Sam Golbach and Colby Brock recount their viral rise from mall pranks to $20K/year meet-and-greets, then to YouTube’s abandoned/haunted locations—like the Queen Mary’s B340, where scripture-like writings and "Bloody Mary" lore persist. Their Tampa felony arrest unexpectedly boosted fame via #FreeSamAndColby, while investigations at Bowers Mansion (slamming doors) and Waverly Hills Sanatorium (EMF spikes) blurred skepticism with undeniable physical reactions. At Romania’s Dracula Castle, they linked Vlad the Impaler’s brutality to lingering dark energy, and in Key West’s Fort East Martello, Sam’s nausea mirrored historical trauma. Thermal anomalies at the Conjuring House—like a child’s face in a window—sparked debates on energy vs. hoaxes, while Robert the Doll’s alleged curses (Ozzy Osbourne’s Parkinson’s?) underscored how belief shapes reality. Future projects lean into global hauntings and true crime, using skeptics’ reactions to validate phenomena, proving that mystery thrives where science stumbles. [Automatically generated summary]
No, speaking of carrying things around, a lot of people warn us that, like, because we go into so many haunted places, they're like, guys, you should be careful.
Like, aren't you worried about bringing this home or bringing this to other people?
Yeah.
I mean, we walked in here, obviously, it's probably just a coincidence.
We walked here and immediately, you know, your curtain fell over.
There's definitely things that reoccur place to place, and it's not supposed to be the same haunting or whatever, but we get the same thing that we think has been following us from multiple places.
Do we 100% buy that?
I don't know.
But what's really weird is when people will look you dead in the eye, and they'll be like, there is someone behind you.
And I've seen them for there for like an hour.
And I'm like, I can't see that.
But I'm also not going to like brush that off my shoulder and saying that's like not there.
That's part of the problem is there's, like, an incentive to sense things and feel things.
I'm not anti-ghost by any stretch of the imagination.
I am open-minded.
But I know that there's a lot of people that like to pretend.
They like to pretend they have psychic powers.
They like to pretend they know things.
They like to pretend they've experienced things.
I've talked to so many people that have experienced UFOs.
I've talked to Bigfoot people that believe that they've met Bigfoot.
There's people that pretend.
But then there's also...
The thing that freaks me out about ghosts...
Is that it's been a reoccurring theme throughout human history and It's always it seems to be connected to some horrific death like whenever there's a horrific death it's almost like Like, that horrible moment, like, burns space and time and leaves a residue.
Yeah, there's been countless of times where we'll go to these spots, and maybe after hearing the story, we don't think it's going to be special at all, but the person who owns the spot is like, I levitated last week.
Just staring us straight in the eyes, no hesitation, like, about it.
And, like, obviously, we've never experienced something that intense with the paranormal, but having dozens of people, like, every place we go to say that, it's like, how do you think they're all lying?
Carl LeBeau, who recently passed away, Carl had the weirdest story.
He got kicked out of his house.
He got in a fight with his wife and he got kicked out of his house and he went to the comedy store and decided he was going to sleep on the stage in the main room.
And he's like, man, I'm going to fucking make it.
I'm sleeping on this stage.
She's going to kick me out of the house, but one day I'll fucking show you.
And so he's drunk and he lays down on the stage and then he hears a door shut.
And the comedy store main room is pitch black, right?
So this is what it looks like.
But that's only when the lights are on.
So he's laying down and he hears a door shut.
And he goes, hey, it's Carl.
It's me, Carl.
Who is that?
And then he doesn't hear shit.
And then he hears chairs moving.
He hears like clink, clink, clink, clink.
And he's sitting there.
He's going, what the fuck is going on?
And something grabs his ankle and pulls him off the stage and onto the floor.
And then he hears chairs moving again.
And bam, the door shuts and slams and nothing else.
A lot of it was also because we had a plan to become famous at the time because as 17-year-olds, it's a whole long story to it.
But as 17-year-olds, we just really wanted to do that.
It was a goal of ours because we had just become really, really good friends at the time.
After learning how to be confident, we were very shy kids in high school and learning how to be confident together, which again, we can get into that story if you'd like.
But it was so bad to the point where I had to carry around these Tums, the anti-acid pills, to just honestly pop before each time I would go into a new classroom.
And just in case I got called on, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't freaking out internally.
And so we bonded in band camp because we were both these shy kids that didn't know how to talk to anybody.
Well, there's an important lesson there, and it's a lesson of honesty.
Because some people want to pretend that they don't feel that way, and if you pretend you don't feel that way, but you really do, you're never going to fix it.
So if you try to play cool, then you're just, like, setting yourself up, and you're in a trap.
Because now you have to admit, somehow, down the line, that you were full of shit back then.
No, it was really like, I mean, there wasn't that many things to do in Kansas besides exploring abandoned places and then going to the mall.
So we decided, okay, what's going to help us with confidence?
Let's go to the mall.
And Colby and I would literally like have my dad like this is before I had a car so my dad would drop us off at the mall and I told him come pick us up at clothes and me and Colby would go back and forth and give each other challenges we're like alright I'm gonna tell you to go do this really horribly embarrassing thing out in front of other people and you either do it or you do a hundred push-ups And then he'd say yes or no.
And I was like, okay, and then vice versa.
And we'd go back and forth.
And basically, the goal is just to put ourselves out of our comfort zone as much as humanly possible.
And again, I think the only reason we were able to make this work is because we had a brand new friendship.
And so there was part of me that I was like, I can't let this guy think I can't do this, you know what I mean?
And vice versa.
And so, yeah, we were just looking up YouTube videos.
Honestly like as embarrassing as it sounds like how to pick up girls how to talk to people like how to be more social and stuff like that And then we take the things that we learned and then we'd go to the mall and throw ourselves in like the most uncomfortable situations Just like get out of our comfort zone and like really take chances and like gross people.
