Shadowing Practice: Do not answer if you hear your name in a cemetery. - Learn English Speaking with Video
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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.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Do not answer if you hear your name in a cemetery”. This video has 214 sentences and 2913 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:39. The speaker talks at a natural 165 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cemetery noun | /ˈsɛm.ɪˌtɛɹ.i/ | A place where the dead are buried; a graveyard or memorial park. |
| passageway noun | /ˈpæ.sɪdʒˌweɪ/ | A covered walkway, between rooms or buildings. |
| doll noun | /dɑl/ | A small figure resembling a human being that is used as a toy. |
| genuinely adverb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/ | In a genuine manner; truthfully, truly. |
| bouquet noun | /buːˈkeɪ/ | An arrangement or bunch of cut flowers; a nosegay. |
| bruise noun | /bɹuz/ | A purplish mark on the skin due to leakage of blood from capillaries under the surface that have been damaged by a blow. |
| footstep noun | /ˈfʊtstɛp/ | The mark or impression left by a foot; a track. |
| sleepwalking noun | The act of walking while not conscious or aware of it, during one's sleep. | |
| witchcraft noun | /ˈwɪt͡ʃkɹæft/ | The practice of witches; magic, sorcery, or the use of supernatural powers to influence or predict events. |
| staircase noun | /ˈstɛɹˌkeɪs/ | A flight of stairs; a stairway. |
| impulse noun | /ˈɪmpʌls/ | A thrust; a push; a sudden force that impels. |
| stare verb | /stɛɚ/ | To look fixedly (at something). |
| visitor noun | /ˈvɪzɪtɚ/ | Someone who visits someone else; someone staying as a guest. |
| disappear verb | /dɪsəˈpɪɹ/ | To vanish. |
| bless verb | /blɛs/ | To make something holy by religious rite, sanctify. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| wake up verb | /ˌweɪk ˈʌp/ | To stop sleeping; to awake. |
| come out with verb | To say (something) unexpectedly. | |
| come up verb | To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly. | |
| fall out verb | To come out of something by falling. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- We're all in this together.
- I can't find my boyfriend.
- We didn't say anything after that.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been listening · has been putting |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | could be considered · was named · had been born |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | someone who really · person who looks · video, which was |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 27 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: toothpaste /ˈtuθpeɪst/, cloth /klɒθ/, grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: deterioration /dəˌti.ɹi.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, sociable /ˈsoʊʃəbəl/, decoration /ˌdɛkəˈɹeɪʃən/, shout /ʃaʊt/, rational /ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: cemetery /ˈsɛm.ɪˌtɛɹ.i/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, basilica /bəˈsɪlɪkə/, deterioration /dəˌti.ɹi.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, disorient /dɪsˈɔːɹi.ənt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like cemetery, passageway, doll.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.