The Sickest Man on YouTube | The Horrors of McKamey Manor

[Music] hey everybody it's russ coming at you right here from the middle of the chamber but some people are calling one tennessee halloween attraction a torture chamber under disguise they are just asking to have someone die or have a heart attack i have been aware of mckamey manor for years and years i just didn't realize how bad it truly was it could be a death wish they say you could die [Music] so about a month ago me and my girlfriend were looking for something to watch on netflix when we got recommended this little indie show i doubt you've heard of it squid games squid games squid games squid game is not like anything else on television taking the internet by storm in october 2021 squid game has captivated audiences with its pertinent allegories lovable characters and impeccable dubbing oh about that grandma why did you get kicked out grandma don't you ever call me that but other than that it's pretty compelling not spoiling anything when i say you really understand why these characters have no choice but to compete in a series of lethal games mr beast is apparently working to recreate which is horrifying what if i told you signing over your physical rights in hopes of a generous cash prize is hardly anything of fiction in fact while watching it i couldn't help but see the similarities between the depraved front man and russ mccamey a peculiar figure with a reputation for carrying out sadistic haunts across the country and broadcasting all of it online and with a 20 000 cash prize on the table anything and everything goes but is what appears to be another halloween attraction just a thinly veiled chamber of torture run by a complete psychopath or is it all just fun entertainment a hint it's not that one join me as we document the infamous character of russ mckamey and peel back the layers behind the real-life squid game mccamey manor mcgavey manor promises an extreme experience at change.org petition to shut down the gamey manor that's all he's trying to do is hurt people police arrived and found a woman shivering and duct taped in a cellar i do this because the fans like it and because it's entertaining to me so i want to start this off with a few notes one massive trigger warning for sensitive references to physical and mental abuse and two mccaimie manor isn't your standard haunted house as opposed to simply meandering your way through a sweaty dark hallway while ellen degeneres makes fun of you in front of a crowd of wine mobs the gamey manor cranks the fear factor up to 100 times 100 this place has been described as a kingdom of masochists where guests more or less willingly sign their autonomy away in exchange for being bound gagged kidnapped beaten frozen taunted waterboarded and more without a safe word at one point the attraction has since been vehemently condemned by former employees contestants and the government which i guess is a trend with these videos now but i understand that's a lot to digest at once okay i get it let's take a quick pause get a drink of water we haven't seen anything yet okay trust me to really get the full picture we're gonna need to dig a little deeper into the man behind the madness russ mckamey a local wedding dj from san diego who loves his country dogs and especially putting on a show for the neighborhood what kind of show you may ask why are you crying it's all over for you okay yeah yeah but it wasn't always this way i'm danielle harris riding route 666 to america's scariest home haunts all month long we are paying bloody tribute to the coolest home-based haunted houses check it out see russ has always had a knack for entertaining as he constantly emphasizes it's all entertainment that's me man just just an entertainer that's all i am just an entertainer that's right locking people up in a deep freezer and mocking them on camera is fun to watch i guess oh yeah that's a lot of people being a self-described showman at heart russ developed a particular interest in a horror when he was just a child going trick-or-treating with his dad and getting a real kick out of various creepy decorations people would set up in their yards it was from that moment russ knew what he wanted to do setting up little makeshift haunted houses in his parents garage as a kid eventually becoming a theater major in college even throughout his 23 years in the navy russ always had a soft spot in his heart for bringing people's worst fears to life i've been jumping in the navy for 23 years i was doing haunts even out to sea didn't matter where i was i was doing them on the ships for the you know for the guys so it didn't matter upon leaving the military rust claimed to have founded the first iteration of mckamey manor sometime around 1995 as a typical boo haunt in his own words now i'm not too familiar with the haunted house community in fact i had never even considered such a thing existed until i started this video but the original manner wasn't unlike the typical haunted experience you may be used to these things are supposed to be harmless fun right you go through a dark tunnel a zombie pops out you piss your pants in front of your friends everybody starts pointing and laughing at you until your new nickname becomes piss boy ombre and you have to transfer schools because the humiliation is more than you could bear at just 10 years old we've all been there but today