He began carving more extensively after his retirement from New York's Allied Chemical Company in 1984. Upon returning to Oxford in 1985, his Picasso-like painted beech wood carvings called "Haints" (or ghosts) took on more supernatural features.
He turned out hundreds of wild and wonderful beechwood carvings. He had a thing about snakes, devils, noses that wrapped around and extra breasts; and managed to give his figures an assortment of vivid and articulate facial expressions. The multiple eyes and mouths (to talk out of both sides of) and other sometimes-grotesque features set Rogers' work apart from the more traditional wood carvers of the South.