That's actually very smart It's a that's the way to do it because people are terrified of those interactions with people that make you uncomfortable But if you just like seek them out over and over again you eventually Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
The problem with failure is a lot of times people let it define them.
They think of themselves as a failure because of not succeeding.
Instead of thinking yourself as a human being who's learning and growing, you think of yourself like, oh my god, I'm the guy who dropped the ball.
I'm the guy who crashed the car.
I'm the guy who did these things.
You think of yourself as a failure.
I'm the guy who flunked out of school.
I'm the guy who, you know, the girl broke up with me.
You start thinking of yourself as like a person who fails.
You don't think of failure as like, like if you're playing a game and you're learning a game, What you're doing is you're trying to figure out how to be successful, but you're still you, right?
You're still the same thing.
But when you fail enough times, it stains your brain and hurts your feelings so much that you can self-define.
And then you put parameters and boundaries up and you define yourself as a failure.
That's what's really dangerous for people.
That's why you gotta get back on the horse.
That's why people say, you fall off the horse, get back on the horse.
Which is terrible advice, by the way.
You fall off a horse, you might fucking die falling off the horse.
But that's good that you guys decided to do that, because that's a really clever way to deal with the inevitable awkwardness that everybody has when they're young.
I talk for a living, but when I was younger, I was very awkward, and I really had a hard time talking to people, like, to the point where I'd get anxiety if I had to go to the bank, because I knew that I had to go to the bank teller, and I knew how to talk to the teller, and I can remember going, like, what am I fucking scared of?
Like, why is this bothering me so much?
But I was just scared to just talk to someone who's in a position of power or someone who's, you know, a position of authority.
It's weird now, can I think about it, because I'm so comfortable talking to people.
I don't understand this, but once we learned how to become confident, we felt like, and especially being 16, we felt like on top of the world, like we could do anything we wanted to.
And so being a 16-year-old mindset and having the social status of us being the band kids and just always wanted to fit in and be popular, We were just like, well, why don't we, you know, YOLO, you only live once, as cheesy as that is.
It's like, why don't we try to become famous in real life?
And so we started with Vine.
We started with Vine, actually, the six-second videos for a while until it died and then ended up transitioning over to...
It was like on the cusp of like, you know, LA rent is a lot.
And so like when we were thinking about it, $3,000, $5,000 to survive out in LA per month, we're like, I don't know if we can actually make that on Vine.
Covers over everything, and we were just living very, very, like, we can't spend any money whatsoever.
We only had one car out there, so it was just grind mode.
As soon as we got out there, the difference between us and a lot of social media kids that do try to make the journey to LA is we knew we had to prove ourselves, and we knew we had a year tops, and so we were doing everything we could to be entrepreneurs and start side businesses and stuff like that, come out with merch, just anything we could do to generate revenue.
So it starts out with, you start doing these Vines, and then you move to YouTube, and was it immediately the abandoned building thing, or did you do other stuff?
Again, we were trying to find ourselves on YouTube.
And so the best thing for us was just to be like genuinely excited about something because we'd be doing these couch videos, doing these challenges and just hating what we were filming.
And so just capturing like so a lot of like what was already existing on YouTube at that time with Abandoned was like more documentary style where people would like Start their video inside the place and then just have like a very slow paced like this is what it's all about and then goodbye.
But what Sam and I wanted to do was like film the adrenaline side of it like film us running up to the place hiding from the guards like hiding from police.
We don't break into these places.
We don't like vandalize anything but like sneak again like all like the adventure part of it.
So we're yeah more adventure less like history of it.
Like, well, and even in Kansas, like, when we first started, what we realized is, you know, being young-looking kids that are doing this and, like, we kind of got better and better at it, like, we figured out, okay, we can talk our way out of the cops, like, every once in a while.
And that definitely happened.
And I think at that point, we were just like, we find it so much more interesting to have that, like, sort of fear of we will get caught.
But we had a conversation for literally, like, an hour and, like, shot the shit and he...
You know, broke down each other's walls and stuff and he was becoming like a friend, actually.
And then he was like, well, I'm gonna go back out to the pod because there's like a main area where everybody can like hang out where there's like basketball and places you can watch TV and stuff like that.
And I was like, okay, I'm probably just gonna chill here.
And he was like, no, no, you should really come with me.
And so this guy, I just took a chance with this situation, but this guy, like, took me under his wing, like, introduced me to, like, all of his friends in jail, and we played, like, basketball.
And in terms of numbers, just so you know, like we were getting on the abandoned videos, like a little less than a million.
So like 700, 800 K, which we were very happy with.
But after we got arrested, we knew we couldn't do like the illegal stuff anymore.
And so, um, Well, during the Abandoned Days, and we can get to the story in a second, but we went to the Queen Mary and had our first haunted experience ever.
And so it just made sense to us that, well, this is a legal thing.
So what was really interesting is we did a lot of the abandoned stuff, but every once in a while we would do like a haunted thing because those creepy stories and, you know, the lore of everything is really interesting, whether or not you believe it or not.
At that time we didn't really believe in any of the ghost stuff.
We're like, all right, this is going to be a great video because everyone loves telling the stories.
But we just got, I don't know what it was, but someone forwarded us something saying that for the first time in 30 years, The Queen Mary in Long Beach, which is like one of the most haunted ships, like New York Times, like top 10 most haunted places in the world.
Yeah, I didn't realize how famous it was, but they have that.
They have haunted houses.
They have a ton of different attractions there.
But there's this one room, B340, that hadn't been open for 30 years, and allegedly they closed it down because there's multiple unexplained murders and or suicides in that room.
And we're like, whoa, like, you know, this is the first week this is open after 30 years.
This is going to be an amazing story to tell or, you know, video film.
And so we went in there trying to make something or like trying to get something.
We obviously didn't really believe that much.
So we're like, all right, let's just see if it happens.
If there's going to be a haunted location, it will be this.
We toured around, did the whole thing, weren't getting much.
