I got access to McKamey Manor’s Facebook group.
And you know what?
I can see what they don’t want anyone joining.
This week’s video is going to be a lot more than silly Instagram accounts or weird YouTube
videos.
I’ve made it my job to insert myself into the strangest parts of the internet, but this
time, I had to pull some major strings to get there.
This is a private group, and I’ve censor everyone’s names, but even at that, I think
you’re still going to understand my point.
Which is that McKamey Manor and everyone associated with it is insane.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, McKamey Manor is the world’s worst
haunted house.
During a normal haunted house tour, you might expect to find paid actors, jumpscares, maybe
a chase sequence or two.
Well uh, the McKamey Manor was waterboarding people.
And shaving their heads.
And breaking their bones.
I’m not going to insert any pictures of that, but chances are, you’ve already seen
many of the videos that covered this topic.
You see, McKamey Manor took the internet by storm.
The terrifying truth of McKamey Manor.
The Full Truth.
I know a lot about McKamey Manor-- McKamey Manor-- My experience with McKamey Manor.
As you can see, these videos were racking up tons of views.
And I would never turn down tons of views.
But the issue is, it’s old news.
McKamey Manor got a ton of backlash on everything from taxes to tactics, and it hasn’t really
done any of the more egregious activities since 2016.
It largely faded into irrelevance, and they lost the original property that the manor
tours happend on, having to downsize from bustling California to rural Tennesse.
Now, the owner, Russ McKamey, who is a very creepy man that we will be discussing later,
operates a smaller, safer version of the McKamey manor, where the only way to get in is by
performing certain tasks on his super exclusive, private Facebook group.
And that was the end of the story.
Except I got into that Facebook group.
Here's how I pulled that off.
25,000 members.
Now, it said that 300 new people had been added in the past 30 days, so I figured if
I was casual enough, I might be able to work my way into the incoming crowd.
The rules seemed simple enough.
No cursing, no inappropriate comments.
One thing I did think was a little weird was that one of the rules says “This group is
for true fans, and not people following hate groups.
If a moderator notices you in a hate group, you will be removed from this group”.
True fans of what?
McKamey Manor?
Russ McKamey?
Let’s just say, I found out the answer pretty quickly.
So the questions I had to answer to get in the group were pretty simple, but here’s
the thing.
I don’t use Facebook, so my profile was completely empty.
I realized I would need to make it look like a normal person before they got around to
seeing my request.
First off I needed a profile picture.
Now, using my face wasn’t a good idea.
I mean, I don't get a million views per video yet, but in a group of 25,000 people, there’s
bound to be someone who’s familiar with my content.
I didn’t want to just steal someone else’s content, so I hopped over to ThisPersonDoesNotExist
dot com, and bam.
One artificial intelligence-generated face.
Why does this look so real, I hate this website.
Anyway, one issue here is that my name on this account is DS Wallace, and I didn’t
see a way to change it.
But honestly, the probability of someone seeing this picture, the name DS Wallace, and assuming
it’s the YouTuber D’Angelo Wallace creating a fake profile is really really low.
As for my header image, I just threw on a vaguely scary picture that I had taken and
bam.
DS Wallace was ready to join the McKamey Manor tour group.
I got declined after two days.
I can tell they declined me because I went back to the group and it no longer said “pending”.
Just join.
I mean to be fair, my account was completely empty and it was obvious that I had just joined
the site to join the group.
That, plus I immediately tweeted out after sending my request that I had joined a Facebook
group so . . . didn’t think that one through.
But I did think through the fact that I might not think things through.
So while I signed up, I asked my friend, who’s a regular Facebook user if he could sign up
too, just in case.
He got declined too.
I started to get suspicious.
It said that they let in 300 members, but I went and looked at a video about McKamey
Manor that had come out two weeks prior, and I saw that they had a screenshot of the group
with 25,079 members.
But looking at it right now, the group only has 24,910 members.
So this group wasn’t accepting new people.
It was kicking them out.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no way to get into this Facebook Group right
now.
It’s not just on lockdown, they are aggressively removing people.
But when you tell me I can’t do something, you’re just guaranteeing that I find a way
to do it.
So I turned to my friends on Discord for help.
And by some insane coincidence, one of them was already in the group.
We exchanged a couple of messages back and forth, and now I too can see the group.
But uh, that might have been a mistake.
My initial impressions: This place is scary.
This is like a funhouse mirror version of a Facebook group.
Right off the bat, I noticed that there was a weird dynamic between Russ McKamey and the
people in this group.
They talked about him the way you’d talk about your favorite singer, or YouTuber.
Like he’s a celebrity almost.
People were wishing him happy birthday with pictures of their kids, talking about how
they finally got to meet him.
It’s weird, okay, it’s like a Russ McKamey fan club.
So that was concerning right off the bat, but the more I scrolled the more I started
to get a picture of the average member here.
These people are off.