today's mckamey manor obviously isn't your typical neighborhood halloween fest instead we're talking a literal year-round endurance boot camp tailored specifically for the subject's personal fears that involves a 40-page waiver medical papers and an entire psychological exam to enter so that's not normal it isn't some people when the doorbell rings on halloween it's not just enough to meet the kids with a bowl of candy russ mckamey created a house of horror that would rival anything at a carnival or theme park he guides neighborhood kids through in groups of two or three assuring them that everything will be followed in 2007 the place may have been far removed from the supposed torture house it's considered today but even back then you can still see where themes of claustrophobia and psychological games originated the scariest part of the caney manor is the spike room it's a small claustrophobic box and these spikes drop on top of you oh my god disco clown room if you look around you'll see all the little decorations like a normal 70s disco party scary but nothing totally explicit they hit water balloons they get splattered with water they're screaming i'm bleeding i'm dying oh stop it and they walk out very very shattered from what i can gather and from what russ has said himself during interviews the manor gradually grew from this run-of-the-mill family-friendly attraction to the infamous monstrosity it is today for a few reasons for starters it kinda had to in order to stand out from the rest at least with any industry comes competition and in order to succeed you need to be doing something unique in hopes of standing out and at this point we all know how russ prioritizes entertainment just keep in mind this is just a big show it's a play this is just a play we're putting on a big old play like in the old movies back in the 40s let's put on a show everybody yes put on the play that's you know nicki rooney and judy garland let's do it to him at the attraction is this grandiose presentation that needs constant expansion in order to keep people coming so over the years he naturally began to up the ante for each halloween making it spookier and spookier both to fulfill his own standards of quality and satisfy his demo according to him the scarier he made it the more people liked it i always do things that were different i i always wanted to make it very much like like a movie so that was always something that i did every year i would expand the show make it more interactive and the audience loved it and it's really hard to go back on something once they're really digging it and before you could say boo the manner it was no longer something for the wife and kids to enjoy it wasn't this fun little mario kart course anymore from the footage i've seen it was more like guantanamo bay in 2003 you understand me say it loud tell me tell me you understand what i'm telling you yeah nope yes what tell me what i just told you christina i live in kuwait so for me to for myself to travel from kuwait just to come to mckinney manor it's approximately a 19 hour flight my motivation for doing a second time was is to see if i can push myself even further than when i went the first time big mistake probably change locations right now follow me fortunately for you i won't actually be showing any of the really extreme stuff let's still get this video age restricted faster than you oh yeah see there there you go but rest assured the activities behind the manor have been well documented for the past eight or so years when the manor was first considered an extreme haunt around the turn of the decade in fact it was about this time russ picked up a video camera taught himself imovie and began producing his own homemade horror films exhibiting the most grotesque corners of the attraction posting what is now over 300 videos to his youtube channel with an audience in the six figures this way he could achieve his own goal as a filmmaker and expand the reach of the manor outside the local community finally reaching over 16 million pairs of eyes in 2013 with a simple five minute promotional video for scare la a summer scare convention that premiered that year let me tell ya it's not for the faint of heart [Music] but i guess the promo worked because soon after this video was published mckamey manor would go down in national infamy sparking what would become years of online controversy thanks to the amount of people who were now aware of just how extreme this attraction was see they weren't doing the typical zombie skeleton type halloween show employees of the manor could be seen screaming things like nobody's gonna save you and you're gonna die right in their contestants faces with people being duct taped shoved into literal caskets dunked into toilets forced to eat unspecified items it's a very unnerving video to say the least but this was just the start to the slew of horrific depictions and homemade films to come out of the manor needless to say people wanted to know more and before long the mckamey brand became a widespread point of contention a lot of negative feedback that were pushing the audience to a point where we shouldn't but but you know believe me they're loving it and everybody is safe i promise you did didn't someone have a heart attack yeah but first a word from tonight's sponsor bespoke bespoke post is a monthly membership club delivering awesome boxes of top shelf