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Emma Fretts, of Southampton County, is going viral.

In October 2024, she purchased a local, abandoned general store from the early 1900s with the intent of renovating it as a place to live. As she has begun her work on the site, she is exploring the building, its contents and the surrounding property, making discoveries of historic artifacts that have begun to tell the building’s story.

Fretts, who is 31 years old, works full time as a social media manager, and she gained the skills to be successful at that job through her own experience of having a presence on multiple social media platforms over the years.

She had developed a small following on TikTok and YouTube, but since November when she began documenting her work at the abandoned general store, her number of followers has grown exponentially.

Fretts said that when she purchased the building, her friends and family were asking her if she was going to film her renovations on it.

“And then I decided I probably should,” she said. “And thankfully I did, because people are enjoying it.”

How much?

Her TikTok account, which can be found at www.tiktok.com/@holistic_emma, had 49,100 followers as of Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 14.

Her YouTube account, which can be found at www.youtube.com/@emmashaye/, had around 1,500 subscribers before she posted her first “Abandoned Home Renovation” video on Nov. 25, but it had 8,300 subscribers as of Dec. 24 and 19,600 subscribers as of Jan. 14.

Instagram, where she has achieved significant success in years past via a hippie fashion and beauty account, has also been a platform where she is starting to tell her abandoned home renovation story — to notable early success.

Her Instagram account, which can be found at www.instagram.com/holistic__emma/, has grown by thousands of followers, and it had 5,778 as of Jan. 14.

She is posting a new full-length video every week. They usually represent part of a day spent cleaning, discovering and renovating at the site, and she edits the day’s activities into an approximately 20-minute video, with some music and her own on-site narration. 

Based on how things have been going since November, “I could post something, and I could get 3,000 new followers on any platform on any given day, it just all depends,” she said. “They’re all growing.”

Describing what the last month-and-a-half has been like for her, she said, “It’s definitely exciting for me because when I started my YouTube channel in the past, I always wanted to be a YouTuber, and I kind of was just like, ‘Alright, this isn’t working,’ and I kind of just let it go. But to see that people are interested in this is really exciting.”

Her comments sections are highly active, with followers peppering her with questions and comments, and she regularly engages with them.

She pinpoints the exploding success of her social media accounts as being due to the specific content she is now able to generate.

“People are so interested in abandoned homes right now,” she said. “There was a Van Life fad for a while, and now it’s kind of like people are buying abandoned homes because they can’t afford anything else.”

She said she is enjoying seeing the focus on abandoned homes and buildings.

“I would love to see more people doing this and kind of keeping the character and charm of America,” she said.

She indicated that she does not know how long her renovation project might take.

“It’s completely up in the air, because I don’t know where YouTube’s going to take me, if at some point I could be over here (on-site) every day, working on it,” she said.

She is currently only able to dedicate one day a week to work at the building. The other days are spent fulfilling her full-time duties as a social media manager.

However, she has already started to see some income from her increased social media followings and would be open to pursuing the renovation project full-time, if that becomes possible due to the level of interest.

“Oh yeah, I would love that,” she said. “If I could just be over here working on this, that would be pure joy. So we’ll see.”