YouTube's Top Ghost Hunters' Big Bet on $52B Experience Economy
My exclusive look at Sam and Colby's L.A. escape room as immersive entertainment explodes — and a new front for creator cash opens
I write about the creator economy. I scooped a leaked Spotify dek revealing the company’s new assault on YouTube and reported on the creator coup at Cannes Lions, the writers’ civil war at Substack and the boom in microdramas. Reach me at natalie@theankler.com
I have a confession. I’m kind of a scaredy cat. It’s been years since I rode a roller coaster, and I avoid scary movies — though if one becomes a true phenomenon like Get Out or Sinners, I’ll research the twists and jump scares ahead of time so I can make it through a viewing without getting too freaked out.
So when I got an invitation to preview a new horror escape room in Hollywood last week, I considered ignoring the email. But once I realized the experience was the latest IRL activation from top paranormal YouTube creators Sam Golbach and Colby Brock, both 28, I decided to suck it up and go.
Spoiler alert: I survived, and now that I’m safely ensconced in my childhood home in the Pacific Northwest, where I’ve escaped to cooler temperatures for the 4th, I’ve got a fun holiday week story for you about how the duo known as Sam and Colby are scaring up new business — and chasing their slice of the $52 billion (and growing) market for experiential entertainment — by extending their millions of likes, clicks and views into in-person touchpoints.
Experiential is on everyone’s agenda these days, fueled in large part by the post-pandemic, Gen Z-driven surge in spending on experiences (up 65 percent from 2019 to 2023, according to a Mastercard report focused on the travel industry). And no one knows the power of this space better than Hollywood. Check out Richard Rushfield’s early look at Universal Epic Universe for a look at experiential on the biggest scale, or consider what Netflix has done with Bridgerton balls across the country — and its recently-announced plans to drive fans to interactive retail spaces in Dallas and Philadelphia.
Horror (which drove nearly $1 billion in domestic box office grosses last year) is particularly well suited to immersive IRL experiences, from Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights to Blumhouse’s Halloween 2024 stunt inviting fans to stay overnight at the infamous Stanley Hotel. And Golbach and Brock are uniquely positioned to capitalize on both trends.
The duo are among many creators jumping on the experiential opportunity — from live events like Jake Shane’s 36-stop tour to interactive experiences like the one Dude Perfect is building next-door to its Texas HQ. But these YouTube phenoms are taking a unique approach that showcases their ability to be far scrappier than legacy entertainment companies — they move fast and know how to create compelling content without anything like a Hollywood budget. Plus, they can market directly and authentically to a coveted young cohort of fans.
Golbach and Brock are YouTube’s foremost vloggers of the otherworldly, having racked up more than 14 million subscribers on the platform with videos where they tour abandoned asylums, spend the night in haunted prisons and seek out encounters with the supernatural. The childhood best friends told Business Insider earlier this year that they made about $20 million in 2024, primarily from their clothing line XPLR, which brought in $13 million in sales.
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Last October, Golbach and Brock released a feature-length documentary — Sam and Colby: The Legends of the Paranormal — that made just over $1.7 million during a limited one-week run in Cinemark theaters. They also recently paid $260,000 to purchase an abandoned elementary school outside of Des Moines, Iowa, that has been the subject of paranormal investigations. After releasing a three-part series about their weeklong stay in the facility, they’ve opened it to the public, and fans can stage their own ghost hunts in the school for the cool price of $85 per person.
“We wanted to bring our channel to life. Our fans were virtually having an interactive experience with us, watching our videos,” Brock tells me. He launches into further explanation, then stops himself, gesturing instead at the lights that have begun to flicker during our interview inside Escape Hotel Hollywood. “Literally this is the feeling right now,” he says, referencing the thrills and flourishes of his and Golbach’s latest venture, an immersive entertainment experience on Hollywood Boulevard.
Their activation at Escape Hotel, which is called Asylum: Room 1952, has just opened to the public. It’s a 60-minute escape room designed for six people; according to the Escape Hotel website, the chances of succeeding are only 30 percent and the scare level is “intense.” The experience is open to anyone who’s brave enough to try — and who’s willing to shell out $45 per person during peak hours.
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“This is something we’ve talked about for years and years and years,” says Golbach, explaining that the thing he and Brock do most together (besides exploring abandoned places, of course) is escape rooms. “This is pretty much verbatim a way to experience our videos without actually watching one of our videos.”
