Shadowing Practice: His mercy killing saved their marriage - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Today, I'm going to tell you three stories about people whose very stressful lives literally drove them insane.
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But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload two,
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three, even four times every week.
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So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the like button's house and relace all of their shoes upside down so they tie at the toes.
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Also, So please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads.
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Okay, let's get into today's stories.
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On the afternoon of January 16, 1960, a 75 -year -old man named Julian Opier carried a bag of groceries into his apartment in Toulon,
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which is a city in France.
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He set the bag down on the counter, and then he looked around at the small kitchen with a twinge of sadness, because he knew he would never see it again after tonight.
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Then, like always, he pulled out a cutting board and a knife, and he began chopping vegetables for dinner.
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And as he was doing that, he heard his 77 -year -old wife, Marie, call out to him from the bedroom.
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So he went to see what she needed, and he found her sitting up in bed, but propped up with some pillows, which was exactly how he had left her.
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So two years earlier, Marie had gotten very sick with a mysterious illness, and she had been totally paralyzed ever since.
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Now, she could talk, and she could move her eyes, and sometimes she could even shift her shoulders around with quite a bit of effort, but that was about it.
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And so ever since this paralyzation happened, ever since this mystery illness set in, Julian had become her full -time caretaker,
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which was exhausting and somewhat depressing.
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And to make matters worse, at least from Julian's perspective, over time, his wife had really only gotten more bitter and more demanding.
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So taking care of her had basically taken over every waking moment of Julian's life, both physically and mentally.
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And so now, as he, you know, with a sigh, walked over, and reached the bed that his wife was in,
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Marie told Julian that he needed to change her diaper because she had gone to the bathroom while he was gone, and he hadn't been there to help her with the bedpan.
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Now, Julian could tell that sort of in this statement was quite a bit of resentment, that she was annoyed that he had left her alone while he went to the store.
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But he didn't argue.
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He just nodded and started pulling back the sheets.
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And as Julian did this, he actually felt a wave of calm come over him because he knew this would be the last time.
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Julian had known for a while now that he simply could not keep living like this.
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It just was not going to fly for him.
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He couldn't do it.
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But he also knew that Marie's quality of life, which was already quite poor, would be even worse without him,
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which is why he'd made up his mind to end it all tonight, not only for himself, but also for Marie.
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Later that night, after Julian had cleaned up his wife and then also made dinner and fed them both and then cleaned up after dinner,
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he sat in the bed next to Marie reading her a book like he did every night.
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And when he noticed that she was beginning to drift off, he put the book aside and he gently adjusted the pillows so his wife could lie flat and sleep comfortably.
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Then after that, he switched off the lamp
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and he got out of bed
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and he left the room he went to a closet
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and he pulled out a rope and then he took the rope to the bathroom
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and he spent a few minutes setting it up after it
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was set up he grabbed a knife from the kitchen
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and went back into the bedroom where his wife was
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and for a few minutes he just stood there you know
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with this knife in hand staring at his his wife as she slept
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and you know for a minute there he didn't know if he could do it but then he decided he had to, and now was the time.
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And so after taking a few deep breaths, Julian raised the knife up, and his whole body is shaking from nerves and adrenaline like he can't believe what he's about to do,
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and so he ended up gripping the knife with two hands, and then he closed his eyes, and he plunged the knife down into Marie.
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At that same moment, in the next apartment over, Julian's neighbor, a man named Roger Moncuso, was getting ready to go to bed.
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And as he was about to climb into his bed, he hears this piercing scream coming through the walls.
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And he could tell right away it was coming from Julian's place.
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So he jumped up and he ran outside, went around, and began banging on their door.
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But nobody was answering.
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But Roger could clearly still hear screaming coming from inside of Julian's place.
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And so Roger began slamming his shoulder into the door over
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and over and over again until it burst open and then he rushed in.
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And as soon as he was in there, he just followed the constant screaming.