They have all the energy of active Facebook members, with a dash of insanity.
Someone posted this meme, where it says “Not a cellphone in sight, just a kid living in
the moment.
Which seems like your average “PHONES ARE BAD” Facebook meme, right?
But it was a picture of a kid waterboarding a teddy bear with a bag over its head.
Kids just copy what they see, so what I want to know is where did you even let a kid that’s
two feet tall find out about this kind of stuff.
But the weird McKamey stans and creepy memes were just the superficial parts of this group.
The real highlights, were star challenges.
Basically, the only way to get into McKamey Manor in current year is to complete a star
challenge.
To complete this, you have to go live in this Facebook group, and livestream yourself completing
certain tasks the Russ and the mods pick out for you.
The star challenges are free for anyone member to join; all you have to do is comment “I
want to be a star”.
This sounds fake right, like a creepy old man running a private game show of dedicated
fans competing in challenges, this sounds like something from a movie.
These people are living in their own young adult dystopian novel.
So the star challenges ranged from slightly weird to completely bizzare.
For example, one star challenge said to go live with a partner who would ask you McKamey
Manor trivia questions picked by the Russ from the live chat, and for each answer you
got wrong, this would spray you in the face with a garden hose while you’re blindfolded.
I mean, that’s kind of silly, kind of really weird to livestream yourself getting hosed
down.
And I quickly started to realize that humiliation was a theme with these star challenges.
Another one said to go to your local grocery store, livestream yourself dressed as a safari
guide, and pretend like you’re a wildlife expert, narrating the items in the store.
Remember, you can't get into McKamey manor unless you complete these star challenges,
so basically you have to publicly humiliate yourself for Russ McKamey in front of a livestream
chat, and whoever else happens to see you in real life.
Other star challenges included dumping honey on your head while singing old 80’s songs,
and taking 10 pieces of shrimp, a whole can of oysters, 10 pickle slices, blue cheese
and hot sauce.
And eating it.
Imagine the smell.
That’s making me sick to my stomach just by thinking about it.
These messed up star challenges aren’t the only livestreams that happen though.
Russ takes it upon himself to livestream the people going through manor tours, and he seems
to get an extra kick out of it when people find themselves unable to continue.
So this entire Facebook group is a group of people infatuated with Russ Mckamey going
out of their way to publicly humiliate themselves in the hopes that they can one day meet him,
where he’ll be able to livestream himself as he wears them out physically and psychologically.
This is messed up.
But you know what, this weird little empire that he’s built is crumbling from the inside
out.
Part of the reason so many people are getting removed from the group is that Russ and the
mods are getting paranoid.
Because of all the backlash they were getting from all across YouTube, it’s not uncommon
to find posts trying to downplay the videos, not because they’re against McKamey Manor
but because they’re against Russ.
I also believe that’s why they didn’t let me or my friend in, and why so many people
are being removed.
Russ McKamey is trying to minimize incoming criticism for his bizarre antics.
But because he’s not letting people in, he's getting more desperate for the people
that are there to join the manor tours.
Here you can see them bending the rules and watering down the star challenges in the hopes
that more people will attempt them.
It’s common knowledge in the group that the tours are no longer as interesting as
they were back in 2016, and even Russ himself acknowledges that he’s losing his edge.
On top of that, many people talk about how they’re unable to make it all the way out
to the manor.
Because of this,moderators are getting more and more aggressive in their approach.
I saw an interaction between a mod and a fan, where the mod basically pressures the fan
into joining the star challenge.
It’s a really disturbing state of affairs.
Everyone knows that McKamey Manor is bad, so at this point, no new people are going
to be joining this willingly.
So instead of accepting new people, the whole purpose of this group is for Russ McKamey
to get people who were already interested to come to his house so he can do weird things
to them and livestream it for free because he doesn’t even get paid for this.
So do with that information what you will.
Anyway, that’s my dive into the extremely private McKamey Manor Facebook Group.
To be completely honest, this was the first time out of over 50 videos that I’ve made,
that I’ve been scared to post a video.
I don’t know if they’re going to try to take it down, but I censored everyone’s
name so nobody’s personal information was exposed.
But nevertheless, if this disappears, you know what happened.
That being said, this is the perfect time to bring up my brand new Patreon, which just
launched today.
You get access to all of the videos on this channel 24 hours early, and if they get taken
down, you still get to watch them.
You also get access to a discord server for patrons and I’m there too so that’s nice
I guess.
Anyway, if you liked this video you’d probably like the six other videos I posted this week.
That’s right, I post daily videos on my second channel about whatever I feel like
talking about that day.
So look in the comments or the description for the link to much less fancy but much more
frequent uploads.
Anyway, looks like I’ve gotten ten minutes of content out of this, so leave a like, tell
me what you think, and subscribe if you haven’t already.
Thanks for watching and a big thank you to my 278,000 subscribers.
Okay bye.