Pratica di Shadowing: Do not answer if you hear your name in a cemetery. - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

Creazione lezione...
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The Panteon de Belen That night was like any other on a legends tour through the Panteon de Belen, but something was about to change.
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One of the visitors disappeared.
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We couldn't find him even after searching the entire cemetery.
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When we finally did, something was wrong with him.
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He was genuinely shaken.
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He said he had separated from the group because he heard a familiar voice calling to him from a grave.
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My dear community, what a pleasure to be with you again.
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I missed you very much.
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And before we get into all of tonight's stories, I just want to say that if anyone listening is going through a hard time right now,
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feeling sad, discouraged, or without hope that things will get better, You are not alone.
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It isn't bad luck, remember.
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It isn't that all the bad things in the world are happening specifically to you.
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Hard stretches come to an end, and remember that everything happens for a reason. So keep going.
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We're all in this together.
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I hope these next few minutes help you forget everything else for a little while, because you are already stepping into the following tales of the night.
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Good evening, everyone.
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First of all, I should clarify that this didn't happen to me personally, but I witnessed all of it, because for a time I worked as a guide on the nighttime tours of the Panteón de Belén in Guadalajara.
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I suppose many of you already know it.
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It's a very old place, full of history and legends.
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Some people go because they're genuinely interested in the history of the cemetery, and others go hoping to be frightened.
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After so many tours, you learn to tell the difference between someone who really saw something, which almost never happens, and someone whose fear made them imagine it.
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And sometimes that second thing is actually what we're trying to create. That fear. That suggestion.
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But honestly, for a long time I was pretty skeptical.
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Not about ghosts in general, but about the things people claimed specifically happened in that cemetery.
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Most of what could be considered strange had a rational explanation, one we would hide so people would get swept up in the atmosphere.
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The night I'm going to tell you about was different.
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It was a small tour, around ten people.
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Before we started, we always gathered for a few minutes at the entrance while everyone arrived.
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That's where I met a couple I liked right away.
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He was about 26 or 27, very tall and lean, the kind of person who looks like a basketball player.
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She was named Carla.
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She was from San Diego, and she told me she crossed into Mexico fairly often, but had never seen Guadalajara.
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He, on the other hand, had been born in Zapopan.
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The curious thing was that he barely knew the city at all.
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When he was two years old, his father had taken him to live with him in Philadelphia, and he hadn't been back since.
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While we were waiting for the tour to begin, we chatted for a bit.
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He told me his father had always talked to him about the Panteón de Belén, had been telling him stories about the place since he was a child.
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And so now that he had finally come to Guadalajara, this was the first place he wanted to see, before anywhere else.
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They both loved legends and always took tours like this when they traveled.
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He was genuinely excited to finally be there, in a place his father had talked about for so long.
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I remember that conversation clearly because his excitement was real.
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He was truly interested in the history of the place.
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We started the tour and everything went normally, completely routine.
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We moved through the passageways, stopping to tell some of the cemetery's best-known stories.
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It wasn't until we reached one of the more distant sections that someone raised a hand.
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Excuse me.
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It was Karla.
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She was looking around with a confused expression.
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I can't find my boyfriend.
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I assumed he had simply fallen behind to take photos or record a video, which was pretty common.
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I asked the group to stay where they were while another guide and I retraced our steps to look for him.
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We called out to him several times.
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Nothing.
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We started going through the passageways one by one.
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Nothing.
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I was beginning to worry when, luckily, my colleague shouted that he had found him.
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He was sitting on top of a grave, hands resting on his legs, staring straight ahead at nothing.
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He didn't even turn when we started talking to him.
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We approached thinking he might have felt ill.
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His eyes were completely open, but he didn't seem to be seeing anything.
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Carla crouched down in front of him and took his hands.
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After a few seconds he blinked, as if waking from a very deep sleep.
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The first thing he said was, Where is my mother?
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We looked at each other.
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I thought maybe she had come along with them, but Carla looked even more confused than we were.
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He kept staring out at the passageways, at the graves, and said that she had called him by name.
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He said he thought he was going to see her.
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I remember Carla went completely pale.
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She apologized to us, and then said quietly that he had never known her.
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That she had been told his mother died when he was eight years old.
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but he had never been sure if that was true.
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We didn't say anything after that.
