The viral 'haunted Walmart' video was filmed in a mall parking lot 40 miles away

I drove out to the spot in the video after it blew up on YouTube last month, supposedly some abandoned superstore near Reno. Turns out the uploader cropped out the mall signs and added that fog filter to hide the food court behind the building. The comments were full of people saying they've been there and it was 'creepy as hell', but I stood in that same lot at 11pm and the scariest thing was a stray cat. How do we draw the line when a title says 'abandoned' but the place is clearly still open for business? Anyone else bothered by how many channels do this just for the algorithm boost?

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miles_robinson2012h ago

Man that drives me nuts too. I spent a whole afternoon last year chasing down a "haunted hospital" that turned out to be an old dental office with a cracked window. The guy filming it had even dressed up in a hoodie and used a flashlight to make it look spooky. When I got there it was literally next to a busy Starbucks and people were walking their dogs past it. The comments were already full of people swearing they saw ghosts... and I'm pretty sure they just watched the video and imagined the rest. It's wild how the title does all the heavy lifting. You can comment "this is just a normal parking lot" a hundred times and people still believe the hype. The algorithm rewards that clickbait so hard too, every ghost channel is doing the same formula now.