Shadowing Practice: Most DISTURBING Photos With Backstories Explained In 20 minutes - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Smile .jpg - Smile Dog If the internet had a cursed hallway with doors you should never open, Smile .jpg would be one of them.
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This infamous image, better known as Smile Dog, is one of the internet's most bone -chilling creepypasta legends.
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It all started with a file, an old grainy jpeg of a dog.
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But not just any dog, this one has human -like teeth, glowing eyes, and a blood -red background.
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cute kind of smile.
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According to the legend, the image originated from a floppy disk mailed to a woman named Mary E who was researching paranormal phenomena.
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After viewing the image, she began having vivid nightmares and spiraled into paranoia and a mental breakdown.
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Eventually, she took her own life, allegedly leaving only a note, smile, God loves you.
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What makes smile .jpg so disturbing People report headaches,
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seizures, and even hallucinations after seeing it.
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Forums are filled with users begging others not to search it.
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Some even claim it shows up in inboxes or hidden links, whispering in dreams.
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Spread the word.
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Rap .mp3 or Memphis Rap Sigils There's a photo floating around the internet called rap .mp3,
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and no, it's not a sound file, it's an image.
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of a man, shirtless and sweaty, staring straight into the camera with cold, almost lifeless eyes.
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He's surrounded by strange hand -drawn symbols, think crosses, triangles, occult -looking squiggles, all scrawled in black marker across the walls.
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The caption simply reads "rap .mp3" and the internet lost its mind.
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People started calling it the Memphis Rap Sigils, tying it to the dark,
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horrorcore rap, a niche music scene known for lyrics about death, satanism, and ritualistic violence.
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Some speculated that the symbols were part of actual sigil magic where drawings are believed to summon spirits or manifest evil.
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Others thought it was a real crime scene and the man in the image was a murderer.
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Others believed he was the victim.
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And then there were those who thought the whole photo was cursed.
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The point is that no one could explain where it came from or
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The only thing people knew for certain was that when you look at it, it just feels wrong.
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Like you've accidentally walked in on something you were never meant to see.
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The Vulture and the Little Girl, Sudan, 1993.
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One of the most haunting and disturbing photos ever to spread across the internet is the Vulture and the Little Girl.
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It was taken in 1993 during the Sudan famine by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter, and once you see it, it burns into your memory.
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The photo shows a frail, starving little girl collapsed on the ground, barely alive, while a vulture lurks just feet away, waiting.
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Yes, waiting.
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As if the bird knew her time was almost up.
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The image was captured Eod Sudan, and it quickly became a symbol of the horror and helplessness of famine.
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But what made it truly eerie wasn't just the photo, but what came after.
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People online began asking if the girl survived and why the photographer didn't try to help her.
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Kevin Carter claimed she managed to crawl away, but her exact fate was never confirmed, and that ambiguity made things even darker.
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According to the story, some said he waited 20 minutes to get the perfect shot before chasing at all.
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Carter won that Pulitzer Prize in 1994, which made the speculations worse because people started saying he had traded compassion for a Pulitzer.
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Sadly, just months later, overwhelmed by guilt, trauma, and backlash, he died by suicide.
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His final note hinted at the horrors he had witnessed and couldn't unsee.
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The Tragedy of Blanche Monnier letter stating that a starving unmarried woman was locked up in Madame Monnier's home.
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The Monniers were a well -respected conservative family of noble blood, so they were definitely not the sort that would do something like this.
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Regardless, the police still stormed into the house and were shocked to find an emaciated woman surrounded by old food, excrement, insects, and vermin.
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Her name Before then, Blanche had the world at her fingertips.
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She was beautiful, from a wealthy family, and attracted wealthier suitors.
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But the only man Blanche was interested in was a poor lawyer.
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For Blanche's mother and her brother Marcel, this was the ultimate disgrace to the family.
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So Blanche was taken to a tiny room in the attic and chained to the bed.
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For the next 25 years, they mournfully told everyone that the lovely Blanche had disappeared, even long after her beau died.
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By the time Blanche was rescued, she was 56, weighed a mere 25 kilograms, and had gone mad.
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Blanche's mother was arrested, but died 15 days later.
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Her brother was convicted at first, but was acquitted because he was considered mentally incompetent.
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And there was Blanche would live for 10 more years before dying in a psychiatric hospital.
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Tomoko in the Bath, Japan, 1971.
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At first glance, the photo looks deceptively calm.
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A mother gently holds her daughter in a bath, both their faces unreadable, one tender, the other blank.
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But once you know the story, the image becomes a haunting,
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tragic, and deeply unsettling picture known She suffered from severe mercury poisoning,
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aka Minamata disease, caused by industrial wastewater dumped into the sea by the Chiso Corporation.