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into the bedroom where it was coming from and
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when he got to the doorway
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and saw what was happening in the bedroom he just froze
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because he was looking at a miracle it would turn out
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when julian went to murder his wife he was
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so nervous he was shaking so badly that
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when he brought the knife down he missed her chest where he was trying to stab
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and he wound up stabbing her in the side of the head now this didn't kill her
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but it did wake her up and it shocked her
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so much that she jumped to her feet and began screaming and
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so roger the next door neighbor barrels into the apartment he
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makes it to the the doorway of the bedroom he looks in he sees marie's screaming
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but really what he sees the miracle is that she's standing he knows she's paralyzed like she hasn't moved in years,
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and she's standing, hand on her head from the stab wound.
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Not that Roger knows that, but he can't believe she's just standing there.
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How did this happen?
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Later, Marie's doctors would determine that her paralysis was very real.
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She could not move.
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That was absolutely real.
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But the cause for it was psychological.
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There wasn't anything wrong with her body.
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It was due to this very serious mental block.
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But when she was stabbed in the head in her sleep, and she woke up to find her husband standing there with the bloody knife,
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that was such a shock to her system that it effectively reset her.
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It got rid of the mental block and cured her paralysis.
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Now, in the moment, like immediately after the stabbing, Julian had been so horrified by what he'd done that he'd actually gone through with the second part of his plan.
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As his wife is screaming there holding her stab wound, he went right into the bathroom and hung himself.
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But, thankfully, because Marie was screaming so loudly, their neighbor Roger, who busted into the apartment, he was there within minutes,
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and he was able to cut Julian down and revive him.
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And so, of course, Marie and Julian lived happily ever after.
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There were no issues whatsoever with Julian stabbing his wife in the head because he cured her.
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On the evening of Sunday, March 15, 1970, a woman named Lisa Cooper sat in the living room of her home in Daytona Beach, Florida, along with her husband and two kids.
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The kids were playing a board game and her husband was reading the newspaper
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and Lisa was dealing with a really bad headache.
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But this was not really unusual for Lisa.
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She'd had a lot of dental issues in the past, and the result of that was getting headaches quite a bit.
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But now, as she closed her eyes and just kind of hoped her head would stop hurting, Lisa heard someone turn on the radio, like really, really loudly.
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And it was this aggressive orchestra -style marching song that was like blaringly loud, which made her headache instantly worse.
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She immediately opened her eyes and looked over at her son, who was sitting closest to where the radio was on the side table, and she yelled at him to turn it off, or at least turn it way down.
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But her son just looked at her with this confused look and said he didn't even know what she was talking about.
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The radio wasn't on.
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But Lisa, I mean, she was so annoyed because she could literally hear it playing, and it was so loud that, like, she couldn't stand it for another second.
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So she She just got up and walked over to switch it off herself, but when Lisa got to it, she saw that her son was right.
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The radio really was off.
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Which didn't make any sense at all, because the song was still, currently, blasting in her head.
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It was so loud, it had to be coming from somewhere in this room.
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But then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped.
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And Lisa stood there, dazed, and asked her husband and kids if they knew where the music had been coming from.
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Like, it wasn't our radio, but it had to be coming from somewhere.
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And they all looked kind of bewildered for a moment, and then said, there hadn't been a song playing.
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Like, you must be hearing things.
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Now, this was obviously jarring and really weird for Lisa.
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But Lisa decided that, well, her family must be right.
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Like, there was three of them and one of her.
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They didn't hear anything.
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she must have just somehow imagined it.
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So she just kind of awkwardly went back to the couch and closed her eyes again, and then she heard the crinkle of the newspaper as her husband went back to reading it,
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and the kids started playing and laughing and just doing their game.
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One week later, Lisa was in her kitchen cooking up some scrambled eggs and bacon.
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Her family sat at the table nearby, and they were waiting for breakfast to be ready.
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And as Lisa was cooking, she suddenly heard a bunch of loud, abrupt bells start chiming.
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It was definitely music, and she realized right away it must be some kind of Christmas song playing.
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And when she looked over at her family to ask where it was coming from, they definitely did not appear to be hearing it at all.
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They were all just laughing and talking and carrying on like there was nothing playing.
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There was no music playing.
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But she hears this Christmas music playing very clearly, and so she asked about it anyway.
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And once again, they all just kind of looked confused and said, no, they definitely cannot hear any music.
