Then people send me 20 pages, and it’s nothing.” Wagner also recognizes the courage it takes to tell a story and potentially risk public criticism. Sometimes, their email was only two sentences originally, but there was some random part of it that made me think, Oh, this seems interesting. There’s a certain art to choosing the best stories to tell, which Wagner can usually spot based on the way a person writes an email: “I look back on some of the stories that ended up being really good. Now, just a little bit in, I’ve had moments where I’m like, Not only do I think something’s going on, I think we could figure it out,” says Wagner. “When I started, I thought there might be something going on, because all of these people can’t be imagining things. A former skeptic himself, his perspective has evolved from amused curiosity to wholehearted belief, due in part to the earnestness of his subjects’ accounts, many of whom were compelled to tell their story not out of a desire for brief internet fame, but in a desperate attempt to make sense of what happened to them. Otherworld has amassed something of a cult following over the last few months, attributed largely to Wagner’s journalistic approach to all things supernatural and unexplained. Born from an annual call for ghost stories on his other podcast, Yeah, But Still, Wagner became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of submissions he received, to the point where he decided to go all-in and start a podcast entirely devoted to the paranormal. I was immediately hooked.ĭubbed the “Paranormal This American Life,” Otherworld, hosted by Jack Wagner, tells extraordinary stories of regular people who’ve experienced anything from ghostly hauntings to demonic encounters, lost time, kundalini awakenings, near-death experiences, and magick rituals. I don’t think I realized how starved I was for genuine paranormal discourse until I discovered Otherworld Podcast through the recommendations newsletter Perfectly Imperfect, and listened to the first handful of episodes one night while cleaning my house, progressively scaring myself to death. I now live in Los Angeles, a place where New Age spirituality has been co-opted by wellness brands and biohacking podcast bros topics like the occult, astrology, and psychedelics are so commonplace that they’ve been reduced to cliché, devoid of any mysticism. Either way, for many, it can be a deeply frightening and alienating experience. But what if the thing you encountered felt too real to deny? What if it persisted over weeks or months? For those who have experienced something paranormal, they’re often forced to contend with two impossible realities: that they’re losing their mind, or they really encountered something otherworldly. Despite a third of Americans claiming to believe in ghosts and UFOs, personal accounts are often relegated to late-night campfire stories and family lore, and are very rarely taken seriously. Curiosity compelled me towards the unknown, and doubt functioned as my protective armor against it. But whenever I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, heard a strange sound, or felt a presence, I was quick to convince myself that it was just my mind playing tricks on me. Each caller confirmed my suspicions that there really was something beyond my everyday reality: something mysterious, terrifying, and sublime. On ‘Otherworld,’ the podcaster feeds into a resurgent cultural interest in the paranormal, from near-death experiences to demonic encounters to lost timeĪs a kid, I used to stay up late listening to a paranormal radio show called Coast to Coast with George Noory, feeling a strange kinship with truckers who’d been abducted by aliens or men calling in from a post-apocalyptic future.
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