And we were kind of frustrated at that point because we're like, all right, this is supposed to be the cream of the crop.
This is supposed to be the big wig.
Like, why can't we get something to happen?
And so it was four o'clock in the morning at this time.
We've been trying for hours of just sitting in circles, like asking out.
Yeah, like, just trying to get something to happen on camera.
And nothing was happening.
And so we're like, fine, I guess, let's do this.
Let's just, like, leave.
Like, it's fun to tell the story.
Let's just leave.
And so we turn off the camera and start packing up.
We start walking towards the door.
And as soon as we turn, like, actually we're about to, like, Get out of the room, the faucet turns on, full blast for four seconds, and then turns back off.
And we all actually freeze and freak out.
Two of our roommates that were there at the time just immediately started crying.
We ran in, we were like, okay, how is that actually possible at all?
Maybe that's a sign of it doesn't want to be filmed, and it doesn't want us to leave.
So maybe let's just not film this and try one more time, just for the heck of it.
And so that's what we did.
But this time it worked.
And to, like, the weirdest extent, we just, like, put away all of our cameras.
We sat in the most serious tone saying, like, okay, guys, like, before this, didn't really believe.
So, like, if this is happening, let's have something happen.
And so we all sit in the dark together, and we start calling out questions.
And we're like, okay, like, is there anybody here?
But apparently, one of our friends, he's like super religious, was like, hey, no matter what, the entire night, he was keeping an audio recording in his pocket.
And so we're like, okay, so this thing doesn't want us to leave, and maybe we should just, like, ask questions under our breath for the rest of the time, just so we know it's not some employee, it's not someone, like, screwing with us the entire time.
So fast forward to the very end, we were like, okay, we've had a bunch of conversations.
At this point, we really believe if this is truly something, I want to know something about something deeper than just yes or no questions or just, like, something silly of, like, how many people are here.
So I decided...
Let's ask about religion.
And I ask out, is there a heaven?
And it knocks three times, meaning no.
And at that point, our two religious friends that were there, like, immediately jumped up and said, we have to leave right now.
So, that was a monumental change in not only, like, our career, but also, like, at least my, like, thought process in life.
Because, yes, I had the idea that maybe something else is out there.
Like, I'd grown up a Christian.
But at that time, we'd gone to so many scary places.
We'd, you know, tackled a bunch of, like, life questions, philosophical questions throughout our time together, and we were like, okay, like, after asking about it, like, for me, I was, like, losing, like, faith in something else.
I was like, okay, maybe we're just the only things out here.
And after that moment, I had, like, a full-on, like, breakdown the next day.
Like, I, like, I was, like, everything that I had thought was not real now becomes real.
And I had, like, pretty much lost any sort of, like, faith at that point.
But there is even a video of me online, like, sitting on my bedroom floor, like, crying to camera saying, like, I truly didn't believe.
And now this instance opens up this whole world.
Like, maybe I don't immediately believe 100%.
But the question of if there's something else out there is now back in my brain and I want to chase that.
And so after the whole arrest and going to the haunted stuff that was like it wasn't necessarily we were like a thousand percent believers the second we like had this experience.
But it was so intriguing because it was one of those things that we couldn't explain.
We told this story so many times and the audio of this actually happening in the Knox is online.
So many people don't believe it because they weren't there.
And we wouldn't believe it if we weren't there.
And so we understand that people don't believe us when we talk about these things.
However, just the idea that it could be real and the idea that it could happen again is what's so intriguing and is why we got into it.
We're like, okay, if we can just keep doing this and keep getting more and more proof, that feeling of hope of like, okay, there is something else out there.
And it is not just, okay, we're just going to live and die here on the planet.
Like, our final stint, which was actually last year, we hadn't gone back in three years, but we wanted to, like, the Queen Mary actually shut down, which was sad.
They're trying to, like, raise money and, like, get it back up, but...
So we thought this was the last time we'd ever see the ship, so we're like, let's go say goodbye to the thing that literally started this whole adventure for us.
And so Colvin and I went back alone to this B-340.
Yeah, I was going to say, I'm curious, because when we went there, again, we were very different than where we're at now.
We didn't do super extensive research.
What we did is we would take the article that it says it is, but obviously we're not going back and fact-checking that, and then we'd go and talk to the employees.
And so most of our stories were all first-hand encounters with the employees that were there.
Or things that they would tell us rather than, you know...
And who's to say, like, you know, we know, like, you know, whether or not maybe a lot of people believe a soul passes on, but what if that's just not true and all souls stay here?
A lot of people dismiss that idea, but I think it's like 50% of the United States or something like that believes in ghosts or believes in the afterlife or something like that.
We're also just coming up with more theories in our head of what we actually do believe with the paranormal.
For example, right now, we 100% believe in energies and stuff like that, and there's no question that you can walk into some places and it's just a different vibe.
It feels heavier.
But do we believe in the Casper, the ghost, sort of figure ghosts?
Like, not really.
Maybe.
We've seen, like, shadow figures before, but have I ever levitated?
No.
Have I ever seen something, like, straight in front of my face where I, like, undeniable proof that that's a ghost in front of me?
No.
It's, like, been, like, just out of corner of the eyes and stuff like that.
You know, there's some scientists that believe that things carry memory.
There's a guy named Rupert Sheldrake, and he has this theory of morphic resonance.
And part of his theory is that he thinks objects themselves contain some sort of memory, whether or not you can access that memory, but that objects contain memory.
And he cites that as one of the reasons why people can feel things.
Like if you were going to a house where someone's been murdered in the house, there's a reason why they have to tell you.
They can't just sell you the house.
They have to sell, well, by the way...
You know, like, if someone gets murdered in the house, I think, I don't know, like, for how long after the, and it probably varies by state to state, but I remember in California, like, you would have to tell people if someone got murdered in the house.
I don't know how old she was, like eight, nine, something like that.