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But at this point, because of what had happened a week earlier, they started gently teasing her, like, oh, looks like you're hearing things again.
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But Lisa, she understood the spirit of the joke, but for her, this was serious.
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Like, she didn't think this was funny.
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Like, right this second, as they're joking with her, she can hear the music playing.
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And she felt like, you know, And when this music was playing, she couldn't do anything but hear it, like it just overtook her entire sensory perception.
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And in fact, for the whole rest of that day and the next day, Lisa kept hearing music.
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And at first, because her family had sort of lightly teased her about it, she thought, maybe they're playing some really tasteless, horrible prank on me.
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But she found, over these couple of days, that the music just wouldn't stop, even when her family wasn't home.
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It was the same rotation of songs, too, over and over and over again.
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And for days, Lisa looked all around the house for anything that might be causing it.
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But she didn't find anything.
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And it was kind of making her feel crazy, like really, like she was losing her mind.
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Over the coming days and weeks, this music situation only got worse, to the point where she literally couldn't even sleep.
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She would just lay in bed, wide awake, listening to these bells and all this orchestra music playing.
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It was, like, constant.
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And in fact, it was where she was one morning in early April, in her bed, just sort of laying there listening to this music,
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when her husband suddenly burst into the room
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and he said he knew exactly what was going on with this music because he'd just read about it in the newspaper.
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After her husband told her what he'd discovered in the paper, Lisa did two things.
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First, she went to a very specific type of doctor.
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And then second, she took out a paid advertisement in the newspaper with a very particular request.
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And the combination of these things mostly solved Lisa's problem.
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It would turn out Lisa was not going crazy.
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She actually was hearing music that nobody else could hear.
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Because the dental work that she'd had years ago had left her with metal fillings and crowns,
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and she'd had enough of them that her mouth actually started working like a radio.
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So in certain cases, metal dental fillings in crowns can actually act like small radio wave detectors.
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If a filling is both loose and made of the right types of metal, radio waves can actually make the filling vibrate,
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which basically turns it into a speaker inside of a person's skull.
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So Lisa had been hearing real music from a real radio signal, just projected through her teeth.
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Now, this is medically possible, but incredibly rare.
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But it had happened before.
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Lisa's husband had read about a similar case in the newspaper of all places, which was how he knew what was going on.
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And he recommended that she go see a dentist.
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And so the dentist, the specialized doctor she saw, ended up swapping out one of her clearly loose crowns, which greatly reduced the music,
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but didn't completely get rid of it.
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Like, she still would hear music
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when it was being played by this apparent one station out there that was playing these same songs on repeat.
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And so she also put an ad out in the paper listing those songs, along with her phone number, being like, hey, this is happening to me.
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If this is your playlist, stop, because it's driving me crazy, but no one ever got in touch, and so she never found out who was doing it,
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and she continued to periodically hear that same music, especially around Christmas time.
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Hey, Mr. Ballin here, getting ready to tell some strange, dark, and mysterious stories around a campfire.
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And I just wanted to remind you
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that you can right now get your hands on our newest graphic novel called The Terror Within.
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It is our third installment.
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You can get this one even if you've never even seen the other two.
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They were New York Times bestsellers, though.
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Pretty good.
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These are nine stories, all strange, dark, and mysterious the through line through all of them is
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that the scariest thing in each of these stories is never what you suspect.
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It makes for great reading, great storytelling.
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Get you a copy, out now, Tarot Within.
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You can either get it at your favorite bookstore or click the link in the description below.
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One morning in 2008, a 27 -year -old woman named Mary Silva knelt down next
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to her crying four -year -old son in their living room in a small village in Portugal.
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He was throwing a tantrum for no clear reason, and across the room, Mary's other son, who was eight years old,
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was jumping up and down on the couch and throwing toys everywhere
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so mary in this moment is like completely overwhelmed her kids are out of control
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and she looks through the doorway just kind of glances over through the doorway
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and she sees her mother -in -law who obviously hears the kids crying
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but her mother -in -law is just sitting at the dining
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room table calmly eating her breakfast no care in the world
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and it's like mary's thinking like what are you doing like why wouldn't you come help
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Mary would have loved to go eat, but she can never get a moment to herself.
