When I was a kid, there was a house visible from the back of our school – a proper local legend. Dilapidated, half-swallowed by brambles, broken windows, the whole cliché. We called it the haunted house. Not because anyone ever saw anything there, or because it had a tragic history, but simply because it looked haunted. The spooky aesthetic did all the heavy lifting, and the stories we invented filled in the rest.
We told ourselves tales of white ladies drifting across the upper floor, of vengeful ghosts stalking the overgrown garden, of shadow figures staring from the cracked windows. It was folklore built on nothing more than the imagination of children who’d seen too many horror films.
By the time we were teenagers, on those nothing-to-do Friday nights, we’d dare each other to creep inside through smashed windows, whispering in the dark, trying not to step on broken glass, jumping at every clatter of loose plaster. Someone might have had a camcorder, pretending we were carrying out a serious investigation. In reality, we were just scaring each other for fun – because that’s what teenagers do.
We knew it was play-acting. We weren’t investigating ghosts. We weren’t seeking truth. We were entertaining ourselves in a place that looked the part.
Fast-forward to today, and there are grown adults doing the exact same thing – only now they do it on YouTube, with cinematic editing, solemn voiceovers about “investigating the paranormal”, and a line of branded merch.
They enter derelict buildings with no reported activity, no witnesses, no folklore. The only evidence that anything “might” be going on is that the building looks creepy.
And when nothing of interest happens – which is the inevitable outcome in a place that isn’t claimed to be haunted – the videos devolve into five minutes of “debunking” a draft through a broken window, followed by twenty minutes of null responses to call-out questions. The result is frankly embarrassing: footage of grown adults behaving exactly as we did as children, whispering theatrically into empty rooms while nothing whatsoever occurs.
In reality, it’s filler. Content to pad out a portfolio of work for creators with lofty ambitions of becoming “Proper Paranormal YouTubers,” but without the resources or drive to visit locations with actual reported activity on a regular-enough basis to satisfy an upload schedule. So instead, they pick whatever abandoned shell looks suitably spooky and simply play pretend.
Debunkers, for some baffling reason, lap this up. Because there’s no over-the-top fakery or demon theatrics, the content is praised as “authentic”, as if absence of activity automatically equates to investigative credibility. But the truth is that these channels are just as dishonest as their more flamboyant counterparts.
The lie isn’t in the evidence – it’s in the premise itself:
The clickbait thumbnails. The moody intros. The claims of “REAL PARANORMAL INVESTIGATION” in the video title.
Some locations they visit do have rumours – usually from other urbex teams who previously exaggerated the same mundane noises for their own content. But these are little more than the childish stories we swapped on the playground about that house.
Without a real paranormal claim to investigate, it isn’t an investigation. Calling it one is about as honest as listing a knackered Fiat Punto on Autotrader and calling it an Italian supercar. The label is doing all the work – the substance simply isn’t there.
To be clear, plenty of urban exploration channels are brilliant – historical, respectful, and openly honest about what they’re doing. Urbex can be genuinely fascinating: abandoned factories and shuttered buildings become accidental time capsules, frozen at the moment someone walked out and never returned. But the moment that exploration is dressed up as a real paranormal investigation – when the fourth “Did you hear that?” is whispered into the dark, and claims of “REAL INVESTIGATION”, “TERRIFYING EVIDENCE” or “WE HAD TO LEAVE!” are plastered across the thumbnail – any claim to authenticity becomes hollow.
Yes, these channels might occasionally visit a well-known paranormal hotspot – 30 East Drive, The Skirrid Inn, etc – just to mix things up and lend themselves a veneer of legitimacy. But when the majority of your output revolves around random abandoned buildings your assertions of “real paranormal investigation” are every bit as false as the channels who swear they’re attacked by demons week after week.
To make matters worse, sometimes these channels are openly visiting multiple locations in a single night – three, four, even five – once you factor in travel time between locations, such timescales must only allow for filming just enough B-roll to pad out a thirty- or sixty-minute video at each stop before moving on. It’s simple location-hopping and it exposes the entire operation for what it is: collecting footage, not evidence. These people are doing whistle-stop tours of empty buildings and calling it “real investigation”.
There’s another layer to all of this that often gets brushed aside, perhaps because it’s far less glamorous than EMF meters and night-vision filters – but much more troubling.
A huge portion of these “urbex–investigation” videos take place in locations that are not abandoned in the legal sense. Many of these properties are still privately owned – slated for demolition, awaiting planning permission, or simply rotting quietly while the owner decides what to do with them. They are not public playgrounds, and ghost hunting does not grant special permission. It is trespassing, pure and simple. And the creators know it, as betrayed by occasional comments about renovation work, or indeed not wanting to be caught on the premises.
Then there are the more sensitive sites. Some properties are abandoned because something tragic happened. An elderly person who died alone. A house left untouched because a family couldn’t bear to clear it. Some are crime scenes. Locations where the last moments of someone’s life unfolded quietly, painfully, and alone. In fact, many of these locations are targeted specifically because of this fact.
One recent example stands out (and is part of what prompted this article): the channel Real Evidence Paranormal casually discussing travelling to an old care home to carry out an “investigation”. A care home. A place almost guaranteed to hold stories of decline, loneliness, and the deaths of vulnerable people whose families, if still living, would hardly want their loss turned into engagement fodder. These are not forgotten ruins from centuries past. These are places tied to real people who lived, suffered, and died within recent memory.
These locations are not fair game simply because the wallpaper is peeling or the corridors look eerie on camera. Turning those places into content is intrusive and parasitic.
Ghost hunters often talk about “respect for the dead”, yet trample over the dignity of the recently deceased and their families by poking around their former rooms for clicks. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality is staggering. If the foundation of your content is trespass, exploitation, or the trivialisation of real grief, then honesty is already out of the window before you even switch on your camera.
And any content creator who will happily criticise the over-the-top but (for the most part) harmless antics of what they perceive to be sensationalist ghost hunting channels, while supporting these urbex-posing-as-investigation channels, is operating under a blatant double standard that undermines the drive for authenticity they claim to promote.
Fakery on YouTube isn’t limited to demon theatrics or dramatic “attacks” in abandoned hospitals. There are countless ways to mislead an audience, and not all of them involve special effects or hidden fishing line. Sometimes the dishonesty is quieter – but still in plain view – baked into the premise before a single frame plays.
And that’s why the gushing endorsements from certain debunkers are so frustrating. They’re so eager to champion anything that isn’t shouting “DEMON!” that they overlook not only the subtle lie of calling thinly dressed up urbex a “real investigation”, but the far more troubling ethical issue beneath it: trespassing, exploiting sites of recent grief, and turning private loss into entertainment.
A random abandoned building with no history, no witnesses, and no reports isn’t a haunted location – and presenting it as one isn’t investigation. It’s make-believe performed at someone else’s expense. And pretending otherwise only drags the bar lower for everyone.
Creepy buildings make great stories. They don’t make investigations. And the sooner this corner of the internet remembers that, the better.