The Hat Man Project Project [Patreon Preview]

Summary

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Otherworld – "The Hat Man Project Project" [Patreon Preview]

Host: Jack Wagner
Guest: Tim (former operator of the Hatman Project)
Date: July 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this Patreon bonus episode, Jack Wagner gives listeners an inside look at an unexpected side quest: the attempted rescue of the "Hatman Project," a website that spent nearly two decades archiving people's encounters with the infamous paranormal entity known as the Hat Man. When Wagner discovers the site has been lost—along with its database of thousands of submitted stories—he contacts Tim, the site's founder, to learn what happened and whether anything can be salvaged.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Hat Man Project—A Brief History

• The Hatman Project was a long-running website that collected and archived stories about the mysterious Hat Man phenomenon.
• Operated by Tim, a pastor whose own experiences with the paranormal led him to launch the site nearly 20 years ago.
• The database grew to thousands of stories and became a major repository for this unique subject matter.

Jack:
"[Tim] runs a website called the Hatman Project. For around 18 years, this guy has been archiving people's experiences with the Hat man on a very simple website." [02:17]

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2. The Website’s Disappearance & Loss of Data

• Listeners and fans alerted Jack that the Hatman Project website was not only down but, according to Tim’s Facebook, completely lost.
• Despite prior downtime, this event was different: 18 years of data vanished, with no apparent backup.

Jack:
"Not only did he lose the website, he lost all of the submissions associated with it. 18 years of stories submitted by thousands of people." [04:26]

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3. Technical Struggles, Mysterious Setbacks, and Closing the Chapter

• Tim recounts repeated technical failures and attacks over the years; hacking, corrupted databases, and inexplicable issues have plagued the site.
• The latest server failure (via GoDaddy) proved final, with all data unrecoverable even after hiring forensic recovery services.
• Tim notes an eerie pattern of unexplained setbacks tied to the project, humorously invoking the 'entity' itself.

Tim:
"I would say it has to do with the entity itself. My wife can attest anytime I've ever tried to get deeply into it... there's always been strange, mysterious things that have happened around it." [07:13]

• Tim expresses peace with closing the project—a sense that his personal research is complete and a desire to move on to other phases in life.

Tim:
"I am ready to move on from it... I got to the point where I kind of came to my conclusions and my research was done. And that was a long time ago." [09:21]

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4. The Scale of the Loss

• Over 10,000 stories lost at one point; after a major earlier reset, new submissions rebuilt the database up to several thousand more.
• Tim mentions regular backups, but even those frequently failed when most needed—a pattern that seems almost supernatural itself.

Tim:
"Yeah, I had a backup and the backup failed. So this weird stuff like that would always happen." [11:51]

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5. The Quest for Restoration – Is There Hope?

• Jack offers help, including rallying the show's audience and exploring tech solutions like the Wayback Machine.
• Tim confirms that some archives do survive in the Wayback Machine, and he still has a (non-functioning) backup file from 2023, though he insists he’s ready to move on.
• He’s open to someone technically skilled attempting to recover the stories if possible.

Tim:
"If they want to take a stab at it and see if... the content's there, there should be quite a few stories in it. But like I said, it would be as of 2023." [12:35]

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6. Reflections on the Hat Man Phenomenon

• The Hat Man remains a highly active subject: story submissions have, if anything, increased over the past five years.
• Tim might write a book on his work one day—“if the Lord lets me do it”—but for now, he's entering a new chapter of life and learning.

