FEMA Official Claims Teleportation to Waffle House, Workers Dispute Story

Shastoni Burge has worked the night shift at Waffle House in Rome, Georgia for a decade. She has been punched in the face by a customer. She has watched someone overdose in the bathroom. One night, a man gathered every steak knife in the restaurant and threatened the staff with them. She was 38 years old and behind the counter when a reporter showed her a photograph of Gregg Phillips, the Trump-appointed head of FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery. She did not recognize him.

"I've seen it all," Burge said. "But I've never seen that."

Phillips, the senior official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who leads its disaster response work, claimed he was teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Rome, but nobody can back it up. On a podcast episode that has since been deleted, he described the experience in detail, insisting he had traveled without experiencing the passage of time. "I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," Phillips said. "I ended up at a Waffle House, this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was." When friends asked where he had gone, he told them he was at the Waffle House in Rome, Georgia. "And they said, 'That's not possible, you just left here a moment ago.' But it was possible. It was real."

Among roughly two dozen workers and regulars interviewed at Rome's three Waffle House locations, none said they were aware of anyone traveling to the 24-hour restaurants by paranormal means. Not a single person reported any supernatural activity, and not one recognized a photograph of Phillips.

Rome's Waffle Houses are places where genuinely strange things happen. Night shift workers handle far more than hash browns and scattered eggs, and Burge's decade behind the counter is proof enough. But even the regulars came up empty when asked about any unusual visitors.

"I can say I've been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House," said Austin Spears, a 29-year-old land surveyor. "Don't know how I got there. But I was there."

Phillips also claimed, in the same podcast appearance, that his vehicle was "lifted up" while he was driving and carried roughly 40 miles from Albany, Georgia, before setting him down in a ditch near a church. FEMA told CNN that "many of the comments cited are taken out of context or represent personal, informal, jovial" remarks.

After the claims drew widespread backlash and doubt, Phillips doubled down, posting on social media and citing Biblical miracles. The credibility questions carry real weight: as head of FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, Phillips coordinates the federal government's response when communities are hit by fires and floods. The workers who staff Rome's overnight shifts, absorbing difficult customers, irregular hours, and the specific chaos that only a 24-hour restaurant generates, provided a grounded verdict. Burge has spent most of her decade there on the night shift, and the things she has witnessed are genuinely extreme. A paranormal visit from a senior federal official, she said flatly, was not among them.