Transcript
Ashley (0:00)
Foreign.
Jack Wagner (0:08)
Welcome to Other World. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. When the email for this next story came in, I'm pretty sure somebody from the team instantly forwarded it to me or sent me a screenshot of it. I'm not sure if they did that because they thought I would find it funny or because they knew it was exactly the type of far out there, absurd story that I can't resist diving into, or both. Either way, this one is indeed weird. And it's weird in a sort of whimsical way that I love certain Otherworld episodes to be. It comes from a woman named Ashley, and she told me that she lives on one of the oldest streets in Toronto and that her apartment building is 120 years old. And her story is a fairly straightforward one about a night when she encountered something very unexpected in her own kitchen. And what she encountered was not something that was there one minute and gone the next. Ashley got a very good long look at this thing. She even sort of interacted with it. And she had a very specific way of describing how it looked, which is what originally caught my attention. I think you'll know what I mean once you hear it for yourself. This episode is called the Kitchen Gnome and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello, is this Bobby?
Ashley (1:42)
Yes, it is.
Jack Wagner (1:43)
At its core, the science you can't argue with, I was worried about is.
Ashley (1:48)
Up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's, I'm going to die.
Jack Wagner (1:52)
Its limbs were just like, wrong.
Ashley (1:55)
Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a bit. So I'm Ashley. I'm from Toronto, Ontario. I work in the music industry. I live in a older house in the city, pretty centralized to downtown. I do do some band management and help organize a festival that happens at the end of May in the city. Very lucky to have this opportunity. I always kind of dreamt of working in the industry and it just kind of fell to the sky for me. So, yeah, happy to be doing it. Really enjoy myself. I'm originally from the east coast, so back in Nova Scotia, you know, it's like a heavy Polish community, a lot of Germanic traditions. So a lot of superstitions did kind of end up coming to me when I was pretty young, listening to my grandmother and her friends talk, talking about, like, signs of death coming, like harbingers of death and like ghosts and mysterious circumstances that they've had. And my parents were actually really into UFOs and paranormal as well. So I kind of like, grew up with like a little introduction to the paranormal and then read deeper into things and ended up really enjoying mythology and old folklore and a lot of it just kind of came naturally to me. And I guess I would say that I have like a pretty reasonable grasp on what's up in that realm. When I was younger, I did explore Wiccan for a little bit there. I just like read books at the library and like even in tempted to like, you know, cleanse my grandmother's apartment at one point, but I kind of moved away from that. But I do feel a certain connection to nature and the earth and the planet and I'm kind of a person that like tends to listen to those messages. So this probably happened sometime in August last year. So August 2025, pretty normal day. I was starting my time at the music industry, so I was just finishing up at another job I had at the time at a barbershop. Coming home at 8 o', clock doing what I normally do. Walk and feed my dog and my cat, make dinner, hang out with my partner, watch something on tv, just get ready for bed and go to bed. Pretty normal August evening, pretty hot. Toronto gets pretty warm. Went to bed without any complications and found myself awake around like, I want to say it was like maybe 3:30 or 4:00am, still pretty groggy, you know, half asleep. My bed is pretty close to the wall, so I kind of have to like, if I'm trying to get out of my bed and if I'm trying to use the washroom, it's like a whole production. Like I have to get out of my bed, walk around my bed, go into my bathroom. So by the time I get to my bathroom, I'm like fully awake. And I head through the door that's leading from my washroom into my kitchen. So I'm grabbing a glass of water, making sure it's pretty cold because it's so hot, like hot August evening. And I'm definitely awake at this point. You know, I can feel like how cold the glass is. And my kitchen has these like really large glass doors that look out onto a small black patio and that's kind of where we park our cars. We have like a small gated parking area. We put our bikes out there and like a fire pit and you know, like our gardening supplies and what have you. So my, my glass doors kind of look out onto that and I immediately look right at my doors and I see that they're open. Kind of terrifying. I don't know how that would happen. Like, we keep things pretty locked up overnight and that's something that we would not forget. Living right in the middle of downtown Toronto. You know, like, there's no way that these doors could have been open, especially because I walked past them before on my way from the bathroom. And there are two reasonably set, like large doors. You wouldn't miss. Like the door opening sound, like that sliding noise, you wouldn't be able to miss it. And there's two doors. So, you know, forgetting one if I did forget makes sense. But forgetting two whole doors, pretty weird. So very bizarre. Like super kind of freaked out at this point. So I noticed something in the corner of my eye and I looked down and standing about 4ft away from me, I would say is this, this small being just looking up at me silently. Something that I can't really describe anything more than a gnome. Never thought in my once in my lifetime that I would come across something like that. So how do you categorize something like that? It wasn't, it's not like it just came into my back door. It was like a couple feet away from my back door. So it was actually like properly in my kitchen. So I can like immediately feel like my hair is standing up. Like I'm getting like goosebumps. And I could just feel like the hairs on my arm kind of lift up while we're like, like eye to eye, like deadlocked looking at each other. It's maybe like a foot, foot and a half tall. And its features are very striking. It's almost like its features were implanted into my brain right away. You know, instead of taking the being in all, it was just like its face. Almost like I zoomed in right on this being's features and its face. Its hair was very, kind of like shoulder length hair, very coarse, gray, brown hair. It was definitely tan. It had some like, almost like it was outside more of like a tan complexion. Its eyes were bright, even though I feel like the eyes themselves might have been brown. But it was just like piercing up at me, like just staring right at me. It almost had like a hawkish features. It had like a really sharp, bigger nose, kind of like a downturned frown, you know, just like didn't look very happy. The creature was kind of wearing this like coarse knit looking almost like a child size, like sweater. And it was gray and black. I was super surprised to see that it like had some kind of repeating pattern on it. There's like things that I like kind of made up in my mind of why it would have like a knit horizontal striped sweater. I'm just like, assuming it, like, stole it from like, an actual, like, baby or like, like a small child or something. Because that, to me is the only probable way that it could have this sweater. It just looked like, definitely used, you know, I think there was definitely some, like, dirt and twigs in it. Some like, dirty canvas, like heavy material pants that kind of looked like it might have stitched itself, but hard to tell, you know, I was just like, so captivated by its face. Like I was taking in the look of this thing. But I, like I said, like, I was almost like hypnotized by its eyes.