Otherworld - Episode 131: Faceless Face

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Karlina and her mother move into a beautiful new home nestled in the rural Ozarks. What starts as a beautiful fresh start, turns sour when Karlina hears strange knocking sounds echoing through the walls and starts feeling watched through the house’s many windows, especially after dark. The unsettling occurrences escalate when one night, Karlina is left alone and finally comes face to face with the source of the mystery. Check out our Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For business inquiries contact: [e-mail] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode comes from a woman named Carlina. She's lived in many places throughout her life, and as a result, she has one of those accents that is a little difficult to pin down, which I always find very fascinating. Carlina, and especially her mother, grew up with very difficult circumstances, including poverty and domestic abuse, but luckily, her mom was able to, escape this, put herself through medical school, and eventually become a doctor, and buy herself a very large multi-bedroom house in the Ozarks, far away from pretty much anything.

This house, like many rural houses, is miles and miles away from the nearest human being, and while this type of isolation can be very relaxing, it's also very unsettling at times. for instance, knowing that you're an hour from the nearest police station. This episode is called Faceless Face, and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello? Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue.

I'm worried about all the science. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm literally. I'm going to die. It's limbs were just like, wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it's just, takes that a bit. Hi, I'm Karolina. I'm 26 years old. I've had a bit of an interesting life. When I was a bit younger, I lived in the evangelical Christian part of the United States. And so that was a really big part of my worldview and how I understood, I mean, the world, but also

the other world, so to speak. But as I've gotten older, I went through a process of deconstructing my fate. And now, I don't really have, I mean, I will listen to things like Otherworld or other ghost shows or things like this because it's fun and it makes me think. But it's not something that necessarily has informed my worldview for a really long time. And I've gotten to a point where I'm comfortable with not knowing because I can't know and I won't know. I've had a bit of an interesting life. I always felt like I had sort of my feet planted in two very different worlds. I had sort of on the one hand or the one foot, I have immense privilege.

I have lived in seven countries. I speak three languages fluently. I have a master's degree. On the other hand, I had this other foot planted in a world that was a lot darker. I was born into poverty, and the poverty that my mother was born into was so much worse. I mean, she didn't have running water in the house growing up. And we remark regularly that the life that we have today and the life that she has given me is not the life that maybe we were supposed to have. And there's just sort of a lot that comes with making a journey like that.

I don't know, it changes you sort of on a fundamental level. It makes you somewhat of a different person. And in my background, my biological father was very abusive and just changed. generally not a good person or a good man. And it all got very explosive one day in particular with an outburst of domestic gun violence where my mom and I were literally thrown out of our house by a SWAT team. And just from there, we kind of created our own life for ourselves. We created a different last name that we go by. Like I said, you know, we've lived in a bunch of different places. And my mom went to medical school as a single mother with me. And because we didn't really

have a lot of familial support or resources to rely on, I tended to go to medical school with her. And those are some of my absolute fondest memories is studying with her, going through her medical textbooks with her, going to classes with her. So yeah, the Christianity and religious beliefs or something that we really heavily relied on. Growing up was a really, really big part of our world, both of us together, and making sense of the sorts of things that had happened to us or would still happen to us or anything like that.

When I was a little bit older, we moved to this place in the rural Ozarks. And I still remember the first day that we visited the house just when we were looking at it to consider buying. it because it was so beautiful the land that it was on because it was this house at the very back of almost like 20 acres. And I didn't even have to really see the house. As soon as I saw the land, it was just something that I knew. I wanted to live there. I loved it. It was so beautiful. I still have this image in my head of kind of the way that the weather was where it was sort of cloudy

and overcast, but with just enough sunlight peeking through that it shone really beautifully, like reflecting off of the really tall grasses that were sort of like swaying in the wind. And it's just such, such a specific image that I've never kind of gotten out of my head. It was a house that had the main story, but then it had a basement under it. On the main story, you had the living room and my parents' bedroom that were attached to this deck on the backside of the house. And the deck was like on top of where you would walk out into the backyard downstairs. There were windows all on like the deck and downstairs anywhere that it opened out, just a lot of windows. I also had two bedrooms because this was a really decently sized house.

It was quite big actually. It was a house that had seven bedrooms, but we sort of finished the basement, so we put in some of those bedrooms. The house was situated at the very back of the property, and on three sides of the house, it had little wooded areas. And it had this really long driveway to connect to the gravel road that it was on. It was in a pretty rural area. We did have a few neighbors that you could walk to my house in maybe like 15 minutes or so. but I mean the land itself was big enough that just going up our driveway took a decent amount of time. And if you wanted to get up our driveway as well, we had like a, with a car, we had some sort of sensor that could tell whenever a car was coming up the driveway.