And it was a national scandal because they couldn't figure out who murdered her or what happened.
And some people thought...
That it was the parents and the Boulder Police Department botched the investigation because they weren't really – Boulder is a pretty peaceful place.
They're not used to murders, especially not murders of children.
And also, like, it exposed people to how weird these child beauty pageants are where you're taking a little girl and you're putting, you know, high-heeled shoes on her and short skirts and sexy makeup.
The scary part about it was that was the accusations that the mother did it.
They brought in these handwriting experts, and the handwriting experts compared the ransom note with the mother's handwriting, and they were trying to say that the mother wrote the ransom note.
I'm like, who fucking knows?
But it's gross enough that no one wanted to have anything to do with the house.
So in Villisca, Iowa, there was this serial killer that came in, apparently, and small little town, a couple thousand people or whatever, a little house, and somehow this guy was able to come into the house and Kill two parents and six kids all in one house with an axe.
And the most gruesome part about it is the killer used the blunt side of the axe.
So you can still, because we went there to investigate, you can still see the axe markings in the ceiling when he was going back to go down.
And again, it's so weird because there was like...
On the top floor there was like the parents room but then right like five steps down a wooden creaky hallway was the children's room where there was four of them and then there was two more of like the third daughter's friends that they were hanging out with that were downstairs that got murdered as well.
unidentified
So how is it possible that he was able to get to all of them with the blunt side and just and like broke like did he break in or was he hiding like in the attic?
And what's really interesting is the two main suspects that a lot of people talk about were not the ones that we ended up talking about in our video.
Just because right before doing research on this location, we saw this author that just came out with a book about a serial killer.
And she thinks she solves the Villisca X murders because that same exact style of murder was actually this serial killer that went from Midwest Town to Midwest Town on a train.
And it's called the man from the train.
And the same exact thing.
So things like...
Covering the mirrors after the death and the back of an axe.
You know drug the family beforehand or like chloroform them or something and there was no sign of like any any drugs like used so here according to the book the man on the train he they describe him for being responsible for up to Let's see They're feeling certain that Mueller committed 14 family murders totaling 59 victims, less certain varying degrees of his involvement, and another 25 family murders totaling an additional 94 victims.
Yeah, the other suspects were just like not as intense, I guess you could say, where it was like there was like this one guy named Jones, I believe, who was just a businessman that maybe had like some rivalry in business with the family.
But wouldn't, you know, result to like murder for that.
And then there was also just like a creepy reverend who was like a peeping Tom sort of character that was just like the town creep that everybody thought it was.
Yeah, according to the Jamises, a number of murders in the period were assumed by local police to be one-off incidents were actually committed by a single person, probably Mueller, based on certain similarities among the crimes.
The similarities include The same being within a few hundred feet of railroad junction.
Okay, so that's the book's title, it says.
The slaughter of entire families in small towns with little or no police force.
And the families having a barn which the killer is believed to have hidden to observe the families.
It's not necessarily like, oh, like, you know, immediately you're just like, oh, yeah, this is spiritual energy or whatever like that, but it's just heavy.
Or it's just like you feel off when you go into these places.
Like, as soon as you stepped into The Conjuring House.
So, yeah, the movie story is like this witch, Bathsheba or whatever, but the actual story, there's a bunch of different things that they say are haunted, but it's actually built on the grounds of the- Is that the house?
The most famous we'll get to, but it's built on the same grounds that the King-Philips War was fought on, right at the beginning of the United States and everything.
So the main people that haunt that are seven dead soldiers that this little girl always kept seeing in the walls and thus it started manifesting more to the entire family.
So this family called the Perrin family bought the place in 1972. And for 10 years, they said they would see these figures, these soldiers walking around.
Their beds would shake.
They would get scratches.
And it kept getting worse over the 10 years.
And the crazy part is it got to become famous because of the final day that changed it all.
They wanted to do, like, an exorcism on the house.
The Perron family actually wrote a book about that.
And they say the Conjuring movies actually don't do it justice of all the things that happened and all the movements and the craziness that happened in that 10 years that they lived there.
They were like, in the real life, actually experiencing it and the trauma they went through, they say it's like 10 times worse.
Well, here's where it gets interesting is they don't know what it is, but they believe it is something more evil or demonic, whatever you believe in, that is like controlling all of these like soldiers and stuff and trapping them.
Movie goes with that's a person named Bathsheba who was like a neighbor who everybody just thought was a witch.
But in real life, it was just known as a demonic possession, but no trace back.
Because, like, if you did, like, there's a gentleman.
Where's this little...
Where's Travis Walton's little thing?
We used to have it on the desk here.
Oh, it's over there.
That guy right there, this guy, is Travis Walton.
And he's got his own bobblehead now.
Man's got to make a living.
He was in this movie called Fire in the Sky.
I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
It's a UFO abduction story.
But it's a very famous abduction story because There was a bunch of eyewitnesses, and there was witnesses that saw the spacecraft that were in the town.
He was a logger in Arizona, including people that hated him, who backed up his story.
So they saw something, and this area where they were logging, there had been sightings.
Like, multiple sightings of UFOs in the past.
And they saw something go through the sky and into the trees, and they pulled the truck over.
This guy, Travis Walton, who was a young guy at the time, he was in his early 20s, jumps out of the car, runs over to this thing, and there's a flying saucer, like a classic flying saucer that's hovering over the ground.
It was like a flying saucer, right?
Is that how he described it, I believe?
Anyway, he runs up, gets too close to this thing, a burst of energy hits him, like he got too close to it or something, gets knocked down.
The other guys run.
They're terrified now.
They run, they get in the car, they drive off.
And then they're screaming and yelling at each other as they're driving off, like, we gotta go back and get him, we can't fucking leave him there.
So they go back, they go back to the same spot, he's gone.
He disappeared for five days.
What's like five days?
I hope I'm not fucking this up.
