Windsor Zombie Walk Fosters Spirit
of Giving and Frightful Family Fun
Story by Jen Brignall-Strong
Photography by Sergio Mazzotta
Despite what you might see on the silver screen, the undead are a surprisingly altruistic bunch. Or at least in Windsor they are.
What started two decades ago as a grassroots gathering of the undead has risen to become one of the city’s signature parades, bringing hundreds of zombies to the downtown core for a celebration of creativity, community and giving back.
Now, resurrected and bigger than ever before, the Windsor Zombie Walk invites the city’s weird, wacky and wonderfully creative characters to crawl out of their crypts and take to the streets.
Beneath the ghastly blood and guts, this eclectic procession has always been about something much more wholesome: community.
“It is 100 percent community based,” says Shawn Lippert of Scarehouse Windsor, which helped revive the event three years ago alongside long-time organizer Micheal Reeve.
The Windsor Zombie Walk dates back to 2006, originally created by then-teenager Jakub Witalec. From its earliest days, charity was part of its DNA; with participants supporting organizations helping the region’s most vulnerable.
That mission was particularly meaningful to Reeve, who took up the mantle of organizing the event in 2014 after discovering the fledgling Zombie Walk which was supporting local community organizations, including the Downtown Mission.
“It’s great fun for a great cause and amassed a lot of creative people,” he recalls. “I wanted in.”
He initially joined the horde as a participant. As a budding costume maker, cosplayer and prosthetic makeup artist, Reeve won the walk’s costume competition two years in a row before deciding it might be time to give someone else a chance.
As the original event grew, so did the logistical challenges of moving a large group of zombies through city streets. Eventually, the walk went dormant.
Enter the fun-loving frighteners Shawn Lippert and Dario Silvaggi at Scarehouse Windsor, who never shy away from creating a spectacle.
In 2024, the team reached out to Reeve with a fitting proposition: why not bring the dead back to life?
“I said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in resurrecting this thing?’” Lippert recalls. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’”
The revived walk initially attracted approximately 60 zombies in a procession that moved from Scarehouse Windsor’s location on McDougall Avenue to Jackson Park. Over the past three years, the event has made its way back to the downtown core and evolved into a full-fledged Halloween parade complete with floats, hearses, horses and hundreds of participants.
Last year, Lippert estimates at least 500 zombies joined the procession.
“It’s exponential,” he says of its growth.
And as the gathering continues to grow, so too does the heart behind it.
For Reeve, keeping the charitable component of the Zombie Walk alive is personal.
Years before he would become known to Windsor’s undead as the swashbuckling Captain Hindgrinder, Reeve found himself needing a helping hand of his own.
Born and raised in Windsor, Reeve spent part of his life in Hamilton, where he experienced homelessness for a brief period in the early 2000s. He credits community organizations with helping him get back on his feet. The experience stayed with him, and has shaped the direction of the Windsor Zombie Walk since he became involved.
“I had a youth centre help me out massively, so I wanted to give back to the community,” he says.
Today, the Windsor Zombie Walk continues to expand its support for the Downtown Mission and other youth-centred organizations, with participants encouraged to bring monetary donations or canned and dry goods for those in need.
It’s a fitting cause for an event built around bringing people together, particularly one that has worked to create an inclusive space where families, kids, cosplayers, horror fans and anyone who might feel a little outside the mainstream can find their place.
As Reeve ‘Captain Hindgrinder’ puts it: “Just because we have no brains, don’t mean we haven’t big hearts.”
For those looking to join the horde, this year’s Zombie Walk and Halloween Parade takes place Saturday, October 3rd, with participants gathering on Ouellette Avenue between Wyandotte and Elliott streets beginning at 4pm.
All ages are encouraged to join and participation requires zero previous zombie experience.
Before the parade kicks off at 6pm, organizers will offer free zombie face painting and host costume awards, giving even those who arrive alive an opportunity to join the undead.
The family-friendly nature of the event has become one of Lippert’s favourite parts.
Last year, he recalls meeting a family who had recently moved to Windsor from South Africa. Their children arrived in their soccer gear and stopped to have their faces transformed before joining the festivities.
It was the family’s first time experiencing Halloween.
“I remember the mom looking around and turning to me and saying, ‘You guys are all wacky and weird just like us. That’s why we found our home.’”
In many ways, that sentiment perfectly captures what the Zombie Walk has become. It’s a place where weird is welcomed and creativity is celebrated. Where anyone can belong: kids, parents, hardcore horror fans, casual spectators, cosplayers, local businesses and anyone else who wants to get a little gory for the evening.
Its continued growth, Lippert stresses, depends entirely on those people.
“It only is as good as the community allows it to be. The more people who join, the better.”
This year, the festivities will stretch throughout the day downtown, beginning with a presence at the Downtown Windsor Farmers’ Market, followed by the pre-parade activities from 4 to 6pm, the Zombie Walk and Halloween Parade at 6pm and a spooky performance later that night by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in the Pelissier Street parking garage.
Lippert hopes to continue building the parade gradually, adding more floats, organizations and community participants as it continues to establish itself as an annual Windsor tradition.
For him, events like the Zombie Walk are part of what gives a city its personality.
“These cool little fringe events are what make a community truly unique,” he adds.
And Windsor’s ghoulish community seems more than happy to keep feeding this particular monster.
Twenty-one years after a teenager first formed a crude gathering of zombies downtown, hundreds now line up each spooky season to shuffle down Ouellette Avenue together, proving that sometimes the wackiest, most eccentric traditions are the ones that give a city its heart…and braaains.
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Published in the Autumn 2026 Edition.
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