And otherwise, the only other way is that you could get to the house were through these like wooded areas, through pastures where I had horses or through this sort of area where there's this creek. So pretty rural. I mean, it was rural enough that it would take the police an hour to get there if you called them. But it wasn't completely middle of nowhere either. It was so enchanting. But some sort of weird things had kind of started almost as soon as we moved in. It was one of those things where all of my friends that I was making in the new place could also feel sort of uncomfortable. And all of them at some point or another sort of film.

put off by my house. It started with knocking. There would be this knocking sound on the glass doors and the glass windows of the house. And we didn't have any bushes or anything like up against the doors and the windows that the knocking would occur on. It would occur sometimes on like the sliding glass doors that we had or something like that where there's nothing in front of it, nothing next to it on top of it. There was nothing that I could reasonably think was making the sounds. And it always sounded, for lack of a better word, intelligent. It was usually an odd number, either three, five, or seven. And it was always just very rhythmic. It was like if somebody were just coming to knock on the door and just be like, like something like that, like very,

it sounded very human. It sounded intentional. And I think that's what made me so uncomfortable about it because it felt like it wanted me to know that it was there. it felt like it wanted to scare me and my mom got the same feeling and my friends got the same feeling. It seemed to be quite relative to where I was in the house as well. So, for example, if I was upstairs in the living room, then the knocking would never happen on the windows in the living room. It would always come from usually the windows downstairs. So on nights that it was more active maybe if I were sitting upstairs in the upstairs living room, then I would hear knocking on my upstairs bedroom window, which opened out to the front yard.

But on nights where it was maybe a little bit more tame, if I were downstairs, then I would hear the knocking on my upstairs bedroom. And as well, it seemed to pick up in activity when I was home alone or when my parents were out. My mom noticed the knocking, and she had heard it, and all of my friends had heard it, but it happened the least when my parents were around. And then it would happen a lot when I was in the house with maybe my friends, but it was especially active when I was home alone. And I just, I always felt watched and like seeing in this house.

And I think it kind of makes sense why, because if you, if you think about kind of like the layout of the land and the house, it's this huge property in a relatively rural area, you know, in the clearing basically of some trees and forest. And whenever it's dark at night and all of the lights are on in this house, just shining through these windows, it's like a big beacon of light in the middle of like a really dark sea. It, I guess, maybe made sense that I always felt uncomfortable because it's just so visible. I had a friend that came to visit me from four hours away, and I didn't tell her about everything that was happening in the house. And so I had a second bedroom downstairs, and that's usually where I slug. And that bedroom also had a really big window.

And I always felt really uncomfortable on dressing in that room. Because even though that side of the house only opened up into like this wooded area, that was still property that we owned, probably the most difficult part of the property to access, we always, we always felt watched. And I wasn't the only one that felt that way. My friends felt that way. It was something that was just ubiquitous. We all understood.

But when my friend came, I thought, you know, maybe I'm just being crazy. I didn't tell her any of it. She felt so unbelievably uncomfortable with all of this. And she was also there one night when the knocking was particularly crazy. And it freaked her out so much that she insisted that I hang up like this big heavy quilt on my window. Because she felt so seen. She felt like we were being watched the entire time. And she just, I don't know, I never took that quilt down either because it honestly gave me a lot of peace as well.

there was this one night that I was at home alone because my parents would sometimes go out of town. There was another town about an hour, an hour and a half away. And my family had friends there, and they would go spend time with them about once a month or so. So I was completely home alone. And things were just really, really crazy this night. The knocking was particularly intense. And no matter where I was in the house, it seemed to get a lot closer to me. So I started out upstairs and I heard the knocking downstairs.

And of course it made me uncomfortable and uneasy. It always did. But I was just trying to ignore it because I was thinking, you know, if I act afraid, then maybe that'll give it some energy. And I don't want that. But then I got a lot more scared whenever it came upstairs and I could hear it knocking on my upstairs bedroom window. and it always stayed out of sight.

It was never in any of the windows that were within my eyeline, but it moved upstairs and started to knock on my upstairs bedroom window. All night as well, my dog was super agitated. He would not leave my side, and I knew I wasn't crazy because he would always react to the same things that I was experiencing. And so I'm downstairs just in my bed, trying as hard as I can to ignore everything that's going on here, when I can hear upstairs on the deck these heavy footsteps. And I can hear it just heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe,

heavy boots. Like, it was obvious that they were cowboy boots, just with how thick that heel was and how that toe came down. It was these heavy cowboy boots. And my dog immediately just junks up, races upstairs. And he, I mean, he's a big dog. He might look a little bit scary, but I never knew him to be anything other than a little bit protective over me. He's a very goofy, silly, cuddly dog.