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Thousands were affected, but Tomoko's case was one of the most extreme.
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A photo taken by Pulitzer Prize -winning photographer W.
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Eugene Smith in 1971, was meant to show the human cost of unchecked corporate greed, and it did.
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It did it too well.
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The photo went viral decades later, resurfacing on creepy forums and disturbing images lists across the internet.
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Because the photo doesn't just document illness, it feels possessed.
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The light is soft, the water is still, but there's something eerie about the way Tomoko's body folds into her mother's arms.
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invisible and beyond us.
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Then came the urban legends.
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Whispers started to circulate that the photo was cursed and people who stared at it too long felt a strange sadness.
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The photo was eventually pulled from circulation by Tomoko's family who said it had been misused.
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By then, it was already too late.
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Annalisa Michel and the Exorcism Death In 1976,
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two Roman Catholic priests Ernst Ault and Arnold Renz went on trial.
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And it's not for the reason you think.
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The two were involved in the death of Enneliese Michel who had starved to death during a 10 -month long exorcism.
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Enna grew up in a devout Catholic family in West Germany, but when she turned 16, Enna started having seizures.
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And by 20, she was on heavy psychiatric medication for psychosis and depression.
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Even with the drugs, Anna ate insects and drank her urine off the floor.
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Once, she bit the head off a dead bird.
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But the final straw was when she told her family that she was hearing voices.
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They took her off the meds and approached the Roman Catholic Church for an exorcism.
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It was approved, and for the next 10 months,
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Ernst Alt and Arnold Renz exorcised Anna while she spoke in a deep, growling voice. on her knees.
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When the kneeling caused some of her bones to break, they didn't stop or even treat her wounds.
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They just continued with the rituals.
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By this time, Anna had stopped eating and weigh just 33 kilograms.
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67 exorcisms later, she died of dehydration and malnutrition.
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Anna was just 23 years old.
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Her parents and the two Roman Catholic priests were found guilty of negligent homicide.
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parents never served time because they had suffered enough.
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Anatoly Moskvin, the doll collector.
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Anatoly Moskvin was known for many things.
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Brilliant journalism, renowned historian, and linguistic expert.
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Some even called him a genius.
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But in 2011, the Russian man would come to be known by another name, the creepy man who collected dead girls.
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It started when the police received several reports about graves being robbed at cemeteries in and around the city
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in Novgorod in Russia.
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After staking out cemeteries for two years, in 2011, they caught Anatoly digging up a grave.
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When they searched the apartment he shared with his parents, they quickly realized that this wasn't your run -of -the -mill grave robbery.
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There were life -sized dolls all over the apartment.
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A 45 -year -old man having life -sized dolls is pretty weird, but what makes Anatoly's case special is that they were the mummified remains of human girls.
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And he didn't stop there.
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Anatoly attached buttons or toy eyes into their empty eye sockets so that they could watch cartoons with him.
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Some of the bodies had music boxes in their chests so that when he touched them, they would make sounds.
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He even kept doll -making manuals and maps of local cemeteries.
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done right under his parents' noses.
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They just thought he liked making big dolls and thought nothing of it.
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29 corpses were found in the apartment.
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The youngest was three, the oldest, 25.
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Anatoly was diagnosed with a form of paranoid schizophrenia and has been confined to a psychiatric clinic since, freeing the dead to rest in peace.
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The Andes Plane Crash, Survival at 70 Days.
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rugby union team chartered the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 to take them to Chile for a match.
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But their plans were forever changed
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when the co -pilot Lieutenant Colonel Dante La Guarrara made a fatal mistake
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that would end with the plane crashing on a remote icy mountain in Argentina.
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Of the 45 passengers on board, 33 remained alive although many were critically or seriously injured.
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Aircraft took off in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay to search for the missing flight, but couldn't find them because the blanket of white snow kept them hidden.
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As the weather worsened, the rescue teams called off the search, convinced that no one could have survived.
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So imagine the shock when 70 days after the plane disappeared, two of the survivors, Nando Porrado and Roberto Canesa,
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trekked 50 miles to Chile with the news that there were still more survivors in the mountains.
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Over the next two days, the Chilean Air Force would find and rescue 16 survivors ones.
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The story of their survival shocked the world, but not as much as what they had to do to survive.
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At first, they made do with the food they had brought, but when they ran out, they resorted to the unimaginable, eating the flesh of the people who died.
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A picture they took shows what looks like a human spine.
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The media went crazy, and families who lost their loved ones in the crash were livid.
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Rumors swirled around that the survivors might have eat their dead came from.
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Eventually, the outrage died down.
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It certainly helped that Pope Paul IV sent a telegram to the survivors sanctioning their actions.
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The remains of the 29 who died were buried at the crash site.
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15 were mere bones, while 13 bodies were found intact.
