I suspect the writer of that sentence chose those words quite carefully to describe what the windows looked like. The two descriptive words are reinforced by a simile in order to convey a feeling of bleakness, or emptiness. The verb 'to stand' can be used to represent meanings such as 'to remain', or 'to be intact', or 'to be upright'. 'Staring' (to stare), evokes a blankness, representing the gap left by the missing window glass. So, the broken windows looked like the empty, blank, unblinking eyes of a ghost.