So five days later, he shows up in town, calls someone on the cell phone, calls the police, tells them his story.
There's recordings of him calling the police and telling the story.
No one knows what happened to him.
Five days, no food, no water.
And his story was that they took him aboard this spaceship and repaired him.
That he got damaged by this burst of energy that came off of this spaceship and that they repaired him and that he communicated with these beings.
And these beings are what everybody describes as these classic gray aliens.
These things with these big heads and these large eyes and there was different types of creatures that were on this spaceship too.
But that poor fucking guy!
For the rest of his life, now he's like in his 60s, maybe 70s, and that's him.
He came on the podcast, very nice guy, but now he's the fucking wacky UFO guy for the rest of his life.
Like Travis Walton could have been a normal guy and had a normal life and never experienced that.
Like, would you rather Be the person who has the unique experience that nobody believes or never have that experience where you could just live a normal life.
I would 100% rather have the experience, I think, because...
Okay, maybe not the UFO experience, but the reason I think deep down that I'm so intrigued with the paranormal and, like, these experiences is because, in a way, it gives me hope of something, like...
Further than this.
I'd rather, instead of not believing in anything and just being like, alright, I'm just going to die and sit in the ground for the rest of my life, or for the rest of eternity, I want to, even if it's a little notch of faith that there's something else out there, I'd much rather have that experience.
I think, you know, there's going to be people that judge you for what you believe, no matter if it isn't ghosts or like even talking religion and stuff like that.
So you might as well just stay true to, you know, the things you actually experience.
And I would love to find out.
It's answers.
It's kind of like giving, like you said, like a little bit more hope of what comes next.
Do you guys feel that with your experiences that you've had, they're limited in terms of like you haven't had anything like The Conjuring House happen to you, but you've had enough happen where you've been around enough that you have questions?
And this was one of these spots where nobody has ever investigated or just like a handful of people.
So we were going to be like the first YouTubers to really investigate and like put it on the map.
And it had to deal with like, I think it was like a murder-suicide.
Some guy like killed his wife and then shot himself.
And we're trying to like, especially this year and in the future, try to just put ourselves in more scary situations so it never...
It's always exciting and stuff like that.
So we're trying to do more alone challenges and stuff.
Things that give us more fear.
And so for this specific one, I had the challenge of staying in the entire mansion by myself.
And I was on the top floor in a room which was deemed to be the most haunted.
Apparently a guy named Bernard had lived there in the past and basically was like Stuck in a wheelchair his entire life and stayed in that room and would like only look out the window and that's it and he died and apparently still in the room and so I'm up there and Sam is not even in the house I think you're actually in the cellar and then one of our other buddies is like across the street and earlier before we all did like the alone investigation the door as we were walking down the stairs of the Bernard Room Close.
Shut.
And we were all like, wait, did you guys hear that too?
Was that just my imagination?
We run up there.
It's completely shut.
And so we obviously propped it back open.
But since I knew that had happened before, I was just up there asking questions to Bernard.
And I was just like, all right, Bernard, if you're really up here, why don't you slam this door right behind me like you did for us earlier?
It's just me and you.
Do it.
And...
Sure enough, like, the door slammed right behind me.
So basically it just detects changes in EMF energy.
So like, you know, if nothing's changing at all, it won't do anything.
But if there's something like movement or like, you know, new energy enters the room or something like that, it'll spike.
And so that's like what a lot of the equipment is based off of.
What's really interesting in the stuff that we do now is we try to integrate just more normal, like, everyday objects into our investigation because of the fact that a lot of people are skeptical.
So, for example, one of the pieces of equipment that we use a lot is, like, a cat toy that lights up when you touch it.
So we would put cat balls around and, you know...
We've seen them sit there for hours and nothing happens.
And then, like, one time we'll be like, alright, if there's someone in the room, can you go touch that cat ball 20 feet away from us?
Well, I saw the episode that you guys filmed at that sanitarium.
I don't know, you probably filmed many of them at a sanitarium, but you had a cat toy and you also had this little box with an antenna that comes out of it, like a circle.
It's like a flat disc with an antenna and it was going off.
You did it.
You set it in a room and you walked away and you let the camera run.
To give context a little bit, the challenge was to go put the rim pod downstairs by this ball or whatever, and everybody else was upstairs, and we had to go alone and do it.
And so I went down here, and I put this rim pod down, set up the camera, and then we're all upstairs.
We should explain why the ball because there was a video of a ball sitting there by itself And you're watching this ball and it's not moving forever and then all of a sudden it just rolls by itself on its own.
So that wasn't our video, but the people that we went with who are our friends, that was their video.
They had been to that place like three or four times and one of the times they had set that ball down because The story goes that the person, the spirit or whatever that is moving that ball is like a little kid.
And, you know, it's a sanatorium.
It was like really sad.
But, you know, the kids were allowed to like play on that level.
And so if you put a ball down, it's supposedly if there's someone there, it will move.
And they put that little rope there specifically so that no wind would get it.
Like you'd have to actually put like an immense force to push it.
And so our buddies who had been there before filmed, I think they said it was like a three hour clip.
Three hours of this ball sitting in that same area, that's why we put the ball there, of just nothingness.
And then, like you said, it didn't seem like it was wind or slow.
So if you put your hand within a foot, it'll change.
But if you're not – like he was standing next to it for like a minute talking what he's doing and it wasn't going off.
And then he leaves the room completely.
He's probably 600 feet away.
We went up two floors and down the hall and then it started going off, which was so monumental to us because it was like – Why, for the entire time that you were there, nothing's happening.
But as soon as you leave, or as soon as I leave, like...
So we had just learned about this too, like recently.
But basically the theory is that if there's enough people believing in something...
By just manifesting it in their minds, it becomes real.
And so, for example, with this spot, it's like there's been so many people that have heard the dark history of Waverly Hills that maybe they're believing it into existence.
There's so many people going there to ghost hunt, so many people hearing about the trauma of it every single day, that all that energy, that's just a theory, is trapped there as well.