Tim:
"I'm almost 50 years old, and I'm in a situation where I'm back in school, I'm learning some new things... If the Lord lets me do it, then I'll do it." [10:30]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On mysterious technical sabotage:
  "There's always been strange, mysterious things that have happened around it, so..."
  —Tim [07:15]

• On story submissions:
  "There's more stories now than there ever has been... I had only been seeing an increase in stories over the last five years."
  —Tim [11:23]

• On the website's demise & story preservation:
  "It's too bad because I feel like I wish you could at least have your own copy just to have it, you know."
  —Jack [12:22]

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Important Timestamps

• [01:31] Introduction to bonus episode and recap of past "Man in the Hat" episodes
• [05:49] Jack calls Tim to discuss the website's disappearance
• [07:13] Tim discusses longstanding strange problems with the website
• [08:51] Discussion about what remains preserved via the Wayback Machine
• [09:21] Tim's reasons for closing the project and reflections on moving on
• [11:23] Continued influx of Hat Man stories, more than ever in recent years
• [11:51] The backup file and hopes for possible future recovery

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Tone & Style

The episode is marked by Jack Wagner’s trademark blend of curiosity, empathy, and gentle humor—a respectful yet warm tone, with space for introspective remarks by Tim. There’s an understated poignancy as the discussion winds from the thrill of investigation to the melancholy of lost history and the peace of letting go.

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Summary

“The Hat Man Project Project” is a sober, reflective, and deeply human look at the end of a paranormal research era. It captures the fragility of internet archives, the power of community memory, and the personal cost and fulfillment found in chronicling the unknown. For listeners familiar with the Hat Man or new to the phenomenon, this episode provides both closure and an intriguing open call: perhaps the stories are gone from the web, but the encounter—and the mystery—continues.

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Transcript

[Jack Wagner]

This episode is brought to you by Quints.

Summer is officially here, folks. Normally at this time I would be on quints.com maybe buying myself a new set of swim shorts, some fine linen polos, getting ready to enjoy a vacation on the beach somewhere, looking like the talented Mr. Ripley out there in a flowing linen wardrobe in the south of France.

Perhaps.

But life has different plans for me this summer. I am instead painting a child's bedroom, about to become a father very shortly. Luckily, the folk at Quint have been very helpful. They actually sent over a very nice

box of stuff for my little guy.

They sent over a bunch of 100% organic cotton kimono bodysuits. They sent over a Mongolian cashmere baby blanket that is very comfortable.

I'm kind of jealous of the baby.

I hope they sell an adult version

of this blanket because I kind of want one.

We have gotten so much nice stuff from Quince which has made life very easy for me. Thank you so much to Quince. Quince works directly with ethical factories, cutting out the middlemen to keep prices 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They even do home and travel favorites make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quint.com otherworld for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com otherworld for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com otherworld.

Welcome to the Otherworld Patreon. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This week a bonus episode about a little project I got myself into recently. That's something that happens quite often to me, getting pulled into weird little projects. I wasn't even sure that this would become an episode, but luckily here we are. Some of you will remember in the

early days of the show we had

an episode called the man in the Hat. One of my favorite episodes. It was actually two episodes about a pair of brothers who saw the Hat man, which is probably one of the most well known modern entities that people talk about these days. I can't even tell you how many submissions we've gotten about the Hat man after those episodes came out. In fact, I've wanted to make a follow up to those episodes, but I mean we have seriously gotten so many submissions. Not just an email. I had family members reaching out to me after those episodes came out saying that they had seen that and so I'd love to do a follow up, but I guess it's just a matter of figuring out how to top those first episodes. Anyway, if you remember those episodes, you'll know that in them, I talked to a man named Tim who runs a website called the Hatman project. For around 18 years, this guy has been archiving people's experiences with the Hat man on a very simple website. Tim is a pastor. In fact, I believe he became a pastor because of his own experiences with the Hat Man. Anyway, that episode was probably four years ago, but recently I started getting emails from people about the website. People were telling me that the Hatman Project website was down, which initially confused me. Websites go down all the time for short periods. It's pretty normal. And I wasn't sure why people were telling me, by the way, shout out to anyone who checks the Hatman Project website frequently enough to notice that there was an outage. But anyway, eventually somebody sent me an email clarifying that not only was the website down, the website was completely lost, along with all the data, and that Tim had posted something on Facebook saying that it would not be coming back. Not only did he lose the website, he lost all of the submissions associated with it. 18 years of stories submitted by thousands of people. When I saw that email, I finally understood the situation. By the way, shout out to a listener named Lily for sending it in to me. And the idea of all those encounters being lost really bothered me. Not only just for his records, but also losing 18 years worth of work. That's horrible. I love a good sidequest. And I realized that I had Tim's number still, so I figured I would just try giving him a call out of the blue to see if there was some way that I could help save this website. I wasn't sure if he would answer

