Episode 184 - The Post

[MUSIC] Welcome to the world. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This story comes from a man named John who is 50 years old and lives in a 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 Stacey 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 tea post in the woods on his property held a clue to its origins. This episode is called The Post and You're Listening to Other World. [MUSIC] Hello? Is this Bobby? Look at him. I said it's core of the science you can't argue with. I don't know what you're worried about, so something is going to happen. It's almost frustrating that it's happened. I'm gonna die, of course, if it's limbs, we're just going to cry. Everybody knows that thing, even if it takes them a minute. [MUSIC] My name is John, I'm 50 years old. I currently live in Tennessee, however I grew up in the Northeast. I've been in Tennessee for about 24 years. 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. And 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 and passed and I started dating this young lady named Stacey, who I ended up marrying. We were living in a small house outside of a major city in Tennessee. And just on a whim, Stacey 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. And the house is its 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 is 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 can drive a vehicle between the trees. 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 is 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, in our house, the back of our house. So when we 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 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 figured out why they bought this piece of property because it was not used, it was 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 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 tea post. And it was right in the middle of the forested area and we looked around and there's no other tea post, 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, 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 like 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 completely solid, black, and 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. This and this thing was about six foot tall, shaped somewhat like a man of certainly human shape. It had, it was bow-legged which stood out to me both, there, his, its legs kind of curved around, almost like a set of parentheses, but not quite that, 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, I don't know if it truly wasn't 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 start at one tree. he would jump to another tree, and then jump to this one, and then jump back to the first one. 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 some of us trespassing on our property, 'cause 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 pot, 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 use behind that tree. And I walked over there and I was looking for overturned leaves, looking for crushed walnuts, look 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 woodline 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. This was June, and it was an uncharacteristically cool June. So we had our windows open, and we were in bed. I was sleeping on the right side. My wife was on the left side, and to the left, even further, was the window. I have a dog. She's a Belgian Malinois, which I don't know if you know what Belgian Malinois's are, but they are the same dogs that police use. They like them because they're faster, the German shepherds, they're smaller, so they get entire spaces, and they're absolutely neurotic. They will do anything to please their owner, which is a good and a bad thing. And she always slipped on the bed with us. So we were sleeping, and I heard, I felt the dog move suddenly, like she something started with her, and I woke up, and I could hear what sounded like footsteps out of the bedroom window, and it had my dogs full attention. She's on the bed, she's facing the window, and she starts this low growl. Not, it's not loud, it's just very soft, and she, her ears are up, she's focused on the window. And I'm listening to this, to these footsteps, and it sounds like someone who's running and stopping quickly, and then turning around and running back, and stopping quickly again, and just going back and forth, back and forth. The footsteps sounded like they were coming from something that was bipedal in that it was a very systemic, one, two, one, two, one, two, you know, when you think of an animal running with four legs, there's more of a, when they start taking off range, it takes them a minute to kind of get their cadence, if you will, that didn't happen. It sounded like a person running. If I were to run back and forth, that's exactly what it would sound like. And I remember thinking, what the hell's going on? What is this? So I get out of bed, and I'm on the right side of the bed, again, the window's on the left. I walk along the length of the bed, I turn left, I'm walking directly towards the window, and the dog starts to growl even more. And the closer I get to the window, the more she starts to growl. As I'm approaching the window, I stand off to the side, because if someone's out there, I don't want them to see me. So I stand off to the side, and I'm looking out the window at an angle, and I don't see anything. And just as I start to turn, as soon as I start to look straight out the window, just ever so slightly, the noise stops. And I'm able to turn, and I look out this way, and now my dog, her main is up. She is really, she's still on the bed, she's not standing, but she is at full attention, and she's pretty tipped off. And I look outside, I don't see anything. I looked, I even had a little flat on the y, I had a flashlight in the bedroom, I went back, I got it from my nightstand, turned light on, and I'm looking, and there was dew on the ground, and if you walk through dew, you will eat footprints. And at that point, with a flashlight, I didn't see any footprints, right? It's not out of the realm of possibility for someone to have seen me and taken off. However, the direction they would have had to go, would have taken them across the