Garrett Watts, YouTube's Friendly Ghost Hunter

Garrett Watts, YouTube's Friendly Ghost Hunter

BY Ivan Guzman | Jan 23, 2025

If YouTube is the new cable, then YouTubers are the new A-Listers. We’re here to profile all the YouTube legends — past and present — who are influencing the cultural landscape and reinventing the internet as we know it. This is Thumbnail.


Garrett Watts may be a little clairvoyant. “I’ve always kind of felt like that kid from The Sixth Sense,” he tells PAPER. “I was quite literally that spooky kid who would meet someone and be like, ‘Hey, it's really cool that you and your grandma had that butterscotch thing,’ and then, like, instant tears in the person.”

For the 35-year-old creator, it’s a hidden gift that he’s only recently semi-honed in on and turned into his YouTube bread-and-butter. With a combined 3.5 million subscribers, Watts has become known for his reliably whimsical charisma, 6’4” stature and niche interests, with video titles like “I Cooked a Gourmet Feast For Squirrels” and “Eating a Box of Expired Spiderman Cereal From 2002.” But within the past few years, paranormal videos have taken over his channel in a major way.

“I just feel extremely close to the other side, even feeling things upon walking into rooms,” he says. Throughout the country, he and creative collaborator Andrew Siwicki will stay overnight in

haunted hospitals and Victorian mansions, fully immersing themselves in a very intimate, cinematic (these videos are often 2.5+ hours long), and non-clickbaity way. They are heavily edited min- movies that equally blend humor and heartfelt curiosity. “Everything I've ever made on the internet is an extremely concise experience,” Watts says. “I've never made a video and then figured out the title afterwards, which is like 80% of YouTube nowadays.”

This adulthood affinity for darkness is a far cry from Watts’ upbringing as a Mormon kid who quite literally spent every day at Disney World (both of his parents were employed there). Having had a self-proclaimed dreamy childhood, he withdrew from the church in his early teens after realizing that he was gay, although he claims to still hold a certain fondness for the faith-based life: “As a child of divorce, it was extremely healthy for me in the sense of having community and a sense of leadership.”

It’s safe to say that he still brings this wholesome, family-friendly energy to his haunted videos today — a sincerity that is rare to find in the current crop of brand deal-led YouTubers. According to Watts, this is his special sauce that makes the ghosts cozy up to him and give him valuable moments. “I just go in with this clean and even inviting energy,” he says. “I never disrespect the ghost. I never demand anything of them. I'm actually really sweet. I try to compliment them. And I think some of the spirits feel comfortable with it.”

Watts’ path to internet stardom was certainly not linear. “It’s funny that I make YouTube videos, because I never watched YouTube,” he says. “A lot of people who started on YouTube did so because they had heroes on the platform. For me, it could have been anything — just a place to put stuff.” Instead, Watts landed in LA with a sort of directionless can-do attitude, working endless odd jobs as a waiter and “runaround boy” at industry events. He eventually landed some production assistant jobs where he got a sense of Hollywood from an outsider’s perspective.

In fact, Watts’ first taste of YouTube virality didn’t even feature himself in the video at all. Garrett Watts’ channel started out with a series of videos in 2012 that followed drag queen Coco Peru as she shopped and gabbed around Target and Walgreens. Even then, Watts’ eye for emotive editing and storytelling was infused with a quality-over-quantity mentality that contrasts the fast fashion-esque scroll of videos that we’ve become so used to in 2025.

Then came Vine. Like many current YouTube stars, the six-second video platform was life-changing — a first-of-its-kind outlet that enabled someone to go from nothing to something on the internet quite literally overnight. For Watts, it was no different, in that he really took the opportunity and ran with it. He went from the go-to yes man on random productions in Hollywood to being a niche front-facing personality of the short-form content that would pave the way for our modern day understanding of it in terms of TikTok and Reels.

Watts found a home within the community of Vine creators in Los Angeles, even organizing the first LA Vine meetup at Griffith Observatory and winning a LA Weekly award for “Best Vine Presence in Los Angeles.”

“I’d say 90% of my social network out here in LA is Vine people still, which is so funny,” he says. Though his current audience may not fully remember that era, Watts’ Vines showcased his sharply tuned wit and knack for editing, setting a standard for his videos that he still maintains today.

When Vine shut down in 2017, Watts took to YouTube, where he quickly gained a following that was intrigued by his penchant for finding magic in the tiniest, most unknown objects and spaces. Many were first introduced to him through Shane Dawson, who featured and collaborated with Watts on hundreds of videos from 2016 to 2018. Today, this era of YouTube is looked back on with nostalgia, though it was very much a whirlwind of an experience for both Watts andthe viewers then.

“That’s a very strange thing for any extremely broke 20-something — just to be thrown into videos with millions of views. But I’d like to think I handled that with grace, even at the time,” Watts says. Dawson was perhaps the biggest YouTuber at the time, and being plucked out of obscurity and propped up as a sort of devoted jester within that space (never forget the time when Watts and Jeffree Star switched lives for a day) admittedly was a mind-bend for Watts. “I didn’t know Gucci or the G-Wagon culture,” he says. “They could introduce me to the biggest YouTuber, and I’d be like, ‘Cool. Do you want to talk about Red Dead Redemption 2?’”

There was a genuine authenticity that many Watts devotees felt was unjustly mocked by someone as clickbait-hungry as Dawson. But you could never see it in Watts’ face. “I think it was sort of beautiful looking back on it, because in those days, my autonomy was pretty important to me. I didn’t know how to play that game,” he says. In that collaborative friendship, Watts found solace as part of the Spooky Boys, which gave him a starting off point when he detached from Dawson and branched out on his own paranormal videos.

“I still feel like I’m just getting started in my creative career,” he says. These days, there’s an army of Watts enthusiasts who are eager to consume whatever he puts out and have built a special sort of parasocial relationship with him, even though his wonky upload schedule may mean several months go by between videos. “I think it’s kind of strange that I’m on the internet,” he admits. As he shows off the firefighter teddy bear he found at Goodwill that he plans to restore, as well as his home filled with hundreds of mini statues and figurines, it becomes clear that this is a homebody of a person who aches for time alone in his own world.

This hyperfixation on things and in-the-moment excitement — ”Sometimes I’ll get things where I just have to take off my headphones, stop editing for the night and go to bed because they kind of scare me too much” — is what charms Watts’ viewers and keeps them in it for the long haul. “I’d like to think that this is why people still even mess with me: that I’m not really an internet character as much as someone who just happens to be on the internet,” he says.”

Unlike other paranormal YouTubers, you won’t find Watts using dramatic cameras, the ghost hunter-esque infrared filter, or the talk boxes. “I have this theory that I get the sometimes radical amount of paranormal instances in my videos because I just go in with this clean and even inviting, I would like to think wholesome, energy into these places,” he speculates. He’s genuinely in it for the experience, not the algorithm, and with the deluge of newcomer Gen Z influencers who think “short is more,” Watts’ fine-tuned long-form content can be a serene, comforting oasis.

“I’ll go to premieres and see a gaggle of TikTokers,” he says. “I sort of feel a bit of nostalgia seeing the way they interact. I always wanna take some of them aside and just be like, ‘Hey man, you’re going to be alright.’” That’s the thing with Watts: whether he’s baking a cake for a rat he found or exploring a haunted hospital, he’s endlessly gonna be everyone’s friend — even the spirits.

Photos courtesy of Garrett Watts/ YouTube