In his early 20s, when Jack Wagner slept at his mom’s house, he’d often hear his sister in the kitchen at night. She’d be getting out a fork, he remembers, or opening a box of cookies. He figured she was just sneaking a midnight snack—but his sister later told him that it wasn’t her in there. “At some point we all had a conversation and my sister was like, ‘I’ve never gone out there at night,’” he now says. But his mom had heard the noises, too, and they continued to hear them until the family moved out of the house. Wagner wasn’t scared when he encountered this mystery. The real challenge, he says, was “having to move through the world knowing this.”
The cable TV programs and viral TikToks where one typically now finds accounts of supernatural phenomenons are highly dramatized, packaged for maximum spooky weirdness. When Wagner started his podcast Otherworld in October 2022, his mission was to create “the most normal paranormal podcast.”
Close to 100 episodes later, Wagner’s show about people’s real encounters with unexplained phenomena has developed a cultlike following. And though the audience has grown and the episodes have ballooned into multipart investigations, Wagner is still making it almost entirely independently. “Compared to a show with our pace and scale, we still have a really tiny team,” he says.
Otherworld may seem like a dramatic pivot from Wagner’s previous podcast,Yeah But Still, a comedy show he cohosted with Brandon Wardell. But for Wagner, his career—which started with film school in Chicago and has included directing music videos for artists and working as a cameraman and PA on various projects—has always been about giving people a space to tell their stories. Now those stories range from encounters with mysterious creatures to the very real study of the depths of human consciousness. Here Wagner shares where he stands on the paranormal and why this summer almost brought him to his professional breaking point.
GQ: How do you go about sourcing your stories for the podcast?
Wagner: We have a lot of emails. Sometimes it’s a lot of back-and-forth with a person. Sometimes we vibe them out on the phone and then oftentimes a lot of the work gets done in the interview. For some of the bigger stories, it’s a prolonged process of getting to know them and editing and hitting them up after.
I get to know these people really well. This stuff is happening to people who just don’t know where to take it or [who to] tell. And people who also don’t even really feel like having it be a part of their life. This stuff is really jarring when it happens to people and can really screw up their head sometimes. I think most people just wanna get back on track and they’re really not trying to dwell on it. They’ll chalk it up to something—“Oh, it must have been the wind.” I even do that myself.
I imagine there are people listening and engaging because they believe, and there are people listening and engaging because they’re skeptical. Is there ever a time when you’re like, “Oh, this person’s fucking with me,” or do you approach everything in good faith?
I try to approach everything in good faith. It’s not like I’m putting these people through the wringer. This is their subjective experience, no matter what anyone thinks of it. I thought there would be more bullshit, and there is bullshit. But I think most people assume that there’s a lot of stuff just being made up whole cloth. I guess maybe that’s nice to think, but in practice, it’s just not the case. I’ve definitely encountered some stories that for various reasons I didn’t think were right for the show. I’m sure there are people who make shit up for attention. I’m pretty good at spotting that. But usually this stuff is complicated and has had a major impact on this person’s life.
Since these experiences are so subjective, everyone’s gonna make sense of them in their own different ways.
One of the biggest things that I’ve realized while making this show is that people are so complicated. We want to put things into neat little boxes. I think that in general that’s how most people look at the paranormal. I always get asked, “So is it real? Is the paranormal real or is it fake?” That’s a big question. There’s room for both existing. And humans are really flawed and that’s totally okay. Somebody can be strange and complicated and still have had something objectively unexplainable happen to them.
The episodes aren’t just based on anecdotes, but include a lot of research that contextualizes the experiences. What does that research look like?
Research is difficult with this stuff because nobody knows the answers to this. The sources I would cite are just, like, some other guy like me. People will email me being like, “You should talk to this expert,” and it’s some other podcaster. So much of this stuff is just the opinions of some person out there.
By elevating these stories, you’re maybe kicking off the opportunity for more legitimate research.
I was really interested early on in ethnographic filmmaking. You’re using film but it’s really more of a science and a study. You’re going to film a group of people living in isolation, they don’t even know what a camera is. And a major part of ethnographic film making is that you’re not trying to tell a story. You’re just recording for people to use later, because in the future anthropologists need to be able to look at actual footage of these people living, doing their thing. That’s how I look at what I’m doing. All I need to do is help these people tell their stories the best they can.
What’s your relationship like with your listeners?
Part of staying sane is removing myself from that, while striking a balance. The audience is great. I have nothing but nice things to say but dealing with something like this; I just had to focus on doing good work, keeping my head down. I did comedy before this and music videos, so you don’t really get strong reactions.
The paranormal has a different kind of audience to navigate.
Mind you, it’s overwhelmingly positive responses, but I really had to learn to trust my gut, but then also be open to criticism from people around me and leave space for that even when I disagree.
