Most of you know that I am a very morbid type of person. I love learning about morbid historical facts, especially when they are also tied to Hollywood in strange and unusual ways. Also, I love learning about the different facets of the deathcare industry. Because of all of this I have been a follower of both Scott Michaels and Caitlin Doughty for a long time and I watch all of the videos that they make. Caitlin Doughty has recently started to make videos about morbid historical events that happen in the LA area. This is something that Scott Michaels has been doing for years with his Dearly Departed death themed tours of LA, and through his website and YouTube channel. Can you see where this is heading? Doughty has obviously used information from two of Michaels’ videos for her own channel without giving him credit.
I tend to try to think the best about people, because I know that you can’t trust everything that you read or hear. So, when Michaels complained about the first time she did this I thought that maybe, just maybe, it was a coincidence that she made a video on exactly the same subject; the sad death of Yvette Vickers who was found mummified in her home. Doughty, in her video on the subject, said that somebody had been disrespectful to the memory of Vickers by entering her abandoned house. She was obviously talking about Scott Michaels, who had made a video of himself touring the house, that had been left to rot after Vickers’ body was discovered. He even took a memento that had been left behind. I think it was an old perfume bottle, but I could be wrong. Michaels accused Doughty of getting her information from his video, which she did, because he had done a lot of research on Vickers that had not been previously made public. When the dust cleared, everything settled back down. I was quite happy about this of course.
The events of today have changed my opinion on Doughty and it makes me very genuinely sad. I understand that she is trying to expand her brand by making videos with a morbid historical angle to them, but when I saw that she had done a video on the St. Francis Dam disaster I audibly gasped, because Michaels had done a very detailed video on exactly the same thing a few months ago. He actually drove out to the area where the dam was and hiked around showing everybody what he had found; big pieces of the dam were still visible all around the area. I thought that is was so well made that I actually made a post on Facebook talking about it. Below is his video on the St. Francis Dam disaster, an event that killed over 600 people.
In his video he has to hike around a bit to find the correct sites, and in Doughty’s video she is magically transported to the same exact spots. Other people have also recently made videos about the dam, however they haven’t also lifted other stories from Michaels. The thing that really gets me about all of this is the fact that she doesn’t credit Michaels at all in either of her videos, when it is very obvious that she gleaned some of her presented facts from his videos. I wouldn’t be upset about any of this if she had just thanked him for his videos and admitted that she got some of her information from them. She could have even approached him about either of his videos and asked him if it was okay to use some of his information. He’s a very approachable kind of guy, and is widely known as being a very nice person in the online death community. In all of the years I have followed his work I have never heard a bad thing said about him. Seriously. Below is her video. Don’t take my word for any of this, judge it all on your own.
I think that Doughty is really trying to expand her brand so that she gets more viewers, but she has gone about it in a way that really makes her look bad. Stealing information from other content creators and not giving them any credit at all is trashy and never a good look.
If any information in this article changes I will do an update.
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