Episode 184 - The Post

Otherworld

After moving to a rural Tennessee farm, an engineer named John discovers a mysterious T-post in the woods that appears to mark a grave. His

Key takeaways

• John, a nuclear engineer, found a solitary steel T-post in the middle of his wooded property.
• A six-foot-tall, shadowy figure with a shimmering quality was observed jumping between trees.

Main topics

• Paranormal sightings in Tennessee
• Historical map research

Notable quotes

It was as though he were walking behind a curtain. He completely disappeared...

Conclusion

The episode highlights the human instinct to seek answers and the even

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:12) Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This story comes from a man named John, who is 50 years old and lives in rural Tennessee, which is where the story takes place. I think this episode particularly freaks me out because it all occurs while John is doing an activity near and dear to my own heart. That is, tinkering around and doing miscellaneous projects in his own backyard. About 10 years ago, John and his wife Stacy bought a farmhouse complete with seven and a half acres of land. It was the perfect house for their family and had everything they were searching for. While he was exploring the property for the first time since moving in, John found a strange metal fence post jutting out of the ground in the middle of the woods. There was nothing attached to the post, nor was there anything surrounding the post that could signify what it was for. So, he decided to leave it be and move on. It wasn't long after this that he discovered he might be sharing the land with something beyond this world, and maybe this mysterious T-post in the woods on his property held a clue to its origins. This episode is called, The Post, and you're listening to Otherworld. Is this Bobby? Speaker 1 (1:45) Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue with. I'm worried about all the science. Speaker 3 (1:50) Up in the sky. It's Speaker 2 (1:51) almost frustrating that it's Speaker 1 (1:52) happening. I'm going to die. It's limbs were just like wrong. Speaker 3 (1:57) Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. I'm Speaker 2 (2:39) 50 years old. I currently live in Tennessee. However, I grew up in the Northeast. I've been in Tennessee for about 24 years. Speaker 2 (2:49) I'm an engineer in the nuclear field. So I have done a little bit of everything. My career started in the semiconductor industry. From there, I worked in a porcelain factory as a project engineer. From there, I moved and worked at a water treatment facility. From there, I went to nuclear research. I also worked at a place that disposed of radioactive material. Speaker 2 (3:17) All throughout the last 25 years, it has led me to where I am now. I work for a company that manufactures instrumentation for the nuclear industry for research purposes and also for nuclear power plants. And I help support that instrumentation. And I also teach classes on how to use this and how to use software and statistics and the math behind the nuclear process, if you will. I had gone through a divorce. My first wife and I had split up. Some time had passed, and I started dating this young lady named Stacy, who Speaker 1 (3:54) I Speaker 2 (3:54) ended up marrying. We were living in a small house outside of a major city in Tennessee. And just on a whim, Stacy started looking at properties for sale, small farms that had some acreage to them. And we found this place, and it checked all the boxes. The house was in phenomenal shape. It had a decent amount of property. It had a very large garage, which was important to me. It had enough bedrooms for the kids. It just was perfect. So our property is about seven and a half acres. The house is right in the center. So if you can imagine from the house forward to the road, that is one large field with some trees. And that's where my barn is. Behind the house, it's wooded, and the forest is very mature. There are very large oak trees. There are elm trees, maple trees, hickory. And because the trees are so mature, there's very little undergrowth. So you can see back into the woods quite a distance because it is so open underneath, which is one of the things that attracted it to us. In fact, there are some spots that are so open, you could drive a vehicle between the trees. Speaker 2 (5:18) Beyond that, on the even further back of the woods, there is a small field that is a very narrow rectangle. It's actually a right-of-way for a gas line, and we keep that mode down. So from the back of our house, you can look through the woods, and you can just make out where that field is. You can tell there's a field back there. And then beyond it, there's more woods that we have on our property as well. But the majority of the woods is between that upper field, that's what we call it, and our house, the back of our house. Speaker 1 (5:52) So when we Speaker 2 (5:54) first looked at the house, we wanted to check out the property because that was one of the things that we were really interested in. So