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He seemed completely convinced he had heard her, said it with the same certainty you would have if you had just heard the voice of someone you know well.
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Because he seemed so disoriented, we decided to end the tour early for them.
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Carla thanked us and walked him out with her arm around him, almost carrying him to the exit.
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Honestly, I thought the whole thing had been a combination of emotions.
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The place, the childhood memories, the exhaustion of travel.
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I kept thinking about them until the next morning.
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Since Carla had left a contact number when they registered, I wrote to ask how they were doing.
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She didn't respond until several hours later.
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She told me they were at the hospital.
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That during the early hours of the morning her boyfriend had developed a very sharp pain in his chest.
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The doctors told them he had suffered a minor heart attack.
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That surprised me enormously, because as I said, he was a very young man.
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He looked perfectly healthy.
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He was the last person I would have expected news like that about.
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I never spoke to them again, and never found out how things turned out for them.
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But I do know that from the very next tour onward, I began telling visitors that regardless of the legends, if at any point during the tour they heard someone say their name from among the graves,
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they should not respond under any circumstances.
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I'm going to tell you something that happened to us about six years ago, just before the pandemic, when my son was barely three years old.
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Every February 20th, my family makes a point of going to the cemetery to visit my mother's grave on her birthday.
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It's a very large cemetery, the kind with roads running through it so you can drive around.
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There are so many sections that if you don't know the way well, it's very easy to get lost.
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My little boy was just starting to understand how important those visits were to us.
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You could even tell he was excited about it.
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He insisted on buying a small bouquet of flowers for his grandmother at the entrance.
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It was a small bunch, but he could barely hold it with both arms.
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We parked near the grave, and everyone got out of the car.
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My wife and I opened the trunk to take out the rest of the flowers.
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It was only a few seconds, maybe a minute.
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When we walked toward the grave, the boy was no longer with us, but we didn't have time to get scared because right away we spotted him further ahead.
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He was standing about 20 or 30 meters away in front of a different grave, holding his little bouquet with both hands, completely still.
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At first I thought he had simply taken a wrong turn, and thought that was his grandmother's I went to him and asked what he was doing.
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He pointed to the grave, which had a photograph of a smiling woman on it.
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It's for her.
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I explained that we had the wrong grave
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that his grandma was a little further back
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but he looked at me as if i were the one who didn't understand
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she asked me for flowers he said it with complete matter-of-fact naturalness
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my wife let out a nervous little laugh we thought it
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was one of those things small children come out with i picked him up
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and we went over to my mother's grave before we left i looked back at
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that other grave to look for the name i suppose i'm not entirely sure why maybe just curiosity
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i read the woman's name then the dates she had died on the same day my son was born
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in that moment i swear i wanted to believe it was all coincidence and nothing more Just a strange detail to tell.
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But every time we went back to the cemetery, even before getting out of the car, my son would start scanning that section through the trees.
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If he caught sight of it, he would raise his hand.
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Like a wave.
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He never talked about it anywhere outside the cemetery.
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Only looked for her when we went in.
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We kept going like that for several visits throughout that year.
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Every important date.
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until one time he looked over that way, smiled, and shook his head slowly.
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Since then we prefer to leave him with his grandparents on my wife's side when we go to the cemetery.
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This experience happened in Costa Rica in 2018 and it happened to my family.
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The events were told to me by my mother and are complemented by what I myself lived through during those months.
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Hello, Uriel.
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I'm Fer.
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Greetings to you and to the whole Tales of the Night community.
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I've been listening since 2021, but it's taken me until now to find the courage to share this experience.
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Even though I lived it too, the true protagonist is my mother.
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It happened in 2018, when I was ten years old.
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My mother had been working at a family customs company for eight years.
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There was a woman there named Carmen.
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Among the employees, people always said the same thing about her family, that they practiced witchcraft among themselves and also used it on other people.
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No one ever knew whether it was just gossip or whether someone had actually witnessed something, but it was a comment that came up constantly.
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My mother has always been very sociable, and over time she became close to that family.
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They would invite us to their gatherings and we would invite them to ours.
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Even though she had heard the rumors, she never paid them much attention.
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She said she didn't believe in those things, but she also didn't like to make fun of them.
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She preferred to stay out of it.
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The moment that changed everything was my first communion.