And he's just making these sounds that I have never before or since heard him make. but he's just going off at whatever it is that he sees on the deck upstairs. I'm absolutely terrified because I'm, I mean, I'm a teenage girl at home alone in a rural area. It takes an hour for the police to come if I need them, because I'm thinking at this point that this is a human, and they're coming to hurt me and take advantage of my vulnerability in this situation. They've seen that my parents are not home, and right now everything that is standing between me and this, what I assume as a person, is my dog. And thank God, you know.

Like, thank God I had him. I didn't want to go upstairs to check it out because my biggest fear is always that I'm going to see something. I really, I don't like fear. I don't like being afraid. If something is happening around me, then I can just sort of try to accept it as much as I can, rationalize it, intellectualize it.

But if I see it, it kind of forces me, to accept that something is happening, and that absolutely freaks me out. So I did not want to go out upstairs for anything. But the crazy thing is that I only heard those four footsteps, the really heavy footsteps. I didn't hear it come up the stairs to the deck, and I didn't hear it go down the stairs to the deck to leave. It was like it just sort of appeared on the deck, took a couple of steps, and was deterred by my dog. and just, like, banished.

I felt so much better after he came back downstairs, because I knew if my dog is, like, coming back from that and he's willing to, like, leave what's up there to come back down to me, then that means that it's gone. And he still wants to protect me. Basically, whatever threat was up there, he didn't feel was there anymore or was a threat anymore, well, per se, because he still came downstairs,

and he was super, super agitated, like, even worse than he was before. and he would not leave my side all night. And all night, like, neither of my dogs wanted to go outside. All of my animals were acting weird. I did eventually go upstairs because I called my parents and I told them about this because I was thinking like, this is still just a person. And my mom was like, okay, you can either call the police or, I mean, you know where the gun is. And I did not want to, I don't like guns.

I don't want to, I mean, I'm a victim of gun violence, you know? I don't want to be anywhere near any of those things, but I did decide ultimately that I was going to go upstairs because I was thinking if I have to go upstairs, I'm at least closer to the things that I can use to protect myself and my car keys and, you know, all of these things. My parents said, you know, you can call. Let's just call him Jerry. He was our neighbor. Usually whenever he came, he came with a car.

call Jerry, have him come out and take a look and see if there's anyone around. Because we were kind of thinking maybe we did have somebody sort of like camping out in the woods and watching me. So whenever we would have nights like this, where I would have the knocking be really crazy and my dogs would be super on edge, we would call Jerry to have him come out, kind of patrol to see if he could find anyone. And he never did. Same. thing happened this night. I saw him come up with his truck. He walks around the property, around the backyard and the front yard, and looks a bit into the woods and everything. And he comes upstairs to tell me like, hey, I really don't see anything. And this is like,

I call him probably once a month to come check. And so he's admittedly a bit annoyed. He still does it anyway, but it's just like, there's nothing here. You're perfectly fine. Chill. So he got back in his truck and he went home. During all of this, I was still trying to think of some sort of human explanation because that felt more plausible to me. Even if it was something that I believed in more than maybe I believe in it now, I was still searching for some sort of explanation for it. And so I kind of got to this point that night where I was like, well, shit, you know, maybe there really is something. Because I remember being on the phone with my mom and telling her, I didn't hear it leave. I didn't hear whatever was on the deck. I didn't hear it get onto the deck

and I didn't hear it leave the deck. And this is a long deck, you know, you would take a lot more than four steps to get to the point on the deck where I heard it. Because it was in the middle of the deck and the deck was quite long. My mom says, okay, like, you know, we're going to come home quite soon, but just stay upstairs, keep all of the lights on, you know, keep yourself close to your car keys and all of the things that you have sort of to defend yourself in case, you know, in case this really is something that's going to come inside and hurt you, basically. And so I'm just, I'm on my parents' bed. And my parents' bed, like when you sit on it, you're facing this wall that also has these like French doors on it that open onto the deck. And the French doors are almost entirely glass. And they did put up a privacy film on it, so it sort of blurs the image on the other side, but you can still see shapes and colors and contrasts, shadows and light. And again, that opens out onto the deck. And so I'm just sitting