goods from under the radar brands made specifically for people who give a damn sorry that's a little much see back when coveted hit bespoke 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jack-o-lantern box next what with halloween being right around the corner although this probably won't be out until the weekend of halloween since all i know how to do is waste time why should you waste time when you can click the link down below right now and get 20 off your first box when you enter the code jaubri20 at checkout that's jay aubry without the little space in between and also with the 20 at the end got it thanks again to the wonderful folks over at bespoke post for helping out the channel by sponsoring this video this is great it's so hard to get through that they give you 20 grand now somebody tells me that there's some sort of hypnosis involved or they hypnotize you to make even more scared i don't even know that much about it you know it's possible i'm just wondering legally how they can get away with this by the mid-2010s mckamey manor's reputation as an extreme haunt was not only well known in the halloween community but it even spilled out into the mainstream after being featured on numerous tv shows documentaries and news segments across the country labeled by countless online publications as this insane endurance test that no one came close to completing in fact most contestants lasted an average of about eight minutes out of what would be an 8 to 10 hour tour otherwise but how do you even get into mckamey manor because if you've watched this far i'm sure you're just salivating at the thought of being kicked around in a river by this guy get in front come on let's go well if we go to the official mckamey manor website which looks like it was created before the towers fell there are at least some basic guidelines necessary for participants to follow for one you must be over 21 to enter or 18 to 20 with a parent's approval something i can't imagine personally my parents were still tracking my location on life 360 when i was 19. you think they'd give me permission to have my teeth wrenched out of my skull by strangers even being over 21 you're still required to pass a background check provided by the manner complete a sports physical in quotation marks for some reason and obtain a letter from your doctor clearing your mental and physical well-being which also blows my mind what kind of health professional would be like oh yeah ripping your fingernails out of your hand and being forced to drink unspecified liquids by a strange man with a gopro do it but nowadays the screening process is even said to be more exclusive than that first you'd have to join the facebook group putting yourself in a waitlist of over 27 000 people supposedly and to being interviewed over skype by russ himself it's at this point that russ makes sure you really want to do this because according to him you don't takes time for me to do what i do with somebody that's and that's part of reason why i spend so much time with these people before the show the contract is a big factor of the psychological part of it russ makes it a point to spend close time with his victims i i mean guess as a way to get to know the individual find out what scares them the most there's a lot of repetitive boarding in the contract a lot of repetitive thoughts images these things all have all factor in to when the actual hypnosis kicks in it's all about repetition and getting inside your head and trying to put the thoughts in their brain of what you want them and where you where you want them to go to so the contract plays a big part of it now this is one of the parts of russ i don't totally doubt he doesn't strike me as an idiot and if his claims are true i'm sure he learns enough about how to manipulate people's mental state through his many years spent in the navy he taps into your weaknesses and tailors the tour to fit around your fears it's personalized in every sense of the word now consider it i learned a lot from my military days just by dealing with so many different types of people you learn a lot of mind control techniques you learn a lot of psychological things that you can use on people later down the road so so you yeah you learn a lot when you're when you've been in the military as long as i have you learn how to get someone's head pretty well the cost a 50 pound bag of dog food this guy eats [ __ ] dog food i got five dogs right too oh yeah that makes more sense but this is also where the waiver comes into question and it's a bit dicier than you may think so one of the biggest attractors of this place has been a reported 40-page waiver that leaked online a chilling read that consists of possibilities such as being buried alive forced to swim under water with minimal breaks for air having live snakes crawl on top of you the thing goes so far as to state there's a chance of death they've already had one heart attack so i mean what happens if someone dies during their tour a waiver won't mean anything we have had one heart attack for real seven years ago we had a heart attack it was good stuff of course this took the internet by storm garnering more than enough mainstream press to put rust on the hot seat in front of the entire country although russ has long maintained the defense that everything within the manor is strictly not tortured and the waiver only exists because safety