Like, how many people, like, tried to dream it into existence, but it didn't happen?
Right.
I think...
It's a combination of stuff.
I think that visualization and it's possible that there's something more to thoughts than just here's a thing that I have in my head and I put it out there and, you know, it's just a thought.
Maybe there's some sort of creative energy that's attached to thoughts that maybe we're not aware of.
But I think The problem with things like The Secret and The Law of Attraction is that those very esoteric and fascinating concepts are hijacked by hucksters.
And then assholes come along and tell you, Sam, I've got the secret to you living a happy, successful life.
You can have everything you need by following my 12-step course.
And then someone pretends that they have this sort of attachment to this to the point where they've documented it and they know exactly how it works.
No, it's a feeling.
There's a thing to it.
It might be real.
There might be something to it.
But there's a lot of other stuff that has to be in place, too.
Like, if you want the perfect life, you want, like, to manifest this incredible existence, it also requires an immense amount of work.
It's not like you just fucking think it and dream it into being.
You could be a child and get killed in a drive-by.
Luck is real.
There's bad luck, there's good luck.
Shit happens.
That's real, too.
It's hard to say because it's all discussed by the winners.
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I had a photo of a house that I put on my wall and that was my vision board and I made that a reality and I built this business from the ground up with my own thoughts.
It's also, whatever you focus on will be what you work on.
Whatever you focus on, as an accountant, if you're always looking for errors, you're going to see all the wrongdoings in your life because you're looking for errors.
But if you're optimistic and you're always looking for positives, you're going to find more positives in your life.
Well, this speaks to what we were talking about earlier about being young and failing a lot.
If you concentrate on those failures, Then you think of yourself as a failure.
It's very dangerous for people because I've seen it with people where they have a few bad experiences like in high school, like they fall apart a few times and, you know, they lose jobs, they lose this, they lose that, and then they're a loser.
And then in their mind, they're a loser because they're concentrating only on those negative experiences they've had.
Instead of like getting past that and growing and say that was a valuable life experience and that's caused me to reevaluate and reassess the way I communicate and change the way I think and caused me to get up earlier and work harder and that made me a winner.
That's the good aspect of bad experiences is that it gives you like an incredibly powerful motivating tool.
So I don't know whether or not you can manifest things into existence.
But I'm not opposed to the idea totally.
I am opposed to the idea that it's the only thing.
I'm opposed to the idea like the secret.
Did you know the documentary The Secret?
There was a bunch of people that really believed that they were just going to think things into existence.
This is the saddest thing.
There was this girl who was friends with a friend of mine, and she was at the Comedy Store one night, and she's like, I am, you know, I am so happy because I found the secret and I'm going to meet the man of my dreams and I'm gonna have the career that I've always wanted.
I'm like, how are you gonna do that?
She's like, well, I just started following the secret.
And like, Oprah was, you know, talking about her on her show and all these people believe in this.
Like, hey, Oprah, you already fucking, you have the secret, alright?
It's so sad, too, because that's what I always think about when someone asks, like, oh, my God, I want to be a YouTuber.
Everyone wants to be a YouTuber now.
Of course.
Everyone wants to be on social media or TikTok, and everyone's like, oh, yeah, it's just easy.
You post a video or something like that.
But you don't realize how much work goes into it or how much you have to try and Be able to accept failure for months on months on months before you see anything.
And some people figure it out and some people don't, but that's the beauty of what's happening now, is that folks like you, who don't have any experience in Hollywood, you don't even have backgrounds in doing musicals and plays, like all of a sudden, you're in show business, right?
You guys are in, but it's like self-created show business.
But it's massively successful.
I mean, you guys have like, I've seen videos you have like, what's the most views one of your videos has?
That's what we base our entire YouTube channel on.
The crazy adventures that we go on maybe are a spectacle.
But the reason why people are watching what we're doing is 80% of that video is just jokes.
Just hanging out with friends.
Our thing that we're promoting is shared experience with our friends.
We take all these different groups of friends all around the world, have a good time, and if something happens, it might be a life-changing experience.
And when those things do happen, you bond with those friends so much deeper than if you just went to a coffee shop.
Yeah, the bottle of Dracula piss that you carried around with you.
When you're in that guy's area, this guy, for people who don't know, Dracula, the book by Bram Stoker and all the movies, were based on this man named Vlad the Impaler, who used to eat lunch while he had his enemies writhing on spikes in front of him.
He was notoriously a ruse, which by the way, Matt Stagg sent me this, that he had been captured by When he was younger, he had been imprisoned when he was younger and probably had been raped and tortured.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why he was such a ruthless person.
It says, when Vlad was called to a diplomatic meeting in 1442 with Sultan Murad II, he brought his young sons, Vlad III and Radu along, but the meeting was actually a trap.
All three were arrested and held hostage.
The elder Vlad was released under the condition that he leave his sons behind.
Oh, God.
Years of captivity.
Under the Ottomans, Vlad and his younger brothers were tortured.
Tutored, rather, in science, philosophy, and the arts.
Vlad also became a skilled horseman and warrior, according to some accounts.
However, he may have been imprisoned and tortured for part of that time, during which he would have witnessed the impalement of his, the Ottomans, enemies.
You know, on that same trip, we went out to Romania, but I think right after Romania went to the Ukraine.
And that was probably one of our most terrifying experiences because in Odessa, there is this giant, like, labyrinth of catacombs underneath the city.
And it's basically like a mine.
They used all the limestone from underneath to build the entire city of Odessa in Ukraine.
But we...
Had some near and run-ins of, like, almost dying down there.
I mean, obviously you shouldn't go into the catacombs alone, but this is, like, one of our, like, exploring videos.
And, oh, my God, this story is crazy.
We met this random guy who was going to take us in because our original guide, like, broke his hand the night before, and he was like, oh, trust this dude.
He's done it before.