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But for Mary, this was actually very typical.
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This was a normal day for her.
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Now, when she'd gotten married a decade ago, she had pictured a completely different life for herself.
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She'd always been smart and ambitious, and at first, her husband had fully supported her goal of continuing her education.
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But just a few months after their wedding, she'd gotten pregnant.
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And around that same time, her husband had immigrated abroad for work, leaving Mary behind in Portugal to live with her mother -in -law,
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who was really overbearing and frankly just didn't like Mary at all.
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And so in short order, Mary had to abandon her dreams of going to school to take care of the kids, which she was happy to do.
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But her mother -in -law was really no help, and all she ever did in some ways was just criticized Mary for not being able to keep her kids under control, even though they're just kids.
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They're little.
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They have tantrums.
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It happens.
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Now, over the last decade, Mary had developed some coping mechanisms to handle all this stress.
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But lately, it had become almost too much to handle.
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She was having trouble sleeping.
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She was losing weight.
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And recently, she'd been having really intense stomach pain and bouts of nausea that she was sure were connected to her stress.
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And so she'd kind of reached a breaking point.
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She knew something in her life needed to change.
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But she was just too exhausted to even begin to see a way out of this.
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Now, Mary's four -year -old son, who was currently down on the floor kicking and screaming, he reached up and he grabbed Mary's hair and he started yanking on it,
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which was really painful.
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And so Mary's like telling him, like, please let go, like calm down.
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The eight -year -old's going crazy still.
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And then all of a sudden, Mary hears her mother -in -law shout from the dining room as she's still eating, like, please get your kids to shut up.
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And Mary's like yelling back at her, I'm trying, as she's having her hair pulled out of her head.
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And then just as Mary is about to pull her own hair out,
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she felt this really sudden sharp pain in her stomach that was way worse than any stomach pain she had had before.
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And then this really intense wave of nausea overtook her
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and she keeled over and she threw up right on the floor
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and at that moment i mean
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if mary had thought she'd reached a breaking point before she
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was wrong this was it this was her low point she knew
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that her current living situation was like killing her basically
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and she couldn't keep ignoring these symptoms like she's having these crazy pains in her stomach
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and nausea she needed help a few hours later in a
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hospital in the nearby city of averro mary lay on an exam table while a doctor pressed on her abdomen Mary, by this point, had explained her symptoms and all the stress she was under,
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and the doctor had told her it might be an ulcer or stress -induced gastritis, which were both quite serious but treatable.
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So right now, as Mary laid there, she was actually feeling cautiously optimistic and glad that she had ultimately come to the emergency room.
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But as the doctor moved his fingers up and down her stomach, he suddenly stopped and he frowned and kept feeling around one specific spot in her abdomen.
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Mary noticed and she sort of lifted her head up and asked if something was wrong.
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And the doctor said he actually felt a hard mass in her upper stomach.
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Suddenly, all the anxiety Mary had been feeling earlier came back stronger than ever, and her mind started racing through all the worst -case scenarios.
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And so she frantically began asking the doctor what was the mass?
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Like, was it cancer?
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Was she gonna die?
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But the doctor said he had no idea what it was.
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And really, there was only one way to find out.
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A few hours later, that same doctor threaded a tube with a tiny camera attached to it down Mary's throat while she lay there unconscious.
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And as the doctor did this, a bunch of nurses stood by and watched a monitor as the camera descended deeper and deeper into Mary's digestive tract.
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Basically, the camera was projecting onto this monitor in real time.
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Earlier, the doctor had ordered a CT scan of Mary's abdomen and it had revealed this mass.
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It It was like a long, oval -shaped lump about the size of a fist, and it was pressing up against the walls of her stomach.
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It had areas of different density, which meant that it was a solid tumor, but the doctor really had no idea what kind of tumor it was.
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So now he was doing an endoscopy to get a better look.
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He was going to go look at it with a camera.
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And so now, as the doctor finagled the tube and the camera deeper into Mary, he also was watching the monitor really closely.