is paramount you got to put your little thinking cap on for all the viewers out there all you guys out there watching now you got to think if these things were really going on to the extent that you've heard wouldn't i be in jail wouldn't i be prosecuted wouldn't i have lawsuits against me the answer would be yes so clearly there's something else going on that is not quite what it seems otherwise i would be in jail because torture is illegal you know safety is always has to be paramount safety is always paramount you know cut and dry tell that to the people who were showing up with a little more than a few bumps and bruises after their visits or the neighbors who witness scenes of women being dragged down the road in chains late at night that's a big production right russ this is a show and they're like saying but kids are right their kids are watching it no they're not these neighbors who asked not to be identified said they're afraid to let their seven-year-old daughter outside anymore we have heard chainsaws we have seen people being drugged around the corner of the house but even calling the police wouldn't do much since russ actually has a relationship with them they know about the show and they claim their hands are tied after all these people signed up for it he says with signed waivers in hand what goes on here isn't illegal and the district attorney for lawrence county agrees there's no law that i know of at this point that they can be charged with violence while county officials say they will continue looking into mckaymie manor mckamie himself self says deputies need to look into bigger problems in the county like drug abuse remember this is all under the assumption that the waiver is real and not just another scare tactic meant to drum up controversy for the sake of promotion some earlier contestants in fact have actually stated they never signed such a thing and were instead given a shorter more traditional waiver upon their visit some videos dating back to 2017 only mention a 10-page waiver so it's honestly hard to say what's real and what isn't maybe he only started requiring it later after all of the backlash hit the waiver that i signed is not the waiver that's going around it was like a two-page waiver very basic like you're gonna interact with strobe lights there's gonna be pushing and shoving and blah blah it was just like it wasn't anything that made me think oh goodness they might like waterboard me they might um cut my hair like there wasn't anything or i guess cutting my hair isn't that bad but there wasn't anything like the new waiver basically we can pull your teeth out we can break your bones like none of that was in it so again i'm not expecting anything crazy it's similar to the people in vegas russ claims are betting on the event live as it happens even though some contestants have gone on the record claiming this is nothing more than another fear tactic it's genuinely hard to differentiate between reality and fiction when it comes to this place but i can assure you the damages sustained by their attendees is nothing short of very real by 2016 the cast members were literally showing up and kidnapping their victims throwing them into the back of a truck and taking them along a journey that russ promised would change their lives forever and i guess he wasn't wrong but when you go through the real show it will change you for better or for worse and i'm hoping it's for better because i want this to be a positive fun experience we never want anything to come out to where you're injured mentally or physically and that's why i'm so particular about who actually takes the tour by 2016 russ had thrown all caution to the wind making it harder to defend the manor as anything close to safe you can't keep saying it isn't real while you're forcing someone underwater for 30 plus seconds he was getting to the point where the waiver didn't even matter to many of the manor's critics this was the most brutal version of what was already considered the most brutal haunt in the world it crossed a line even with some of russ's own peers in the community pretty much people going into there voluntarily signing a waiver and getting tortured with the promise of reward if they make it through it and from what i've heard he makes sure that nobody makes it through it industry experts agree mckamey manor is not a haunted house members of the haunted attraction association say they're tired of this consensual torture experience being put in their same category the attraction was being chastised as an outlet for russ and the cast to express some kind of weird deeply sadistic desires and i mean it certainly didn't not look like that like i'm chained in this freezer like what if they don't actually let me out so i like started to have like a real life panic attack so then he opens up the free the freezer and like the look on his face was just like he was so satisfied that i was so terrified yeah i think it's easy to take one glance at any of these videos and understand exactly why people were as mad as they were getting to where a change.org petition was set up to in the manner once and for all with over 100 000 signatures at the time of me recording this but because contestants had waived their rights at the beginning there hasn't actually been any substantial legal action taken against ross at this time which is pretty unfortunate if you ask me