Ghosts, cryptids, and Chicago

The Otherworld podcast explores the city’s stranger side.

By MEGAN KIRBY

When Jack Wagner was 15, he made a documentary about the haunting of Wheaton’s Grand Theatre. Built in 1925, the historic theater went through several identities over the decades (including an aughts-era punk venue where Wagner’s band played). When he showed up with his camera, the owner shut Wagner and his buddies in the empty theater—and turned out the lights. And Wagner swears that he saw something moving as he looked up toward the ceiling—some- thing he couldn’t explain. He recorded the experience, but when he tried to upload the video files, his computer kept crashing.

“I remember getting myself scared in a way where I sort of left the paranormal behind,” he said. “I just opted out.”

That is, until he launched the paranormal podcast Otherworld in 2022. Now, researching supernatural stories is Wagner’s full-time job. Episodes chronicle first-person accounts about unexplainable phenomena: ghosts, aliens, cryptids, and beyond. And even though Wagner left Chicago for Los Angeles in 2014, the show has told several Chicagoland stories, including a “Chicago Tales” episode that delves into three stories adjacent to the Windy City.

Otherworld began as a segment on Yeah

But Still, a popular Patreon show that Wagner hosted with Brandon Wardell. In October 2020, Wagner asked listeners to email him spooky stories for a Halloween episode, and

The podcast’s 14th episode, “Chicago Tales,” tells three stories from the area: a UFO sighting in Beverly, a Mothman encounter in Elgin, and a Chicagoland woman who has been haunted by the same ghost since she was a teenager. Sometimes, the podcast is the first time the subjects have discussed their stories in depth.

Wagner says that when something unexplainable happens to someone, they often want to forget it and move on with their lives. It took some finessing to convince the Mothman source to come on the air. “If you saw the Mothman one time, what do you do with that?” Wagner asked. “You just put it away in the filing cabinet.”

Ultimately, that reluctance made the story more authentic. The source didn’t seek out the unexplainable; the unexplainable found him. “That’s the funny thing about Chicago stories, to me—the power of the Chicago brain to ignore something bonkers right in front of their face,” Wagner said. “It’s the midwest stubbornness, you know?”

Jessi Czarnowski appears in the third segment of “Chicago Tales,” describing a haunting she’s experienced her whole life. When she was a teenager, her family moved into a house in Glen Ellyn where strange things began to happen: odd sounds, disembodied voices, and nights when she would wake up with her sheets tucked tight around her body in bed. She learned that a teen girl named Christina had lived in the house before and had died in a car accident. And ever since then, Czarnowski swears that Christina has followed her through life—perhaps out of yearning for college, romance, motherhood, and the other worldly milestones she never got to experience.

Otherworld is the first time Czarnowski told her story on record, and she’s grateful for the experience. She feels a camaraderie with other subjects who have appeared on the show. “Even if you don’t believe it, this is still such a huge part of our lives,” she said. “It happened to us. We experienced it. Jack does a great job of getting the listener to understand that.”

Once, a medium approached Czarnowski in public to confirm Christina’s presence. She has spoken to the spirit in dreams. And she finds that the more she talks about Christina, the more things occur. In fact, after she recorded the podcast episode, she visited her parents to listen together. When they were standing in the living room, something strange happened. “There’s this old music box that plays a creepy little tune,” she said. “All of a sudden, it played