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And when the camera reached Mary's stomach, on the monitor, he and the nurses saw this dark mass covered in mucus.
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And it was like nothing he or any of the nurses had ever seen before.
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And for a few seconds, he and the nurses had no idea what it was.
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But the doctor continued to move the camera around to get a better look at this weird mass, and eventually they figured out what it was.
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And when they did, the doctor snapped to attention and told the nurses to get Mary scheduled for surgery immediately.
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It would turn out Mary's symptoms, the mass, the pain, the nausea, all of it, it was related to her stress.
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But what they found was not an ulcer, nor was it gastritis.
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It was a trichobizor, which is the medical term for a hairball.
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Mary had a psychiatric condition called trichophagia, which causes people to pull out and eat their own hair as a way to cope with stress.
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Once the medical team figured out that's what they were dealing with, they surgically removed the trichobizor, the hairball, from Mary's stomach,
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and she was given medication and counseling to help with her anxiety.
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And after a month of treatment, she felt a lot better physically and mentally.
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She felt ready to sort of take back her life.
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So she promptly left her mother -in -law behind.
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She moved out and she took her two boys.
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They moved abroad and they reunited with their father and her husband.
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Thank you so much for watching today's episode.
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Let me know what you thought of it in the comments below.
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And remember, we have a whole playlist of Places You Can't Go episodes ready for you to binge right now.
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So go ahead and click here and give them a watch.
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All right, until next time, see ya.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 276 sentences and 4229 words to shadow. The speech runs for 23:15. The speaker talks fast, about 182 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 86% 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
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| stomach noun | /ˈstʌmək/ | An organ in animals that stores food in the process of digestion. |
| knife noun | /ˈnaɪ̯f/ | A utensil or a tool designed for cutting, consisting of a flat piece of hard material, usually steel or other metal (the blade), usually sharpened on one edge… |
| scream verb | /skɹiːm/ | To cry out with a shrill voice; to utter a sudden, sharp outcry, or shrill, loud cry, as in fright or extreme pain; to screech, to shriek. |
| bedroom noun | /ˈbɛdˌɹum/ | A room in a house, apartment, hotel, or other dwelling where a bed is kept for sleeping. |
| nurse noun | /nɝs/ | Anyone performing this role, regardless of training or profession. |
| monitor noun | /ˈmɑ.nɪ.tɚ/ | Someone who watches over something; a person in charge of something or someone. |
| mysterious adjective | /mɪˈstɪɹi.əs/ | Of unknown origin. |
| stab verb | /stæb/ | To pierce or to wound (somebody) with a (usually pointed) tool or weapon, especially a knife or dagger. |
| nausea noun | /ˈnɔzi.ə/ | A feeling of illness or discomfort in the digestive system, usually characterized by a strong urge to vomit. |
| doorway noun | /ˈdɔɹweɪ/ | The passage of a door; a door-shaped entrance into a house or a room. |
| establishment noun | /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ.mənt/ | The act or process of establishing; a ratifying or ordaining; settlement; confirmation. |
| dental adjective | /ˈdɛn.təl/ | Of or concerning the teeth. |
| headache noun | /ˈhɛdeɪk/ | A pain or ache in the head. |
| neighbour noun | /ˈneɪbɚ/ | A person living on adjacent or nearby land; a person situated adjacently or nearby; anything (of the same type of thing as the subject) in an adjacent or… |
| symptom noun | /ˈsɪm(p)təm/ | A perceived change in some function, sensation or appearance of a person that indicates a disease or disorder, such as fever, headache or rash; strictly, a… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| pull out verb | To withdraw; especially of military forces; to retreat. |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. |
| clean up verb | To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
| jump up verb | To move from one position to a higher position by one jump. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 58 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, she'd, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: establishment /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ.mənt/, shock /ʃɔk/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, rush /ɹʌʃ/, sharp /ʃɑɹp/
- Long words — get the stress right: mysterious /mɪˈstɪɹi.əs/, establishment /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ.mənt/, anxiety /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/
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 stomach, knife, scream.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was annoyed · was set · was stabbed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | pillows, which was · life, which was · places, which was |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | hasn't moved · I've gotten · you've never even seen |
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.