personally nobody should be getting away with putting someone in the hospital inflicting serious physical and mental issues on their subjects according to my pal and missing youtuber primink some of these people have developed ptsd for [ __ ] sake there's no way to properly argue these contestants actually knew what they were getting into a lot of hoops people think oh man these people are they don't know what they're getting into they know exactly what they're getting into because right it takes a lot to get here some people said that they wanted to see how far their body could go that probably wouldn't really have been your mindset because you didn't really expect it i didn't expect yeah that much stuff but even if we were to play devil's advocate here and blame the guests themselves for signing up there's still the fact that countless individuals have since come forward to paint russ and his crewmates in a less than favorable light i was actually an actor i've known ross for a couple years um and i used to be an actor but it kind of the manners changed and it just got a little out of control um he's he's sadistic and he's sick off his knocker yeah he's crazy i used to defend him because he's such a nice he he came off as such a nice guy but then we all have our crazy side it used to it used to be for for the love of the haunt and i don't know what still is okay still is the love of hunt no no it's just because you get off to torturing people [ __ ] you man [ __ ] you you know you know [ __ ] [ __ ] about me by 2019 the manor had achieved a level of infamy it had never quite seen with the house of horror taking over youtube and twitter not to mention the myriad of podcasts on the subject mckamey manor had finally reached its peak in online notoriety partly thanks to the wave of victims stepping forward to shed some light on their time in the manor and a lot of what they said didn't totally line up with russ's claims of this place being a beacon of safety according to this article one contestant quote went back to her hotel room and took a shower as the adrenaline wore off she began to realize how much pain she was in so she drove herself to the hospital she also took photographs to document the injuries in one photo she's in a neck brace and a hospital gown and her face is markedly swollen her lips are red and puffy and there are small cuts at the corner of her mouth in another image you can see a large bloody wound on her left knee she says that's an old surgery scar that opened up after mckamey's actors cut off her knee pads and made her crawl on the ground when she refused to tell the hospital staff how she was injured they called the police and that's just one testimony too there are countless stories like these that exist online all of which work to discredit russ's defense that it's all a game bro it's psychological you just don't get it now keep in mind the manner has always offered a myriad of tours a 10 hour one three hour one six hour one so trying to differentiate the specific rules of each one how they've evolved over the years is a little hard to follow but according to youtuber gabs a contestant from 2015 she was able to bypass the supposed waitlist of 20 000 plus people by contacting russ directly after doing some light research on the plates she was immediately placed at the front of the list and asked to come down to the house the very next day so she cancelled some family plans grabbed a bag of dog food and headed down only when she got there it really wasn't like anything she had expected the videos that you see now on youtube from 2015 2016 2017 i did not have those videos to look at for reference i learned about the haunt watched a ton of videos that same day at 2am is when i sent him the message and then the day after that is when he responded or i guess that same day later in the evening he responded and told me i could come the next day so it wasn't like i'd been searching on this subject or searching on the candy manor for days or months or years it's something that i found i thought was cool and then i blinked and i was there the things that happened and like the way that russ and the actors and just how it was just wasn't it didn't seem i don't know i don't know how to explain it i didn't see anything wrong with it necessarily but like in the in the moment but it also wasn't what i expected it to be the thing was she never signed a 40-page waiver she didn't have to provide a background check or anything really it was almost like he wasn't as strict about the rules back then maybe because there was less eyes on him and thus less pressure to actually keep his patrons safe at least in my opinion i mean at one point the place didn't have the correct fire sprinklers or basic precautions you'd expect from any business what what did they what did you have to change it was things like egress systems escape systems um sprinkler systems they wanted that kind of thing even though even though i'm not a business they still because i'm so well known they had all these things they wanted done like that so to me at least it's hard to believe that safety is always paramount with the expansion of the manner came a growing sense of paranoia which probably wouldn't be happening if russ wasn't up to anything nefarious 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 this sense of dread eventually led to the facebook group cannibalizing