or if I would even be able

to fix it, but I thought I would at least try giving him a call and recording the process as I went. So that's what this episode is. I haven't really thought of a name for this one yet, but I think we'll just call it the Hatman Project Project. This is just a short preview, but

if you want to hear the whole

episode, it's available [e-mail] otherworld and you're listening to the Otherworld.

Patre. Hello? Hey, is this Tim?

[Tim]

This is he. How can I help you, sir?

[Jack Wagner]

My name is Jack Wagner.

I actually interviewed you a few years ago for my show Otherworld. I don't know if you remember that.

[Tim]

Oh, hey, how are you?

[Jack Wagner]

I'm good. How are you?

[Tim]

I'm doing pretty good, man.

[Jack Wagner]

I just. I've been receiving a few Emails from our listeners. I saw the news about the website and I. I just wanted to give you a call and see what happened.

[Tim]

Yeah. So, long story short, Anytime. Anytime, brother. Over the last, I don't know how many years now, over 20 years that I've worked on the project, it's always been the same kind of thing. I'll have one hiccup after another. Databases will get lost, I'll get hacked. And I had been contemplating shutting down the, the research anyway because I had gotten done and I was moving on to different phase and time in my life. And we had Another situation with GoDaddy where the server went down, mysteriously went down again. And so we worked with them and I paid all the fees or whatever to get the databases back and it was gone. So we lost everything again. And this time around I decided to go ahead and shut down the research

[Jack Wagner]

and GoDaddy, they just didn't have anything.

[Tim]

Yeah, that's. They didn't have anything. We even paid for their forensic service to go back and try to retrieve the databases and everything was gone. So, you know, it's weird. I would say it has to do with the entity itself. My wife can attest anytime I've ever tried to get deeply into it. And there's always been strange, mysterious things that have happened around it, so. But I'm ready to move on to a different stage of my life anyway. And I really would like to write the book, but I just don't know when I can. But yeah, as far as the research for the Hatman project, we've already closed everything down.

[Jack Wagner]

The database.

I mean, you said you lost it a couple times. Was it mostly just text based stories?

[Tim]

Yes, over the years, when I started that thing back in 2006, 2008, somewhere around there, it was always just people sending us stories. A lot of times early on we had WordPress databases and they would get corrupted, they would get hacked and I had copies. Sometimes the copies would get messed up. There was one point where we lost everything and we had to start completely over. So we started collecting stories again. We had up to almost 10,000 stories on the first go and then they got completely compromised when we started over. We started over back in like 10,000, 2010, something like that, and you know, had another few thousand stories that came in from there. I still had all my data points that I had researched on my end, but I didn't have the stories. And so after this latest attempt or whatever to retrieve everything, like I said, we decided to go ahead and close it down.

[Jack Wagner]

And you've. Sorry, I've got so many questions, but, you know, the Wayback Machine seems to back up most sections of websites. Have you looked at on there to see?

[Tim]

Yeah, there's. There's. There's several there. Yeah, yeah. The Wayback Machine, if you want to dig there, still has a lot of old snapshots of the website and several. Several of the stories. I think you can still access that from that website. Yes.

[Jack Wagner]

Hmm. I mean, because, yeah, when I. When I saw your post, part of me was wondering, I'm like, man, is he just kind of ready to move on from this for. For whatever reason? And, like, this is just a happy excuse, or is this something that you actually would love to get it back up?