on my parents' bed, and I've got my dog, he's calmed down a little bit, because at this point, ever since the footsteps came, the knocking completely stopped. So my dog is a little bit calmer, but he still won't go outside, neither will my other dog. My cat is hiding somewhere. Just none of my animals are acting right still. And my dog is just situated on top of me. And he, he won't leave, not even to do his little patrols. He just has his face, you know, on the wall facing the doors to the room, basically, just making sure that I'm safe. And I'm just scrolling through my phone, trying as hard as I can to be calm. When I hear my dog, just like before, I'm hearing him make a sound that I've never heard

him make before or since, but it's a different sound. It's really low, and it's really scary. The sounds before, it felt it sounded like he was going to tear that person to shreds. You know, it was very high energy. So it was sort of snarling and squealing, but also like screeching. like barking really, really loudly. But this was, this was something else entirely.

His hackles, like, they went up, but he kept his head, like, really low. And it was more just maybe like a warning sound or an expression of his fear and discomfort maybe trying to alert me. And his whole body is just tense. And I can feel, because he's a very muscular dog, I can feel it.

Like he's sitting on top of me. I can feel it under my legs. His whole body tends up. And I look up. And in the door, the glass of the door, I see a face. But there isn't a face. It's just close enough that I can tell that it is pressed up against that glass. It is right there. It's completely smooth. There's nothing. It's just this skin-colored all of your blob right there. And I am, again, just paralyzed. I'm breathless right now, just thinking about it. It was petrifying. And my dog is still making this noise and so tightly wound, but he's not moving a muscle either. it was short, it was small. You know, it didn't come very high.

It was probably shorter than I am. And it felt feminine, which is strange because all of the other things that I had experienced in this house and all of the other things like that night or before, the knocking, the footsteps, all of it felt masculine. And the knocking, it didn't feel benign. It didn't feel good.

But it felt mischievous. It felt like it was toying with me. But this thing, it wasn't just the way that it looked. It was the way that it felt as well. It felt so disgusting. It just felt dark and gross. And like it wanted me to see it. I actually got a distinct feeling that it had been looking at me.

Maybe my dog had only noticed like a few. before I did, but it just felt like whenever I saw it, it just, it felt like it had been there a while. And it felt like it was just, it was very obviously just looking directly at me. All right, we'll be right back, but we'll be right back with the rest of the story. I've tried to remember if I could make out the silhouette of a body as well underneath it. and I've genuinely asked myself this question a lot when I think about this event. And I don't remember. I couldn't tell you because I was just laser-focused on the face.

I was looking for the shadows. I was looking for the contours of a face, and I was just in shock that I couldn't find them. It didn't make a sound. It didn't turn. It just backed away slowly and disappeared. entirely, just in front of my eyes, just dissolved, basically. I don't really remember what happened the rest of the night, to be completely honest. The main thought that I do remember having was, I'm so glad that my dog was here, because if he hadn't reacted, I would have thought I was going insane.

That was just the thing that I kept on thinking about was kind of feeling like that didn't actually happen. I didn't actually see that because I, I mean, back then I definitely believed in like a spiritual world more than I do now. But I didn't really believe that people saw things. I didn't think that you would see something. You know, I thought, okay, maybe these forces exist. And so it was just sort of this, I guess, like challenging of that perspective and genuinely grateful that my dog was there and thinking, was I hallucinating my dog's reaction?

Like that's really what the spiral was was for me. It honestly was less about the fear and more about the sort of what does this mean? What would the purpose be to come up to the window, right? Because realistically, there are other windows in this house that you could, if you just want to, if you want to be a keeping Tom, if you just want to leer, if you want to case the house, if you want to see what we've got going on in the house, then. And I mean, we've got plenty of windows for you to do that. But this one in particular, with me being inside and you can sort of see from the outside of this house, because of all of the windows, my movement through the house, like to press yourself up against that glass, it feels more to me that you're wanting to be seen rather than you wanting to see. I guess my family came home and I told my mom about it and she took it pretty seriously because like she had kind of also seen and encountered some of the things that I had seen

and encountered and some things of her own as well. So she took it seriously. But I mean, what was there to be done? You know? I think that had the faceless face not appeared, I would have just assumed and rationalized it to myself for the rest of my life that those footsteps, steps that I heard were actually a person. But I think that with the, with the face, or lack thereof, it sort of recontextualizes that and it sort of recontextualizes everything else that happened in

that house. And that was sort of the conclusion that we had come to that night. I think she did reassure me and say, look, clearly it can't get in. Clearly it is something that is taunting you and is targeting you and is praying on you, but it can't hurt you, it can't get in. All that it can do is scare you. So we kind of left it up that, I guess, after a while. I know that since I left that house, nothing has ever happened to me since. But I don't remember if, like, the knocking ever came back, for example. I just knew that, like, from then on, I was sick of living there, and whenever it was time for us to leave, I was certainly, certainly happy to leave. life just sort of continued.