itself and expelling any and all members who were suspected to be talking to outside sources if you went behind russ's back to talk [ __ ] you were gone the tour was getting too big and russ just couldn't afford to keep people around if he couldn't trust them i tried joining in my burner account but wouldn't you know it got rejected a day later luckily we do have an idea of what goes on thanks to local detective d'angelo wallace whose online sleuthing speaks for itself i saw that they had the screenshot of the group with 25 079 members well 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 anyone that was showing concerns for the manor was removed from the community and anyone that was causing problems outside of their group russ would ask the group members to go harass them 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 mckaymie 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 answer by 2017 the manor had to move spontaneously too i might add deciding the high cost of living in cali which i guess checks out i'm sure it has nothing to do with him reportedly owing a quarter of a million dollars in taxes to the state of california right after all russ never actually made money doing any of this and i doubt you're able to pay the irs in dog food in 2017 russ made the case that it wasn't his fault for the taxes he said there was just a miscommunication with his partner who was handling the money at the time so no idea if that's been paid or not whatever the reason he inexplicably packed his things and set his sights on the nearest state he could a pretty random one too tennessee according to him it was the luck of the draw you basically just needed anywhere that had enough space to set everything up only there wasn't actually that much to set up this time much of the original attraction including his own team members were all left behind in san diego during my time out here in tennessee it's always been a one-on-one situation russ had to get a little creative if he wanted the manor to stay up and running and boy did he ever offering a grand prize of twenty thousand dollars for all who completed it the neighbors in summertown tennessee quickly got to know russ mckamey thanks to the many tours he would conduct right in his own backyard but the new tour didn't just take place in a house instead this little adventure consisted of individuals being blindfolded and trafficked to various locations around the states of tennessee and alabama by russ and russ only he didn't have a team anymore this was just one-on-one which to me seems intensely worse which is scarier that way despite being a more intimate journey a hefty cash prize was offered at the end another big sticking point for onlookers because the manner had always been impossible to complete it may as well have just been an outright scam literally no one ever saw that money he actually stopped offering it pretty early on according to end was because too many knuckleheads were in for the wrong reasons which is probably what i'd say too if i owned six figures to the government pretty sure he just wanted to get people in the door which would be a little misleading as he's admitted himself some of these people clearly had no idea what they were getting into and just saw the manor as their ticket out of debt not realizing what they had actually signed up for until they got out there nothing unethical there that i can see i just wanna do something special that people are going to remember fondly when i'm dead and gone that's kind of cool this halloween you can rest assured the modern day mckamey manor hardly resembles the resplendent production it once was unless you consider crawling around a creepy old guy's backyard with a barrel strapped to your back uh cool and fun what used to be your typical spooky attraction evolved over the years to being the most feared and controversial house in the world as many slammed the 2016 iteration as nothing more than legalized torture to them becoming a never-ending nightmarish boot camp that's hardly documented on their youtube channel anymore the facebook group chat serves as a hotbed for constant paranoia in addition to a tool being used by russ to go after defectors and critics everything that once may have contributed to the grandeur of the attraction now works against it with less and less people buying the tired defense of it's all smoke and mirrors as prim athlete said two years ago a smoke don't break no bones russ interviewing his victims immediately after the tour hardly means anything when they're still in shock in what happened to them as many have since spoken out against russ personally in hopes nobody else gets hurt with so much out there it's difficult to defend the manor its practices and its peculiar founder to him he's a comedian and natural entertainer at heart but to anyone on the outside with half a working brain stem it's entirely darker than what he may have wanted us to think but hey man what's a little long lasting trauma if it's for the sake of pure entertainment i wouldn't want to go into this thing it's crazy [Music] down [Music]

Channel: j aubrey

Views: 825,357

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Id: Ozf3zpYTC7s

Length: 35min 15sec (2115 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bill_e_midnight]

This isn’t even a haunt. It’s just literally going through torture from a trained former CIA agent.