If you’ve been brave enough to roam the slushy sidewalks of Toronto over the past few weeks, these cryptic event posters may have caught your eye along the way.
The eye-catching yellow advertisements allude to some kind of mysterious event happening on February 10th at the Great Hall in Toronto, and offer a seemingly counter-intuitive warning: “DO NOT COME.”
You read that right. The cautionary notices confirm that something is happening at the Queen West concert venue tonight, but strongly discourage potential attendees: "Although entry is discouraged, it is technically permitted." Tangible details are scarce, but the poster also includes curious imagery and scattered numbers, tempting curious onlookers to search for hidden messages. Don’t you love it when a poster plays hard to get?
This puzzling tongue-in-cheek campaign caught the eye of several codebreaking Redditors, who worked together to piece together whatever information they could. "Don't solve"? That sounds like a challenge. Click on the annotations below to see their relevance.
1.
Here’s what we know: there’s an event tonight at the Great Hall at 9pm. It has something to do another event taking place in Burl’s Creek in July. It is more than likely called “WAY HOME.”
These details seem to be connected to the recent announcement of a music festival co-presented by the founder of Bonaroo. Organizers promised a “multi-day, camping music and arts festival is officially coming to the Toronto area in late July” in an interview with the National Post last month. They also noted that this festival is not called HomeAway, as initially reported on Festival Snobs.
Is there an official lineup announcement for Way Home Festival happening at the Great Hall tonight? If everyone heeds the poster’s warning, we may never know.