concrete patio that I just pressure washed. So I believe I would have heard those steps going across the concrete as they were running. And once I realized that the noise had stopped, I moved a little bit faster in looking over to the right side, out of the window, to see if I could spot somebody. And in all honesty, if I would have seen somebody, I have no idea what I would have done. I have no idea, that's one of those things. You don't know, you just, I, what would I have done? I don't know. And I thought, well, I don't know what just happened, but that was, that was really weird. So I slowly went back in front of the bed, got back into bed, and I petted my dog, Maya, calmer down. And I lay down and I stared at the ceiling. And I don't believe I ever went back to sleep that night. And I know that Maya did not go back to sleep that night, because when I got out of bed around six in the morning, she was still focused on the window. That was, that was pretty unnerving. I did not care for that. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell anybody about the shadow that I saw when I was pressure washing, and I didn't tell anybody about the footsteps. My wife can be a very heavy sleeper, and this was a perfect example of that, because she did not wake up even with Maya growling and me walking around. And I didn't tell anybody because I wasn't sure, when things like this happen, you never know how they're gonna be received. So at this point, I had rationalized nothing bad had happened. It was, I don't know. It was, maybe it was, there's some explanation. I'm just not, I'm, I'm smart enough to realize I don't know what I don't know. So maybe there's something I don't know. I'm not gonna burden anybody else with this story until I can figure out what's going on. There's a few months later. I believe it was three months later. I remember it was fall. I remember that. It was just starting to cool down. And I was walking in the woods. I didn't even know why I was out there. I was just, just out there walking, enjoying nature. And I, again, caught a glint of motion off to the side, and I saw him. And I, it appeared to me. He was far enough away. I don't think that he saw me, 'cause he appeared to be walking away. Once I realized that I was seeing the same thing. I froze. I stood still and I watched him. And he continued to walk away from me. And I was so still. And as he began to turn to the right, that's the only time I've ever seen his profile, he was walking right towards the fence post. And I leaned back kind of like this so I could get a better view. And as he approached the fence post, the fence post is only about five feet tall. As he got to it, he ducked his head down so it was below the highest point of the fence post. And he walked behind it. And as he walked behind it, it was as though he were walking behind a curtain. He completely disappeared. As though he were walking behind a curtain. I couldn't believe it. I was stunned. And I saw that happen. I stood there trying to understand what I had just witnessed, couldn't figure it out. And I just slowly walked over that in that same direction. And I got about 20 feet from the fence post. And I stood there and I was looking at it. My, I don't know why, my fear was that. He was gonna come back and yell at me. What are you doing here? I just saw. I didn't know what was going to happen. And I stood there and I just looked and I started looking around. And there was nothing. There's absolutely nothing. I got a little closer. There was a small indention in the ground. There's several on the property. It's the woods. Things happen. And I had no idea. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen up to that point. I have no idea what he was doing up there. If he was. I don't know. He seemed to just be going home, if you will, when he was headed to the post. One of the things that I thought of years later. And I don't know if this is true or not. But when I saw him walking away and I saw him going to the post, I always assumed he couldn't see me. And then I started thinking maybe he knew I was there. Maybe he wanted me to see where he was going and where he came from. I don't know. At that point, that made me truly understand this was not a trespasser. This was not someone who was coming onto my property to dance in the field. This was something totally different. And I didn't know what that was. So, I really. And to this day, I still don't know what it is. And I don't know enough about the paranormal to classify this something. What I do know is he's scared to hell out of me. All right. We'll be right back after this quick break. The wilderness can hide a lot, but it can't hide the truth forever. I'm Dilya Deambre, a host of park predators. And every week, I investigate true crime cases hidden in national parks, forests, and beaches. I follow every lead, every clue, and every overlooked detail. Because even when a trail seems to disappear, the truth has a way of resurfacing. Listen to park predators wherever you get your podcasts. Get ready for more of the gripping mysteries you love, because forensic files is back, and they're revisiting some of your favorite episodes. Come along as investigators, scientists, and experts, piece together evidence, clues, and data in search of the answers behind violent crimes, unexplainable mysteries, and other strange occurrences. Listen to forensic files on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I started doing some digging on the property because I'm a nerd, and I want to learn everything I can about everything. And the United States Geographical Association has got a bunch geographical surface. I'm sorry. They have got a bunch of topographical maps. For all parts of the country, dating back to when topographical maps were first done, and some areas as early as the 1700s. So you can -- and it's all free to look at -- you can dig up these old maps, and you can see what the, you know, the infrastructure and the town you lived in, what it was in 1898, 1960, 2025. And I noticed as I'm looking through these maps, there are quite a few that encompass my property from 1898 up until 2025, that there are a couple from the 1930s through the 1960s time frame. And at that time, my property was part of a larger farm, much larger farm. And there was an X that was on the property. That was the only indicator there was no house. There was no property lines. There was just an X. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. I wonder what that means. Looking at the topographical lines, the lay of the land, if you will, I was able to correlate that X with the approximate location of that fence post. So I thought, well, maybe that fence post is a marker of some sort. It's a property marker or a corner of something. And the legends on the map did not denote what an X meant. There were indications in the legend for -- I'll kind of -- for elevation, for primary roads, secondary roads, gravel roads, structures, nothing for the letter X. And just as a -- on a whim, I ended up talking to a friend of mine, ended up over at his house. And he told me that he needed to go to his parents' house to help them with something. And he asked if I wanted to attack along. I said, yes, sure, why not? So I went over there and I got to talk into his father. And I didn't know his parents very well. And his father was a retired cartographer, a matmaker. And we got to talk and we hid it off. He's a really nice guy. And I mentioned to him, I said, hey, you know, I'm just out of curiosity. I said, I was looking at a map from the 1960s of my property and it had -- it has an X on it. I said, I -- there was nothing in the legend about an X. And according to him, the symbols were standardized around 80 to 100 years ago. And he said an X generally indicates a grave. And I said, oh, really? He says, yes. And I said, oh, okay, that's interesting. I did not expect that. When I asked him about that, he said it in such a non-chalant manner. He mined as well as said, that's a red car. He said, well, that's where a grave is. And I said, really? Are you sure? He goes, I've been doing this for 50 years. I'm sure. And I said, okay. And then that was the end of the conversation. He asked his wife, we're having for dinner. He had no follow-up questions. He could not have cared less about the fact that I potentially had a grave on my property. Meanwhile, I am thinking, holy crap, is there really a dead guy on my property? What is happening? Where did this guy come from? Who is this guy? Where there are no records? Where did the T post come from? It was just the oddest thing. I had no I had all the questions and I had zero answers. I didn't know where to look for answers. So I didn't know what else to do. So I did the next best thing. I went home and I started digging. I will say, I've done a lot of stupid shit in my life. That's up there. I mean, that is up there. I have no idea what why I decided to do that. I got home and I thought I still had there was daylight. I said, I'm going to dig. I have no idea why. And I started digging. I didn't touch the T post. What I realized is that where the T post is, there is and then the ground is indented. And in all honesty, the intention is probably about six feet long and about two and a half feet wide. So I thought, holy crap, there he is. So I started digging. And it's interesting because Tennessee is known for its red clay, which is very hard to dig through. Very tough stuff, very dense. However, since my property was a farm, they had amended the soil and it was very good soil. So not a tremendous amount of red clay. A lot of it was very good stuff. I had the hardest time digging. And I spent hours digging. And I work outside a lot. So it's not like, you know, I'm, you know, some 16 year old 90 pound weakling who does not dig a hole. And I had a hell of a time digging. And which in a way was kind of a good thing, because it gave me some time to think. And I was out there, after about two hours, I was covered in sweat. And I started to think, is this the right thing to do? What, why am I doing this? What's the end gain? Where, what is the expected outcome? And just as quickly as I started, I stopped. It was like a switch had turned off and I, I'm not going to say I lost interest, but I got down about two feet in two hours. And it was not a very large hole. The hole was probably 30 inches diameter. It was not a large hole. And I remember thinking my expectation was to hit possible a coffin lid, but I thought, what if there is no coffin? What if I pull up a rib or something else? Then I would feel really bad. Not to mention that this guy, this thing would be all pissed off at that point, I'm sure. So that's when I started realizing, you know, what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? This is not a way to behave, this isn't appropriate. And I realized, okay, we're done here. So I covered the whole back up. In the following weekend, I was working on one of the tractors. And I was over by the garage. So the garage is adjacent to the house. If you can imagine the house sitting facing east west, the garage faces north-south. So it's 90 degrees to the house and about 40 yards away. So it's a little bit of a distance from the house. I was working on the tractor, I remember exactly what I was doing. I was replacing the fuel filter. And I had my back to the woods facing the road, standing up. And it was like someone poured a bucket of water on me. This sense of fear hit me. And it washed all over me, the likes of which I had never felt before. The only way the best way I can think of is to describe it, is you have a bell in the pivier stomach and someone rings that bell. It just reverberated throughout me. And at that time, I had a wrench in my hand and I stopped what I was doing and I looked straight up away from the tractor. And I realized there was no sound. There were no birds. There was no wind. There were no squirrels. We live on a pretty desolate road, but you still see cars periodically. No cars. There was nothing. It seemed as though everything in the surroundings just froze. I still had my senses about me. I could still hear. And it was so quiet. I have to notice. So I have ring in my ears all the time. It was so quiet that I noticed it. And for whatever reason, I felt like I was compelled to turn around. And I slowly, I knew there was something behind me that I did not want to see. I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was something. And I turned around and I saw the shadow there. And he was standing