I’ve got an exclusive look at Asylum, so keep reading for all the details, including:
How they designed the escape room like a YouTube video, complete with viral “moments” baked in
Why this isn’t your typical creator licensing deal — and how it unlocked full creative control for Sam and Colby
How they turned props, Easter eggs, and deep lore into a real-world fan experience that pays off
The one terrifying feature I chickened out of — and why that’s exactly the point
Why Escape Hotel is betting big on creators, and how this collab breaks new ground
The bigger strategy: why the future of creator monetization may lie in immersive, offline worlds
Photos of Asylum: Room 1952, including details of some of the puzzles
‘Bring the Fan into Our Experience’
When Golbach and Broch began plotting their path to an escape room, they tapped their management firm, Night, to help them find a partner and ultimately settled on Escape Hotel Hollywood. “They’ve done a fantastic job with this space,” says Night’s David Huntzinger. “Not only the interior here is immersive, but each room is really well done, and layer that on top of the fact that it’s right here on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard in the heart of everything.”
Since opening in 2016, Escape Hotel has teamed up with several Hollywood studios to launch themed rooms. (The company worked with Warner Bros. on a Tomb Raider room to promote the 2018 film, for example.) But owners Ivan D’Leon and Lara Herczeg tell me that Asylum — which is one of seven games they currently operate alongside a haunted nursery called Daycare and the self-explanatory Haunted Fair — marks the first time they’ve worked with digital creators.
“The world they live in is perfectly aligned,” says Herczeg. “And we like them.”
Neither party disclosed the terms of their business relationship, but they did tell me the room is part of the permanent collection at Escape Hotel. “There’s not really an example of this being done before,” says Huntzinger. “So we all got creative about it and put together something that’s a little bit unique. It’s not just a straight license. It’s more in depth than that.”
Though the escape room is a small part of the overall Sam and Colby business, it aligns with a larger effort to grow their experiential footprint. If it’s successful, they say, they’re open to doing more escape rooms in the future. “A huge part of our business is trying to figure out a way to bring the fan into our experience,” says Golbach. “We definitely plan to keep making in-person experiences.”
‘How Do We Make It Viral?’
Golbach and Brock developed the storyline for Asylum alongside their creative director, Zach Bell. Then D’Leon (who builds all the games) and Herczeg (who handles design) advised on turning their vision into a viable escape room.
“We wanted people to really have a challenge,” says Brock. Golbach chimes in to add, “We’ve played a lot of escape rooms in the past, so we’re really thinking about, ‘How can we get people to talk? How can we make this different?’”
The logline: You’re the newest patient of the psychiatric ward at Clearview Hospital and must fight physical bonds and spiritual forces to find your way out. Participants start by watching a short video explaining the history of Clearview Hospital, including the motivations of the unconventional doctor who leads the facility. They must then break free of their straitjackets before they can complete any of the puzzles in the room.
The pair know that once fans start showing up, they’ll quickly turn Asylum into a meme. Golbach tells me they took every detail as the “baseline” and then asked, “How do we make it viral?” They’ve planted a number of Easter eggs around the room, including objects that have appeared in their old videos, and they have cameos in both the instructional video at the start of the experience, as well as one that plays later during the game.
They also designed the room like they would a video, with marquee moments designed to generate buzz throughout the hourlong experience. Without giving too much away, the escape room features puzzles that test both your mind and your nerves. An electric chair sits in a prominent place in the room and plays a major role in the game. There’s also what Golbach calls a “claustrophobic moment” that they offered to let me try during my guided walk-through of the room, but I wasn’t brave enough to attempt.
“We really challenge people in a way to face their fears like we do in our YouTube videos,” says Golbach. “You’re dealing with claustrophobia, you’re dealing with trust issues, you’re dealing with these demonic-looking things. It’s actually really scary.”
Herczeg and D’Leon tell me they aren’t sure how much foot traffic to expect for Asylum, but Golbach and Brock are hoping it’ll become a cult classic with their fans. And given the difficulty level, visitors might need to play it through a few times before they escape — all the better to catch every little Easter egg. The room is so hard to escape, in fact, that even Golbach and Brock only barely managed it the first time they played. Brock admits with a laugh, “We had to use a couple hints on our own thing, which is embarrassing.”
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