[Tim]

No, no, I am ready to move on from it. I. I have been thinking about it for a long time, and, you know, after I did a lot of my research and, you know, came up with, you know, my own conclusions, it was really always at the beginning. It was just trying to share, you know, what I was learning in my journey as I was trying to understand this thing and, you know, help others along the way. And I got to the point where I kind of came to my conclusions and my research was done. And that was a long time ago. So when this latest thing happened, so, yeah, I decided to go ahead and shut it down.

[Jack Wagner]

Okay. Interesting. I mean, part of why I was calling was I was like, if you

needed help, I'd be happy to use the powers of the show to try

to bring this back or, you know,

whatever you would need help with.

I'm happy to help.

[Tim]

No, I appreciate it. Thank you. And I've had some others reach out, too. I have a family member of mine that's obsessed with that man. She wanted to go ahead and try to get it back up and running, but like I said, I just. I'm ready to move on.

[Jack Wagner]

Yeah, I mean, it's been a very long project.

So are you leaving the Hat man behind entirely?

Or you think you might do the book one day or I may do

[Tim]

the book one day again. I'm just in such a different phase of life right now. I'm almost 50 years old, and I'm in a situation where I'm back in school, I'm learning some new things, and so just. I don't know anything anytime soon for that. So if. If the Lord lets me do it, then I'll do it.

[Jack Wagner]

Yeah, no, I. Trust me, I get it. I mean, even just four years into this show, I'm like, it kind of weighs on you after a while, so I don't blame you.

[Tim]

I can't imagine with you, you're having to always come up with content. How often is your shows at weekly?

[Jack Wagner]

Yep. But luckily there's a lot of submissions.

[Tim]

Well, that's good. That's good. And there's certainly no shortage of hat man stories, you know, not at all. The one that I was talking to the other day that wanted to kind of restart it and get it going again, they were asking about the stories, and I said, there's more stories now than there ever has been. You know why? When I quit, when we. When we finally shut the website down, I had only been seeing an increase in stories over the last five years. So it's definitely a very current happening phenomenon. Still,

[Jack Wagner]

one last question about the website. Like, was.

Was it a WordPress database?

Like, what. What was the thing you were trying to rescue? Yeah, it was a WordPress database and it just disappeared.

[Tim]

Yeah, and I had a backup. People ask me about the backups. Yeah, I had a backup and the backup failed. So this weird stuff like that would always happen.

[Jack Wagner]

Do you still have the backup of the way?

[Tim]

I still have the backup as of 2023, but it won't work. I have everything backed up from the beginning when we. When we restarted it, when we started recoiling. Oh, is it. Oh, yeah, I do need to go. Okay. Yeah, I still have that backup, but it doesn't work.

[Jack Wagner]

Huh.

Okay, well, I'll think about this.

I mean, it's too bad because I

feel like I wish you could at

least have your own copy just to have it, you know, but.

[Tim]

Yeah, well, if somebody could get the backup to work, maybe I'll find.

[Jack Wagner]

Maybe I'll be able to find somebody

that could work on it for you.

[Tim]

Well, yeah, if they want. If they want to take a stab at it and see if. Even if the content's there, there should be quite a few stories in it. But like I said, it would be as of 2023.

[Jack Wagner]

Yeah, that's when.

Is it on a hard drive or something?

[Tim]

I just have it on a zip file here on my computer. But I'm actually up against a hard break. I've got to go to a meeting here.

[Jack Wagner]

Yeah, go for it.

Go for it.

[Tim]

Send me an email and I can take a look. Yeah.

[Jack Wagner]

All right.

I'm glad you're doing good.

Sorry about the website and I'll talk to you soon.

[Tim]

Okay, thanks, man.

[Jack Wagner]

See you later.

[Tim]

Bye.

[Jack Wagner]

Bye.

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