Is the “weird sinkhole guy” interview real? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

The “weird sinkhole guy” interview video is one of those ever persistent videos that – while clear to most that it’s nothing more than a prank – is so well edited that it still manages to fool viewers.

The video depicts a local news report about a sinkhole that appeared in East Detroit that occurred in 2015. The news reporter on the scene, as they often do, turns to local residents and witnesses for their own personal accounts.

But things get a little weird when the camera cuts to one of those witnesses with an exceptionally unusual talking style and an apparently very vivid imagination. The video, titled “Weird Guy Nearly Falls Into Sinkhole” can be seen below.

While we’re not in the habit of “debunking” prank or humour videos designed to entertain, we’re so frequently asked about “weird sinkhole guy” that here we are, finding out about the ‘real him’ and his videos.

So, if you were sceptical as to the authenticity of the video, then you had every right to be. This wasn’t a questionable decision by the news editor to include him, since the video is entirely fake.

The man behind “weird sinkhole guy” is Andrew Bowser. He’s an actor and vlogger, who even has his own Wikipedia page. If you recognised him from elsewhere, it might be from other similarly-veined videos in which he appears as either “weird Arbys guy” or “weird Satanist guy”.


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Bower’s modus operandi for many of his videos is to take legitimate news reports and creatively edit himself into them, as if he were being interviewed. For those that want to see more of him, he had his own YouTube channel as well as (perhaps less surprisingly) a podcast on the occult.

If there was any lingering doubt, you can see the real ABC footage of the sinkhole story from 2015 here, sans Bowser.

So there you go. Veil lifted.

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