Exploring With Josh is an American YouTuber best known for his videos about his adventures around the globe, particularly to abandoned places. While initially he was mostly interested in exploring the history of these places and was even skeptic about ghost-hunting videos, he eventually became a ghost-hunter himself. As such, he was dragged into the fake content controversy involving paranormal investigators, Cody and Satori, with whom he has collaborated.
Career
Exploring With Josh was just 16 years old when he often bunked school to go with his friends exploring abandoned places. His first visit to an abandoned place was an asylum in Exeter, in Rhode Island, where he went about 20 times altogether, but never filmed anything as he didn’t have a camera. While YouTube was out for 3-4 years by then, he was not even interested in it. After learning about other abandoned places, he was determined to visit as many of them as he could, and often had to convince his friends because he didn’t have a car.
He rediscovered YouTube at 20, when he was depressed about working nine-to-five as a forklift driver at a mill and was looking for alternatives. He initially had a channel called theartofrealitycrew focused on break-dancing as he uploaded small edits of his dances. Although he was appalled at how people were watching vlogs about others eating cereals on YouTube, he thought of creating something new and interesting about abandoned houses. He started earning from his videos within three months and hit one million subscribers within a year. He continued to add a million more for each of the next few years. In the wake of the Logan Paul and the Suicide Forest controversy, he claimed to be one of the first “mainstream” creators to do “Abandoned” videos on the Creative Exchange Podcast in October 2018.
Controversy
Initially, Exploring With Josh was more interested in the history of the abandoned places, and even called out popular creators from other fields for jumping on the bandwagon to create “fake” ghost-hunting and haunted-house videos in the same podcast. However, eventually, he himself started focusing more and more on ghost-hunting videos, alienating some of his original fan base while also attracting new fans. In late 2023, after fellow paranormal investigators Sam and Colby exposed another pair of paranormal investigators, Cody and Satori, as con artists, the whole community, including Josh, felt pressures from debunkers.
Josh, who collaborated with Cody and Satori in a video in early November 2023, made a community post on YouTube in which he blasted against both “fake” content creators and “armchair debunkers”, even calling them “creeps in their mother’s basement”. While he tried to emphasize on the efforts he put into his videos and the fact that his videos were not just about ghost-hunting, he further alienated some fans who questioned how he considered himself above scrutiny.
Family Life
Exploring With Josh was born in a working class family and was raised alongside two brothers. His mother’s name is Mary.