at the very edge of the woods, looking right at me. I say he was looking at me. He didn't have a face, but I knew he was looking right at me. And I was looking at him. And a couple things happened simultaneously at that point in time. I could see him better than I ever had before. And that's when I noticed the waviness, the shimmering appearance more than ever before. I had mentioned before about touching the pan of water with the ripples. I could really make that out. I could also tell that he was moving. He was swaying side to side all the time. And I realized that he was there to send me a message. I also realized I got the impression he was not allowed out of the woods. That was his boundary. He could not go out of the woods and come into, come closer to the house or get him to the front yard. I don't know how I knew that, but I knew he could not come out of the woods. And he was right there. And he just being there said to me, I'm not going anywhere. And this is my domain. This is my area. These are my woods. The best way I can describe it is if, you know, my mother, she could give me a look like, you know, and you knew what that meant. It was a similar thing. He gave me this look like, and I was like, oh, you're the boss. It was just his presence said everything. And it said it in a very forceful way. And I remember thinking to myself, okay. And the next thing I know, I blinked. He was gone. I was still terrified, but I did not see him. I'm looking around. I don't see anything. I don't see anybody. But then I start hearing birds again. I see some swirls. See a buddy rabbit. A car drives by. Everything. It was like the world had stopped. So he could deliver that message. And then it resumed. That shook me up. That shook me up. I had never experienced anything like this in my life. I am not an ordinary type of person. That terrified me. That really, really did. It was, it left a lasting impression on me that I will never forget. When everything came back and I kind of calmed down, I remember I said out loud, what the fuck was that? And I looked at my tractor and I looked at the woods and I went in the house. And I stayed in the house for probably about, probably about an hour. And I just sat there on the couch and just kind of calmed down. Eventually, I came back outside and out of the front of the house. So front yard is in front of me. Garage is off to the right. And I walked down the steps. And as I'm walking to the garage, I mentioned this about a 40 yard log. The woods is behind me. It's my right. I'm kind of looking over there, thinking to myself, please be gone. Please be gone. Please be gone. And I got down there and I looked around some more. I thought, okay, I think, I think everything's okay. And I went back to work and finished my job. At this point, I was too scared. I, again, you don't know how people are going to react to this kind of thing. I did not want to, but everyone thought I was crazy. I didn't want my wife to worry. I certainly didn't want the kids to worry. Because at the time, we had a young son who we adopted. My wife and I were foster parents for a long time. And we adopted several kids through the foster care system. And I didn't want to scare him. He's a big scaredy cat. So I thought, I'll just keep this to myself and we're going to pretend this never happened. And so the next day, I walked back up to the fence post and I hammered it in deeper and straight. And I backfilled the hole more so it had more dirt on it. And I cleared away all of the leaves. I don't know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do and try to make it nicer. If that is, in fact, a grave. I don't know what truly is. But as a way to say, hey, I'm sorry. I get it. This is your place. Let's, let's be friends. This is going to sound kind of corny, but I felt righteous. I felt like I was what I was doing this the right thing. I was hopeful that this was going to take care of everything. So I, I felt like I was moving, I was doing the, going, moving in the right direction to repair this real, I felt like I was repairing a relationship. And again, I realized what that sounds like, but that's kind of what it felt like. I had done something to slight this individual. I needed to make that right. So I do see it from time to time. Not very often, maybe twice a year. He has not approached me. I have not approached him. He, I allow him to do his thing. He allows me to do mine. And I, there has been no fear. There's been no change in the environment in terms of, you know, to see you still hear the noises of nature. And I, I don't mind if my kids run around in the woods. I'm completely content to let them do that. So I, I think, I would like to think that we've come to some sort of understanding, if you will. So I think, I think we're good. I think we're good. One of the things that I had heard and I have not done any research on this, there is a cemetery that is down the road from, from my house, maybe half a mile. This entire property was once a farm that was owned by one family. It was several thousand acres. That is their family plot. I had heard that, and I have no data to back this up, that if someone commits suicide, they will be buried away from the family. I don't know if this applies here or not, but it's kind of interesting. think about. I don't remember. There's a historic town in Tennessee called Jonesboro. It's the oldest town in Tennessee. And they put on a like a historical festival every fall. And part of that is a series of local storytellers that tell stories about the land and about early settlers and their relationship with the natives and that whole thing. And it was in one of those stories that one of the someone had, one of the locals had a son that committed suicide and because he committed suicide, he wasn't allowed to be buried with his family. He was buried some distance away. But still on the same farm. And I thought that was really interesting. And I meant to follow up with the individual with a storyteller, but I never did. But I thought that was, that's pretty interesting. Again, I'm not saying that that's the case here. I don't, I don't know. All I do know is, I'm not digging anymore holes. And he can do what he wants. And as long she's happy with me, I'll continue doing what I'm