YouTube Recommendations: The Paranormal Scholar

Everyone’s done it. You’re bored, you have half an hour to spare, and you pull up YouTube, where you spend 10 minutes looking for something to watch. News? Too heavy. Late-night shows? Nothing’s funny right now. Celebrity gossip? Yeah, right…

Eventually, you stumble across something you like. Something covering the odd, the weird, the paranormal. And 20 minutes later, you’re either ready to go further down the rabbit hole or you realize that those are 20 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. Recommendations is the Armchair Fortean’s attempt to provide you with enjoyable, well-curated channels that will not only hold your attention, but will leave you (sometimes) with knowledge you didn’t have before.

Enter The Paranormal Scholar.

The Paranormal Scholar is, for my money, one of the best YouTube channels on the paranormal. While it does share some similarities with story-telling, ‘It Happened to Me’ channels (which I’m not knocking—I love a lot of those—watch this space), it does so much more. While the channel does give over a good amount of time to recounting stories sent in by viewers, it also provides plenty of time for documentaries covering a wide variety of paranormal topics, ranging from 20 minutes to an hour. They’ve delved into the story that provided the inspiration for The Exorcist, dragon sightings throughout history, and the Cottingley fairies, among others. They even did a full hour on the Elisa Lam mystery*.

Everything about this channel exudes scholarship (To quote Wayne Campbell, it’s not just a clever name). From the rigorous research done by the channel team to the narration by (presumably) the Scholar herself, Laura Rowton. Beyond the choice of material and research, Rowton’s narration truly sets the channel apart. There are no attempts to shock or to sound sinister, just Ms. Rowton’s calm tone, relating the research or the tales sent in. Always understated in the best way and never sensationalistic, The Paranormal Scholar is truly among the best, most informative paranormal channels I’ve found on YouTube. Highly, highly recommended.

*Elisa Lam was the student who disappeared from the Hotel Cecil in Los Angeles, only to be found in a locked water tank several weeks later. You may have seen the clip of her erratic behavior in the elevator.