive growth, and three former employees will be posting beneath the announcement asking when they will receive their final paychecks.

A new sign will already be hanging above the empty entrance.

FUTURE HOME OF A PREMIUM CANNABIS EXPERIENCE.

Spirit Halloween found a business in occupying dead stores.

Cannabis found a business in creating them.