doing. So the records are pretty complex because the family, and this is going back to the 1800s, passed down to their children. So those parcels were broken up. As the generations have gone through, parcels have been broken up even further, a lot of them have been sold off. A good chunk of it was purchased by a paper company. It was turned into a tree farm for a number of years. Those that parcel was broken up even further and sold to these other people. I, in the family that I owned, it was a huge family going all the way back to the 1800s. I mean, I think there were 14 brothers and sisters. So in all honesty, I really even wouldn't, I wouldn't know which direction to go. I don't know. And there were multiple families on one parcel of land at one time. And they spread out. It was just, just a whole mess. But you could do that kind of thing in the 1800s and early 1900s. So I really, that is, that would be such an undertaking to do that research, not saying it would be worth it or interesting. I just haven't gone down that rabbit hole. Where everybody's happy, let's not rock the boat. So I'm, well, it would be interesting to learn more about that, that side of things. I am completely content, leaving things the way they are. We still live there. I have actually gone so far as to harvest some of the trees and had them milled in a lumber. And I built my barn with, with the lumber from the trees from the property. I built a coat pen, a goat house, with that same, with that same lumber. So doing all of that, I have trails that go up through the woods. We walk, we, we, you know, take the tractor up there. A lot of times I've topsoil for the garden is needed. I'll go up there. I'll get topsoil or compost. So it's not like we don't do anything with this property. I mean, we, we do things. And I, when I've cut down a number of trees, none of that is seen to have pissed this guy off yet, which is good. So it's just day to day. If you were to come to my house, you would have no idea that any of this had ever transpired. We could walk through the woods and you would be like, well, look there's a fence post. That's stupid. And you wouldn't think twice about it. So it's just kind of business as usual there. I attend a non-denominational Christian church. And when you read the Bible, there are fairly, I don't know if I want to say strict guidelines pertaining to this kind of thing. But there's also a lot of people like to put guardrails up in the, in the realm of Christianity. No, this, this is impossible. It's because of X, Y, and Z. And I don't see it that way. I think there is room for interpretation. My Christian faith does not exclude this, this experience from being real. I mean, obviously, I know it's real. But it, again, as I mentioned before, I'm smart enough to know what I don't know. And there's a lot I don't know. I don't know what this is. I don't know what happened. And I've always been an open-minded person. And this is just another, another reason to maintain that open-mindedness. I will likely never know the history behind all of this. And that's okay. That's okay. There are some things that I'm not knowing. So I just live with it and think of it as a feature of the land. Thank you so much to John for sharing your story with us. I mentioned before that this one really unnerves me because I spend so much of my own time doing random projects in my garage and in my yard. It's kind of a meditative thing for me. And hours can slip by without me realizing it. The idea of something startling me out of that flow state is very terrifying to me. Now, I am sure some people may have been shaking their head while listening to the part where John decided to dig up the grave after finding out what it was. And then halfway through sort of snapping out of it, like, wait, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? From afar, it could seem like such an obviously bad idea. But I think things are a little different when it's on your own land. I understand not only the curiosity, but also the instinct to want to dig when you encounter a literal ex marking the spot. In an older episode of Otherworld, I spoke to an archaeologist who told me how many burial sites are scattered across our land. Way more than any of us could imagine whether or not those burial sites are documented. That conversation has always stuck with me. And beyond that, I was recently reading about how during the Civil War and many wars before it, it was incredibly uncommon for a family to be able to bury the body of their loved one who died in battle unless they lived really close to the battlegrounds. Most of the bodies were buried on the battlegrounds in shallow mass graves or left on the battlefield itself. And back then, even proper burials were commonly done on people's own property in their backyard. This is all to say that John's situation is not uncommon at all. What is uncommon is that this grave was so well marked. And if you ask me that middle post that John found was probably not put there by the person who originally buried this body, I would have to guess that it was probably put there by somebody who previously owned this land, maybe somebody who went through something very similar to John and decided to mark this grave for whoever came later on. No matter the case, I liked the way that John was able to make peace with whatever it was that seemed to exist in the woods on his property out by that post. This place may be John's farm now, but it was many other things before he came along. And I think John being able to cohabitate with whatever this thing is is a pretty fair bargain. This episode has been called The Post and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are The O'Shafer, The O'Krants, Haley Parson, and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by Wicca Phase, Spring's Eternal, Juice Jackle, and North Americans. Our artwork is by Koldasek Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com/otherworld. Our social media is @otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Leah Restennis, Laura Curran, Josephina Frances, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gainer, and Hilary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you can send us your stories at [email protected]. (soft music)