Sam and Colby

This article needs biographical images. Please consider adding images so that it can be better illustrated. (May 2025)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Sam and Colby" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2026) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Sam and Colby
Born	Samuel John Golbach (1996-11-27) 27 November 1996 (age 29) Cole Robert Brock (1997-01-02) 2 January 1997 (age 29)
Education	Blue Valley High School
Occupation	YouTubers
TikTok information
Page	Sam and Colby
Followers	4.9 million
YouTube information
Channel	Sam and Colby
Years active	2014–present
Genres	Paranormal vlog exploring comedy
Subscribers	15.6 million
Views	2.4 billion
Last updated: April 9, 2026

Sam and Colby are an American YouTuber duo, consisting of Sam Golbach (born November 1996) and Colby Brock (born January 1997). They are best known for their paranormal investigations.^[1][2]

The pair first met in middle school band class, however the two didn't become friends until shortly after they both joined the Blue Valley High School marching band. During summer band camp they bonded over having a crush on the same drum major, however, due to their shyness, the two began to boost each other's confidence.^[3] In one of their earlier videos: "How did we meet?",^[4] Sam and Colby explain they were “shy” and awkward band kids who wanted to step out of their comfort zone. While their content first started out as performing public pranks, there was a deeper meaning behind it. As the duo continued to make content their confidence grew and they wanted to help and inspire other people become for confident within themselves as well.^[4]

After initially gaining prominence on Vine as teenagers in the mid-2010s with comedy-videos.^[5][1] After Vine went defunct they started uploading videos onto YouTube.^[1]

Their first YouTube video: "Intro video",^[6] first released on 13 November 2014, and ever since the pair has been growing their channel subscriptions. Their earlier content on YouTube was random as they expressed they would be doing “everything” and asked for commenters suggestions. They made vlogs of their everyday lives and followed media trends. Originally, the duo was original a quartet, inside a place that they named "trap house". A large mansion-like home where Sam Golbach, Colby Brock, Jake Webber, and Corey Scherer would do crazy stunts like pranks, skits, or for Sam's personal channel, haunted horror challenges like the ouija board.

The videos gained them notoriety very quickly, landing them to have a fanbase who would make edits of them. After a now-deleted video entitled "we finally kissed", in which Sam and Colby finally gave in to a joke of them being gay, they showed a half second clip of them kissing, before it abruptly cuts "haha, gotcha bitch" style.^[7] After this, they'd be officially named "Solby".^[7]

In April 2015, Sam and Colby would upload a video entitled "Our first haunted experience", a school project about them going to an abandoned, rotted, and haunted house in the middle of nowhere after failing to get to a friend's party due to their car breaking down. The video ended with Sam getting possessed by the house's Demon and Colby seemingly getting so too after failing to escape. Unexpectedly, that video started a new chain of themes in their career.^[8] A year later, they started making urban exploration videos of locations in Kansas, New Jersey, and even Mexico. These videos featured the Sam, Colby, and their guests, following the same premise as their school project, but with the intent of exploring actual places that were by reputation dangerous, abandoned, and sometimes possibly haunted. Earlier creators had not made such videos, and there were viewers eager for this type of content, leading the Sam and Colby brand to become ever more popular. Some of the most famous places visited during this era were the Devil's Tunnel in New Jersey, Satan's Castle, and the Queen Mary.

However, while visiting an abandoned school in Florida in 2018, they were caught by police and arrested at gunpoint, landing them for the first time ever on the news. Their mugshots became viral on social media; their two roommates were even uploaded by a random user screaming and swearing, throwing pillows at the wall in panic and distress while Jake was live on Twitch. Thankfully for them, their experience in jail lasted two single days. Sam called it: "the most traumatic experience of my life", even stating that when a convict saw his and Colby's faces, the convict said: "you're going to fit here real well". Both would also stated:

"We were at gunpoint, on the ground, being shouted at by everyone. Told not to move. Imagine it. We're just two teenagers from Kansas, going about their lives doing something they love and then all the sudden, they're about to be arrested."^[9][10][11]

This would prompt them to fully abandon the urban exploring theme altogether. Despite that, four sporadic videos in their "25×25" series were uploaded while they were filming in Panama, and one final haunted video from Paramount.^[8]

In need of change, the theme of haunted urban was replaced with something safer. In 2018, prior to retelling of their arrest, Sam and Colby decided to change their content into a haunted investigation channel. Inspired both by the Ghost Adventures show from their childhood, Sam and Colby went on to investigate haunted hotels, castles, and many other places that have a haunted tale, to find out if those places are as haunted as people say, or not. This point however, would also be met with its fair share of issues. While the content was in places of public residence, other videos would be set in mountains, forests, and even a cave entitled "Ritual Tunnel". Their final episode of their first attempt at haunting, entitled "Sam and Colby 2.0", would lead them both to say on Instagram and YouTube that: "we have to rethink things through", leading them to go in standby after ending up getting in trouble with some people for recording and trying to do a ritual in the previously mentioned "Ritual tunnel" episode.^[12]

However, the next year, would be back with a six-part miniseries that their fans later titled "the shadow man era", as the miniseries of six movies would be about the long and enduring tale of Corey's spirit from a failed ouija session called the 'Shadow Man' to follow him everywhere he went. In 2020, when COVID-19 hit the world, Sam and Colby started a new series where they would bring celebrity guests to haunted places. In two special episodes they treasure hunted at the Cerro Gordo and Custer's Last Stand historical sites. The "shadow man" series had mixed reception saw a decline in popularity: Fans stated that the episodes were boring, uninteresting, and lesser quality than their earlier videos. The poor reaction lead Sam and Colby to think the programming through once again, and in 2021 they started a new series titled "25×25".^[13]

The series they titled "25×25" was 25 episodes where Sam and Colby completed 25 of their biggest goals before turning 25, as of them previously and in the future, with Sam specifically giving life lessons to the viewers and himself since he was young. Stating things like:

"Life is too much of a wonder to not live it."