we, of course, we checked out the house. We started walking into the woods. And the previous owners... It was interesting because they weren't very outdoorsy people. So I can't for the life of me figure out why they bought this piece of property because it was not used. It was not used, not utilized. It was not appreciated. And we started walking up through the woods and we went all the way up to the top and we were kind of making almost like a zigzag pattern. We were looking at the trees and, you know, we were amazed at how loud the birds were and we could see squirrels everywhere and we saw deer tracks and it was wonderful. And we got to a part of the property where we saw a fence post. It's a steel fence post commonly referred to as a T-post. And it was... right in the middle of the forested area. And we looked around and there's no other T-posts. There's nothing. Just it. And it was in the ground. It was at an angle. It was not in the ground very well, but well enough. And I remember thinking, wow, that's really weird. This is the only thing here. There's nothing else around. There's a tree behind it. No fence, nothing. And we thought, wow, that's interesting. But it wasn't hurting anything. It wasn't hurting anything. And we were just looking at the property for the first time. So we let it go. And it stayed that way for a long time. Well, for a while anyway. And it just kind of kept it in the back of my mind, but don't have any real reason as to why that was there. The rear of the house has a concrete patio. And I was pressure washing that concrete. So if you can imagine, the house is to my left. The woods are to my right, and I'm kind of looking off to the side, and I'm taking the pressure washer wand, going back and forth on the concrete. And I caught almost like a glint of movement out of the corner of my right eye. And I looked and then went back to what I was doing, and then I looked again. And that was the first time that I saw it. It looked like a shadow. It was in the shape of a person. The shadow was completely solid. It was a completely solid black mass. And it appeared to have almost like a shimmering quality to it. The best way I can think of to describe it is if you have a pan of water and you put your finger in the pan, the ripples go through the water. Imagine that all the time, only somewhat fuzzy. Speaker 2 (9:10) This thing was about six foot tall, shaped somewhat like a man, certainly human-shaped. It was bow-legged, which stood out to me. Its legs kind of curved around, almost like a set of parentheses, but not quite that bad, if you will. He had arms. I could not make out hands or fingers. Not to say he didn't have any. I couldn't see them. And they were jumping from tree to tree. So on the other side of the tree, he appeared, I call it a he, I don't know if it truly was a he or what it was, but appeared to be on that upper field at the very edge of the property. And he would start at one tree and he would jump to the other. another tree and then jump to this one and then jump back to the first one and and i'm looking and he's far enough away that i could see what is happening but i'm not understanding what i'm seeing It looked like a person, but I thought, that can't be a person. Some of the jumps he was making between trees, they were three, four feet. And that was pretty impressive for something, for a person to do that. And I watched it for, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 seconds. And the first thought, the first rational thought I had was someone was trespassing on our property because our property is fenced in. So in order to get up there, they had to climb over a barbed wire fence or climb over a cattle gate. So I wanted to see exactly what was going on, who this was. What I did was they were at the top of the woods, I was at the bottom. I started walking off to the side and started to make a giant loop. As I was making a loop, I could still catch glimpses. I didn't hear any sound. I didn't hear any noise at all. And I got to a point where I knew where he was, but due to the arrangement of the trees, I could not see him specifically. So I thought, no big deal. What I'll do is I'll walk all the way up to the field. And then when I get all the way up to the field, then I could look over my shoulder to the right and I could see everything. And when I got up there and I looked to the right and there was nothing, absolutely nothing. And I knew there's a specific tree that is dead. And I knew the last time I saw him, he was behind that tree. And I walked over there and I was looking for overturned leaves, looking for crushed walnuts, looked for some sign that somebody had been there. I couldn't find anything. I spent... 30 minutes looking behind these trees. I know he was there. I couldn't find any sign of anybody ever being there. In fact, that area was so close to the wood line that I didn't even mow over there. So it would have been very obvious if someone would have been literally jumping from place to place up there and there was nothing. Speaker 2 (12:28) This was June, and it was an uncharacteristically