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That day, Carmen gave me a photo album and a cloth doll shaped like a little angel that even prayed.
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I loved it.
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I put the album in a cabinet and left the doll on my dresser, never imagining that gift would be the beginning of something terrible.
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Shortly after that, my mother began to feel very unwell.
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She said her teeth felt loose, and there was a constant pain in her stomach, as if something were twisting inside her.
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She went to the doctor several times.
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They ran tests and checked her teeth.
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Everything looked normal.
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On top of that, money started to run short, even though she had a good job and my father was paying child support for my brother and me.
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The money simply stopped being enough.
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Then other symptoms appeared.
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She had difficulty breathing on the bus on the way to work, and on several occasions, she felt a very strong impulse to throw herself out while the vehicle was in motion.
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She stopped sleeping well, and her hair began to fall out.
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The doctors thought it was anxiety or stress, gave her treatment, and nothing improved.
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Meanwhile I started changing too.
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I had an inexplicable terror of the second floor of the house where my mother, my brother and I slept.
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I started waking up crying at night, sleepwalking all through the house, and one time I tried to open a window and throw myself out.
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My mother and brother managed to stop me, since they no longer knew what I might do in my sleep.
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They removed the keys from the doors and began locking the windows.
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I never remembered anything.
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I would just wake up with bruises from having bumped into walls or fallen out of bed.
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Eventually, the dark circles under my eyes and the bruises made people at school suspect I was being abused.
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They had me evaluated by a psychologist before confirming that I had never been hurt at home.
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At the same time, footsteps began to be heard on the staircase in the early hours of the morning.
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Our metal staircase sometimes creaked with changes in temperature, so at first we thought that was all it was, but this sounded different.
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You could clearly hear someone going up and down the steps for much of the night.
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That was when my mother decided to speak to a co-worker who knew a Chilean woman with a reputation for clairvoyance.
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Everyone called her simply the Chile Mom.
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About a week passed.
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One day, while they were at work, that co-worker came in very agitated and asked my mother, Is your food in the refrigerator?
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She said yes.
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Don't eat it.
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Throw it out.
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She didn't understand what was happening, and then he told her.
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The chili mom says Carmen has been putting dead men's bones in your food, and in something else the two of you share.
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My mother went cold.
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No one outside of the two of them knew they shared a tube of toothpaste they kept in the work bathroom.
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The co-worker continued.
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When you get home, call me.
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She needs to speak with you.
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That night they made the call.
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The woman greeted them very calmly and asked them to say a prayer.
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Then she went silent for several minutes.
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Finally she said, I am in your house now.
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My mother expected something extraordinary to happen.
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Nothing did.
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She could only hear the woman breathing on the other end of the line.
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A few minutes later she spoke again.
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Someone is working witchcraft on you.
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What is in your house entered because you accepted a gift that woman gave your daughter.
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My mother immediately thought of the doll in the album.
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And before she could say a word, the woman added, Also get rid of a red ornament you have on the little table where you keep the figurines of the angels.
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My mother had never described our house to her, let alone that decoration.
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But what impressed her most came next.
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The woman told her that my brother was not in danger, but that whatever it was was after my mother and after me.
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According to her, entities of that kind found it easier to reach children.
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And suddenly everything made sense to my mother.
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My sleepwalking, the footsteps on the stairs, the impulses to throw herself from the bus,
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her physical deterioration, the fact that no doctor had found any explanation.
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The Chile mom instructed us to bathe with coarse salt during the full moon, to bring a priest to bless the house, to throw away everything Carmen had ever given us,
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and to place St. Benedict medals in the four corners of the house.
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We also went to the basilica for holy water and blessed the entire home.
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After that, everything stopped.
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My mother recovered her health, slept again, and the money stopped disappearing.
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I never sleepwalked again, never woke up crying.
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A few months later, my mother was let go from that job and found another where she still works to this day.
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The full story was told to me when I turned 16. That was
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when I understood why my whole family had carried a St. Benedict medal in their wallet since I was a child, and why my mother has never again accepted gifts from people she doesn't trust completely.
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Be very careful with what you accept.
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The last we heard of Carmen was that her mother had died, and that apparently a small dead bird had been found in her trachea.
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Whatever the case, I thank God I never have to cross paths with her again.
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And I am deeply grateful to the Chile mom, whose name we never learned, but without whom I suspect I would not be here telling this story.

Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione

Questa lezione di conversazione di livello B2 si basa sul video “Do not answer if you hear your name in a cemetery”. Questo video contiene 214 frasi e 2913 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 17:39. Chi parla ha un ritmo naturale di circa 165 parole al minuto, vicino a una conversazione quotidiana. Il 85% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese; conviene studiare le altre prima di iniziare.

Vocaboli chiave di questo video

Le 15 parole più avanzate del video, con pronuncia e significato:

ParolaPronunciaSignificato
passageway sostantivo/ˈpæ.sɪdʒˌweɪ/corsia
doll sostantivo/dɑl/bambola
genuinely avverbio/ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/veramente, genuinamente
bouquet sostantivo/buːˈkeɪ/mazzo
bruise sostantivo/bɹuz/livido
footstep sostantivo/ˈfʊtstɛp/impronta, pedata
sleepwalking sostantivosonnambulismo
witchcraft sostantivo/ˈwɪt͡ʃkɹæft/stregoneria
staircase sostantivo/ˈstɛɹˌkeɪs/scalinata, tromba delle scale
impulse sostantivo/ˈɪmpʌls/impulso, aire
stare verbo/stɛɚ/fissare
visitor sostantivo/ˈvɪzɪtɚ/ospite, visitatore
disappear verbo/dɪsəˈpɪɹ/sparire, scomparire
agitate verbo/ˈæ.d͡ʒɪ.teɪt/agitare, turbare
basilica sostantivo/bəˈsɪlɪkə/basilica

I phrasal verb che sentirai

ParolaPronunciaSignificato
go through verboattraversare
wake up verbo/ˌweɪk ˈʌp/svegliarsi
come up verbovenire fuori, emergere
find out verboscoprire
go up verbosalire
look over verboesaminare
take out verbocavare, cacciare
throw away verbobuttare via

Frasi da ripetere

Frasi brevi e complete del video che puoi riutilizzare nella conversazione di tutti i giorni:

  • We're all in this together.
  • I can't find my boyfriend.
  • We didn't say anything after that.

La grammatica di questo video

Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:

StrutturaNel video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — un’azione iniziata prima e ancora in corsoI've been listening · has been putting
Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fabe frightened · could be considered · was named
Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosasomeone who really · person who looks · video, which was

Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione

Chi parla usa 27 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come didn't, I'm, don't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.

  • I suoni “th”: toothpaste /ˈtuθpeɪst/, cloth /klɒθ/, grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/
  • I suoni “sh” e “zh”: deterioration /dəˌti.ɹi.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, sociable /ˈsoʊʃəbəl/, decoration /ˌdɛkəˈɹeɪʃən/, shout /ʃaʊt/, rational /ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/
  • Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: cemetery /ˈsɛm.ɪˌtɛɹ.i/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, basilica /bəˈsɪlɪkə/, deterioration /dəˌti.ɹi.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, disorient /dɪsˈɔːɹi.ənt/

I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:

  • Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: bruise /bɹuz/, footstep /ˈfʊtstɛp/, witchcraft /ˈwɪt͡ʃkɹæft/, staircase /ˈstɛɹˌkeɪs/, impulse /ˈɪmpʌls/
  • /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: passageway /ˈpæ.sɪdʒˌweɪ/, witchcraft /ˈwɪt͡ʃkɹæft/, agitate /ˈæ.d͡ʒɪ.teɪt/, grandparent /ˈɡɹæn(d)pɛəɹənt/, protagonist /pɹəˈtæɡ.ə.nɪst/

Come esercitarsi con questo video

  1. Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
  2. Inizia a velocità 0,75×, fai shadowing frase per frase e torna alla velocità normale quando diventa facile.
  3. Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come passageway, doll, genuinely.

Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?

Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.

Tecnica dello shadowing: leggi la guida completa passo dopo passo →