The original episodes contained them going to places like Alaska, try scuba diving, and see what it meant to live on an island. But once again, reception was mixed. That response lead them to get back to haunting videos, but this time, with the full scope of guests in every episode. The quality of the videos grew and they also started using more professional equipment, like an EMF Detector, a Rem Pod, and a "Spirit Box". The final episode of 25×25 was filmed at Chernobyl – the duo's biggest life-dream to date.^[14]

Once 25×25 had ended, it had been decided that the duo would become a Ghost diva Hunting show host and turn their jobs into Ghost Hunters. Their channel now focuses on investigating all kinds of haunted places from all over the world.^[15]

Unlike most investigators, Sam and Colby have been praised for bringing in some originality to the format of ghost hunting. They open every video episode with an introduction of what their location and objective is. Then they introduce the guests that are going to be in the episode. After a short walk through of the location with the owner of the place, they start to interview the owner and try to connect the pieces of the tale that the place contains, to see if they can solve its mystery or find some meaning to the spirit's causes. With the use of their tools and means of communication, they investigate each room with attentive care and means of communicating with the spirit. If necessary, the duo bring on a medium or a witch to do some more serious and dangerous means of communication. In some episodes, the duo takes a test on their own selves to see if they can see or feel things that not many can feel. An example is in White Hill Mansion, where the duo got a hypnotist to get them in a trance and see if they could see what the spirit could see.^[12]

In other episodes however, when the tale of the place is a literal mystery, the duo does their all to solve the mystery of that location. In fact, Sam and Colby have managed to solve three long lasting and deemed unsolvable mysteries in the paranormal community or simply Murder cases that couldn't be solved. Their first one at the Villisca axe-murder house, in which they found the name of the killer. The second one at the new conjuring house, in which they found out that the Smurl family had been lying about the spirits for the entire time and that Ed and Lorraine were told to not say anything, to the public to keep the lie alive. And the most recent one at the S.K. Pierce mansion, in which they found out the killer of the girls that had inhabited the place in its era of prostitution, gambling, and illegal activity, and the mystery of an unnamed girl that had her pelvis bone found in the house's basement.^[16][17][18]

This is a list of famous guests that have appeared on their show.

A list of mediums that have appeared in the show.

An annual Halloween special that follows the duo going to the most haunted places full of demons and dark history only on Halloween.^[19]

A singular 8 part miniseries in which the duo along with a few other guests head to various places that contain meanings of an attachment inside Sam from the Sallie House.^[20]

Part 2 of Attachment in which Sam and Colby head to places that have empathic energy.^[21]

One-off 3 part miniseries in the UK's most haunted locations.

Sam had a relationship with Katrina Stuart in 2017, before breaking up with her sometime in 2021. Since summer of 2025, he has been in a relationship with Sofie Dossi.^[22]

In 2023, Sam and Colby stayed one week at the 'Conjuring House', a famous home that originated the Conjuring franchise. During the series, fans speculated of Cody and Satori's method of contacting with spirits that as they stated are: "from your past". At one point in the video, the name 'Libby' came up and was soon revealed by Sam to be his dead grandmother, "Libby Golbach".^[23]

After the entire four part miniseries was over, this lead to severe backlash for the duo, and Cody and Satori, with former fans calling them "fake" and "disgusting". While for the duo, backlash of them being manipulative and all in for the money started to spur. For a long time, neither Sam nor Colby said anything about the incident. But various Reddit posts alleged that Colby stated on a Livestream that the entire thing was fake, leading some of their fans to start believing they were blackmailed to not show proof that the ritual was fake.^{[citation needed]}

Sam and Colby have been criticized for not making their videos 'serious'. With many containing lots of shouting, inappropriate and out-of-place guests, and too much offensive swearing. One of the most caught examples of this is at the Driskill Hotel, when Colby said to a female little girl ghost: "Oh, she likes my balls".^{[citation needed]}

The duo's recent episodes have been considered as an outright disrespect to the fans, the paranormal community and offensive to the spirits, while also being outright fake. Lot of times, fans have said that the tools they use have been debunked multiple times, specifically the small flashlights used in their videos to communicate with a spirit by 'yes' or 'no' questions and that their constant merch promo on their official site lead them to believe that they now make videos for the money, no longer caring about the quality. Fans have also criticized their membership app XPLR, calling it a useless app with very little content with a too high price.^{[citation needed]}

• In 2019, they released their web series, Stranded with Sam and Colby.^[24]
• In 2023, they debuted their feature film, Sam and Colby: A Week at The Conjuring House.^[1][25]
• In 2024, they released their second movie, Sam and Colby: The Legends of The Paranormal.^[1][2][25]

• "Sam and Colby". IMDb.
• "Sam and Colby" (official site) – via shopxplr.com.