Smug Puppy has now admitted that the paranormal videos which helped build the channel were staged. But the fakery itself is not really the worst part of this story. Plenty of people make fake paranormal content. If Smug Puppy had made the videos, kept quiet when people called them fake, and then revealed the truth later, this could have ended up being a clever little experiment.

The problem is what happened when people started questioning it. Debunkers such as Beardo Gets Scared, PSI had been calling the videos fake for years, and instead of simply ignoring them, Smug Puppy kept defending the footage. People who questioned the videos were pushed back on, and some critics say they were mocked or blocked. That is what makes the confession look so much worse now. It is one thing to fool people with a video. It is another to keep defending something you already know is false.

The money side does not help either. Smug Puppy has argued that the money came from adverts rather than directly from viewers, but that is a pretty weak distinction. The viewers created the traffic, the traffic created the advertising value, and the content was being monetised while a large part of the audience believed they were watching genuine paranormal activity. Nobody outside Smug Puppy can honestly say exactly how much they made without seeing the platform records, but the fact money was being earned from the content makes the trust issue harder to brush aside.

This could have been handled far better. If it really was an experiment, the easiest thing to do would have been to say nothing when people called it fake. Ignore the comments, refuse to explain how the videos were made, then reveal everything at the end and show the tricks. That would have kept the mystery without leaving years of denials behind. Instead, the lie was defended for so long that coming clean was always going to look bad.

Coming clean was still better than carrying on, but by that point a lot of the damage had already been done. Beardo’s criticism now is not really about proving the ghosts were fake anymore, because Smug Puppy has already done that themselves. It is about the fact that people were saying it for years and were repeatedly told, directly or indirectly, that they were wrong.

That is the real problem here. The ghosts being fake is almost the least interesting part. The damage came from defending the story long after people had started seeing through it. Once you spend years telling people something is real, admitting later that it was not is always going to come with a price.