Before Colin Browen takes any of the haunted artifacts out of the box he brought to the Houston Chronicle offices, he offers me a small plastic bottle of water. It’s holy water from the Sanctuary Santa Maria del Fonte in Caravaggio, Italy. I dutifully rub some into my hands, making sure to get between the fingers the same way I learned to use hand sanitizer during COVID. Better safe than sorry.
Sanctified, he unpacks an odd assortment of household items from one of his paranormal investigations, a famous case known as the “Moffitt Family Haunting.” Browen, 28, has been hunting ghosts since he was a child in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. His parents often went on ghost tours during vacation, and he filmed the first episode of his YouTube show, The Paranormal Files, at his high school in 2014 thanks to an indulgent principal. Since then, his channel has grown to over a million followers.
“It has been an insane 10 years of life,” he says…