You should just go in the catacombs with this guy.
We're like, what?
So stupid.
Spoke broken English.
We did it.
We're like, all right, I mean, we need to get a video.
Let's go.
Like, why not?
Oh, my God.
So we're diving deep into this place and he turns to us at one point and he said, do you guys know how to get out?
And I was like, I mean, maybe.
He's like, no, you don't.
If I leave you right now, you would die.
And he just looks at us.
And we're like, please don't.
And he's like, I want to test something.
I'm going to go over there.
This is a circle.
You guys got to find your way back over to me, but I'm going to leave you alone.
We realized at that point, oh god, we could die right now.
It was just absolutely terrifying.
All those markings on a wall was apparently a story of a guy that got trapped in there and kept seeing that figure, that little shadow figure on the wall.
And so he went crazy and wrote a ton of different things.
Usually when we did the Explorer videos, abandoned videos, we would go and film like four to five, like in one stint.
So this was like our Florida trip.
We land, it's like 8 a.m., 9 a.m., and we're hitting like our first spot, which is this giant hotel, giant like hospital, something like that, right next to the highway.
And so basically we were just there to film our video, of course.
One of our main things back in the day was we had these Explorer stickers that we go put at the top of each one of these buildings.
And so we made our way to the roof and probably spent a little bit too much time on top of the building where everybody could see us.
And so we knew we already had to, you know, lay low as we were like leaving and we're leaving this building.
And as we go out, we see a lady on the property with an orange vest and she's walking towards us.
You know, we can do anything.
We just decided to run.
And so we ran the opposite direction and there was like a little fence that we could hop behind us.
And so we hopped it into what we thought was like a private property of like an office building space.
There was like big buildings and like a big parking lot and stuff.
Literally this.
Like that's where we're at.
And as we're trying to leave this like office building, what we thought, we had four officers run up to us right here, where this is like the front gate with guns saying like, get on the ground, like, you guys are so fucked, like all this stuff that we, we were like, whoa, whoa, we've, We've been doing abandon forever.
We've been caught before, but never been held at gunpoint.
But yeah, so anyway, so apparently this Dybbuk box is said to be able to trap a spirit inside of it and that way it's not gonna be haunting a location.
I don't know exactly because a lot of these Dybbuk boxes are now like just fake random things that people put around.
This one in particular...
I think it was like the most rare, like the original one, like where the idea came from.
And that's why people say it's like the most haunted box in the world.
And whether or not you believe that, there has been so many people that have touched that box and immediately passed out.
Or said as soon as they walked in, they had bad luck for the next week.
Even like, I know Post Malone always talks about his story.
So, when I was there, there's a feeling when you go in that room that I'm saying to myself, okay, Am I mindfucking myself?
Is this me going, oh, this box is haunted, so you should feel weird?
Is this bullshit?
But it didn't feel good.
It felt like, oh, I should probably get the fuck up.
That's what I felt.
When I was around that box, I was like, I don't think I want to be here.
But was that because it's...
I mean, the setting is really cool.
What he's done with that museum...
It's really fun.
I recommend it.
If you're in Vegas and you got some time during the day and you don't feel like blowing all your money at the slot machines, go there because it's really entertaining.
At that location, just, you know, for example, so in Zach Bagan's museum, one of the most, if not the most haunted object in the whole museum, I don't know if you saw it, probably did, the Devil's Rocking Chair.
Yeah, he had shut down that exhibit specifically because a lot of people were complaining about getting nauseous or throwing up or something like that.
It's apparently the only artifact that he had to close off in that museum.
But for some reason, he was super nice to us and was like, guys, besides me, no one's sat in that since the exorcism that had occurred on that chair.
So if you guys want to...
You guys can sit in it for the first time ever.
And that was one of those times, like, we're down to push the limit and stuff like that, but that was one of those times that I actually, like, gather myself and be like, we can do it.
Like, let's figure this out.
Let's, like, not actually, like, overthink about it.
Every once in a while we'll break into a radio station where it'll be like a song or something that like will be something saying or like just a word will pop out.
I'm, like, watching him, and I'm asking questions out, and whatever's there is supposed to use the Estes method or, like, use Sam basically as the vessel to speak out.
Yeah, basically to sensory deprive myself so that no matter what, I couldn't be just faking an answer and hearing what he said and say something random.
So the theory is, yes, there will be other random words that happen because it's radio frequencies.
However, down to the coincidence theory, if things make sense over and over and over again to the questions that he's asking, then that is said to be more paranormal.
Like, I've been hypnotized before, and, like I said, if everything in my being wanted to stand up, yeah, I can stand up, or I can not listen to, like, what's happening.
However, if you allow yourself to, like, feel that, the feeling was paralyzing.
And, like, I, like, run a lot, so I always, like, use this as an example.
It felt as though, within seconds of sitting down on that chair, I had run 5-10 miles.
Like, it felt like I was sore, and, like, my legs were, like, really, you know, like the...
Almost like sluggish feeling to your muscles after a big workout.
That's what I felt almost immediately.
It was so bizarre and I'd never felt like that before and still to this day, since that share, I had never felt like that either.
No, what's interesting is obviously there's all those stories, whatever.
So what really gets us is when people have their own personal experiences that they come and talk about.
What we didn't realize is how many people had experiences with this doll.
They calculated to more than 10,000 people have written in apology letters to Robert to ask for forgiveness because of the curse that he put on them.
10,000 individuals.
Like, maybe even if 50% of those are bullshit, there are 5,000 people out there that genuinely believe they have been cursed by this doll by taking a picture of it.
And he blames that on Robert the Doll because the story is there's a big touristy shop at the end and he bought one of the little Robert the Doll plushies and put it in a microwave and just made fun of it and stuff.
And then claims that he got Parkinson's because of that.
Well, a lot of people get Parkinson's without that.
Ozzy Osbourne blames Year of Hell on Haunted Doll.