Life was incredibly heavy and incredibly hectic at that time. And I think it was just a sense of acceptance of, you know, for me, I don't think that I necessarily ever have feared that any of these things would actually cause harm, to be honest. I've never feared them in the sense of, you know, I'm going to be hurt. It's more, I don't want to be afraid. I don't like the sensation of fear. And I don't like being freaked out. And I don't like being messed with. And that has always been my biggest fear.

And so in that house, I was constantly being messed with and I was constantly feeling afraid and I was constantly being freaked out. And so I think when I did see it, this thing, whatever the hell it was, I think that there was this sort of almost like resignation of like, okay, well, now I have actually seen. something because that's my biggest fear, you know, that I'm going to look in the mirror and my face isn't going to track my own facial movements or there's going to be something behind my shoulder or something. Like, that's always been my fear that I would see something. And then I did actually see something. Even if it's not something that I necessarily engage with anymore in terms of, like,

the supernatural or the spiritual world being part of my worldview, I went through a process of deconstructing my faith and deconstructing a lot of how I had been programmed to view the world and understand the world growing up. And part of that was sort of coming to terms with the fact that I don't necessarily know that I believe in anything outside of the not supernatural realm. Like this, whatever we see, whatever we touch is what there is. But this one event with the faceless face has just sat in my mind. Because every other thing that has happened, I can look at and I can say, okay, there's something logical and there's something normal about that. Like, I can absolutely have faith and trust that that was probably something easily explainable.

And this, you know, seeing something with your own eyes, though, is just a vastly different experience. And that's why I feared it, because it's different to have to kind of confront what you were seeing. But I think the thing about the thing about the... this experience for me is that, you know, like, am I entirely alone with this or is there, is there some sort of explanation? Is there some sort of, I don't know, like how alone am I? And I just, I've not really seen people talk about this, something like this. You know, I'm trying to make sense of this for myself and I'm trying to see if anybody has ever experienced something like this for themselves. So that's kind of just sat with me.

As I go through the process of deconstructing and completely sort of changing how I understand the world, there's always been that one night that sort of sits in the back of my mind. That is sort of, you know, maybe there still is something. And so the weight that that holds in my life is sort of a reminder to be comfortable in the uncertainty. All right. Thank you so much to Carlina for sharing her story on this episode. I obviously thought this one was very terrifying. I mean, personally, I find huge houses like that scary on their own. It's unsettling knowing that you could be on one end of the house doing your thing

and there could be something happening at the other end of the home without you even knowing it. Also, the fact that they're so isolated, that always creeps me out as well, even if there wasn't a mysterious knocking going on. when it was first just that knocking and then the sound of what seemed like cowboy boots on her deck, you could say maybe it was a peeping Tom or a would-be intruder or maybe even a deer or something like that. But as she explained before, this house was extremely far away from everything else. And although I do not have any experience being a peeping Tom or breaking and entering, I would have to imagine that the number one rule for doing something like that would be to not wear extremely loud cowboy boots.

I mean, they literally have a type of shoes specifically meant for this called sneakers. So I doubt anyone would wear such shoes to sneak around at home or to do the amount of hiking that would be required to get there. It sounds like it was really isolated. And same with a deer. I mean, even if a deer somehow walked up this big flight of stairs under the deck, I think when a dog scared it off, you would hear that thing going crazy, stumbling down the deck. I mean, it might have even broken through the window.

Deer are not known to be very quiet, calm, or coordinated animals when they're startled. I'm sure they would have heard whatever this thing was, run away down the stairs, if it was something physical. But as she mentioned before, she didn't hear this thing come up onto the deck or leave. She just heard it taking those steps in the middle of the deck.

Obviously, she ended up seeing something that proved it was very likely not an intruder or a deer or anything like that. I couldn't imagine how scary it would have been for her to see that. But still, I do find those details about the deck very unsettling. The fact that you would have heard loud noises

coming up and down those stairs, and this thing seemed to just appear in the middle of the second story deck. It's very strange. So, thank you so much once again to Carlina for talking to us. This episode was called Faceless Face, and you've been listening to Otherworld.

Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by, by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by Juice Jackal and North Americans. This episode was edited by Theo Krantz and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our associate producers are Nikki Kate Delgado and Haley Pearson. Our artwork is by Coltacac Studios. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. Our social media is at Otherworld

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