Holy shit.
Look at him.
Oh my god.
The Black Sabbath rocker was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease last year and underwent spinal surgery following a fall at his home.
Makes the claim that his family's new reality TV show, the Osbournes want to believe.
The show sees his son Jack, 34, trying to persuade Ozzy, 71, mom Sharon, 68, and sister Kelly, 35, To believe in the paranormal, including ghosts, UFOs, fairies, and werewolves.
And he gave his first name and his clothes to this doll.
And so the kid and the doll became best friends for years and years and years.
And he basically embodied this guy and just became Robert himself.
But over the course of his childhood and all the way up until I think he had left his parents' house to go to college, he would have horrible things happen to him because of this doll.
And this doll was allegedly taken from, like, Germany at this shop, the same...
What's crazy is like this same guy, he went off to be an artist and he did his whole career.
And when he was like in his older age, he came back to the house and for like 10 or 15 years, he kept this doll upstairs in his attic and put a whole like, you know, three foot version of his house upstairs.
So like a short couch and a short desk, all for Robert.
As rumor would have it, the Ottos and their servants would often hear Gene in his bedroom, having conversations with himself in two entirely different voices.
Furthermore, the Ottos would wake up in the middle of the night to Gene screaming, only to find the frightened boy in bed surrounded by overturned furniture.
Gene would blame Robert the doll for messing up the bedroom, While Robert would glare at Gene from the foot of the bed.
Like, what if, like, a demon can manifest itself inside of a doll occasionally?
Just every now and then, a little fucking opening in the dimensions pops out, and this thing manages to, and it can't assume a physical form, but it can sort of embody itself in some sort of an object, like a doll, something cute.
Which is so terrifying, too, because, you know, when it's a little doll or something cute or whatever, like a lot of these things that you say is like a little girl spirit or something, it's like cute.
But what was scary is like so it was me and my buddy Nate that who we know since high school like he's been one of our best friends forever.
So we've known Sam since he was 15 type thing.
We've both never seen Sam ever act like that.
It got so bad that Nate and I were doing our own individual investigations, and the guide came and got me, and was just like, yo, you should go check on your buddy outside.
He's throwing up outside.
And I run out there, and what people don't always forget about is it doesn't just affect us in the moment, but we get done filming, and we have these things called paranormal hangovers where it affects us for a long time.
Like I was telling you about my stepdad having that experience at Gettysburg, I would imagine that if enough people will die in an area, if that's real, if things can have a memory, you would think that there would be something that just lingers on.
The last moments of your life, you're throwing up blood and you're realizing this is the end.
It gets so meta and confusing because then, yeah, it's like if you're religious, it's like, well, you would go to heaven, but it's like, how do you know?
Spirits don't have the opportunity to walk around earth for a little bit before they move on to the light.
Yeah, it was like a normal guy and then he lived in this house and killed his whole family, right?
And then there was a thing you broke through the wall.
I remember, see if you can find the scene.
There's like a scene where he breaks through the wall, and I remember that freaking me out as a 12-year-old going, like this idea of like, you know, your dad breaking through this hole in the wall.
What's interesting about the Stanley is there's this part that's literally in the front room called the vortex where there's just a bunch of mirrors on each side that are pointed towards each other and the theory is in the paranormal world that that can create a portal, mirrors facing each other or like spirits can become trapped through mirrors and stuff.
And so that was like the coolest part of the entire place.
Again, like, pictures, you know, are always, like, hit or miss, and there's a lot of times that, like, people will be like, oh, like, an orb or something.
Cydonia, Viking 1. So in Cydonia, there was this guy, though, that was...
That guy's still alive, Hoagland.
I think his name is Richard Hoagland.
But he would, like, milk this for all it's worth, and he made a series of videos talking about the geometry that you could find in Cydonia is impossible to create in nature.
There has to have been an advanced civilization that existed on Mars, and the government's hiding this from us.
It was one of those things.
He seemed...
At least a little out of his fucking mind.
But when you smoke a lot of pot and watch documentaries, those are ones that'll get you.
And his one got me a couple of times.
I was like, is this guy right?
Because, like, I'm one of those people, like, I was convinced that the original Bigfoot footage, do you ever see the Patterson Bigfoot footage?
And again, like we said, I don't think we're really on that wave of believing that I'm going to just video the corner and there's going to be someone there.
There's one time that we ever got something that was convincing of us being like, maybe this is something.
When our first time at the Conjuring house, if you just type in Sam and Colby Conjuring thermal photo...
So, like, our buddy was pointing down, like, a thermal camera, and you can take a picture of it, and through this, like, gap, she sees, like, you know, there's a window at the end of the hall.
But like that right side is apparently like what we think is like a child's face with you can see a hair swoop, eyes, nose, two eyes, mouth, and then the corner of your shoulder right there as well.
Our plan right now like obviously we love the haunted stuff and there's endless amount of spots and there's always more interesting things we can do and experiments we can get into or more alone investigations.
That's almost more fucked up to me because those are real stories that 100% people were killed by other people and it's just like, ugh, you have to sit with that.
That and conspiracy theories and all these other things.
There's millions of things in this mystery realm that aren't just haunted, which is exciting to us.
As well as, like you said, other business ventures and part of it.
But again, most of this recently has been much more about other people's experiences rather than just ours.
So the majority of our content is taking other influencers or other people like that, maybe even sometimes they don't even believe.
And giving them an experience that will, like, change the way they think.
Like, we started out with our friends, like you said, like our hometown friends, and that was great and all, but now we love taking people that may not even believe, or maybe be on the fence, they're interested in this stuff, but then when they see these things, like, two or three times this last year, we took someone that had never had an experience before, and they come on an adventure with us, and they see, like, a full-on shadow figure.
But it's also more interesting when you want things to happen.
Because at the end of the day, like, the reason why we do this is because if we were to prove on either way, we'd rather prove that it's real because that means there's something else out there.