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The Dylan Redwine Case On November 19, 2012, police received a missing persons report from Elaine Hall.
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Her son, Colorado to seen her soon -to -be ex -husband, Mark, on a court -ordered visit.
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The following morning, Mark left home to run some errands, and when he got back, the 13 -year -old was gone.
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Father and son didn't have a great relationship, so people didn't think much of it when Mark said Dylan had run away.
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Then, months later, Dylan's body was found eight miles from Mark's home.
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By then, a lot of people were suspicious of him.
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He didn't join in the search for Dylan, and he had told an ex -wife mountains were the best place to get rid of a body.
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He also told his older son, Corey, that Dylan's head needed to be found to determine the cause of death.
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Mark and Elaine had also appeared on Dr. Phil, where Mark flat out refused to take a polygraph test.
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The police did a more thorough search of Mark's home and truck and found traces of Dylan's DNA.
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He was arrested and sentenced to 48 years.
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However, the question on everyone's lips was why?
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Why did Mark kill his 13 -year -old son?
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Well, back in 2011, Corey and Dylan found some disturbing pictures of Mark on his laptop.
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He had on a wig, was wearing women's lingerie, soiled diapers, and even eating human waste from said diaper.
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Dylan had planned to confront him during his visit and had asked Corey to send him the pictures.
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Faced with this humiliation, Mark had killed his own son.
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Maybe in a fit of rage, maybe to keep him quiet.
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The Murder of Lisa Holm These yellow tiles were the last thing Lisa Holmes saw before she took her last breath.
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Lisa Holmes was a 17 year old working a summer job at a coffee shop in Blomberg, Sweden.
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On the night of June 7, 2015, she texted her father that she had ended her shift and was heading home on her moped.
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But Lisa never made it back.
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Hours later, when her father came to check what was holding her up, he found her moped still there with a key in the ignition.
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But no Lisa.
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For five days, hundreds of volunteers flooded the area searching for Lisa.
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They slowly found bits of her things.
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Her cell phone case and license.
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All pointers that Lisa might still be in the area.
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a neighboring farm.
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Then a suspicious man showed up and told them the area had already been searched.
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They didn't believe him and continued their search.
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Lisa's jacket and helmet were soon found in a nearby barn.
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They eventually worked their way to a nearby work shed.
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In one of the closets, they found Lisa's body with a rope around her neck.
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The teenager had been hanged by the neck in the barn before her body was hidden in the work shed.
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DNA evidence on Lisa's body and the
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old lithuanian nareas belevichus the same man who had tried to
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derail the search nareas's computer contained a lot of pornography
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and there was evidence that he watched the girls in the coffee shop from his room
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and checked on them nareas was sentenced to life in prison
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but he wasn't there long he got beaten up by other inmates was drenched in hot water
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and in 2022 fatally stabbed by another inmate Robert Pickton, the pig farmer killer.
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When Canadian police executed a search warrant for illegal firearms at the Pickton pig farm on February 6, 2002, they expected to find weapons,
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pigs, and maybe one or two weird things.
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After all, David and Robert Pickton were known for hosting wild parties on the farm.
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What they didn't expect to find were the personal belongings of a missing woman.
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They executed another search warrant on the property, but this time they found much skulls,
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hands, and feet, bloody clothing belonging to a victim, a jawbone and teeth, and a garbage can with human remains.
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By the time they were done, they had found the DNA of missing women.
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Some of them were prostitutes, others were drug users.
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Robert Pickton had murdered 33 women between 1995 and 2001.
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Robert put the actual number at 49 and had told an undercover detective
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What was crazy about this case was how normal Robert looked and was.
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On the outside, he seemed like the quiet Picton brother.
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He got rich selling parts on his farmland to property developers
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while working diligently as a full -time farmer on his family's pig farm.
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Behind closed doors, Robert lured women to his farm, handcuffed and killed them before getting rid of their bodies.
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And the way he did it would definitely disgust you.
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He told one person that he ground them up and fed them to his pigs.
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But there's also evidence that Robert may have ground up human flesh
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and mixed it with pork that he sold to the public.
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The serial killer got a taste of his own medicine in 2024 when he died from a fatal heart attack behind bars.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Most DISTURBING Photos With Backstories Explained In 20 minutes”. This video has 193 sentences and 2643 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:23. The speaker talks at a natural 152 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| survivor noun | /sɚˈvaɪvɚ/ | One who survives, especially one who survives a traumatic experience. |
| doll noun | /dɑl/ | A small figure resembling a human being that is used as a toy. |
| disturb verb | /dɪˈstɜːb/ | to confuse a quiet, constant state or a calm, continuous flow, in particular: thoughts, actions or liquids. |
| exorcism noun | /ˈɛk.sɔɹˌsɪ.zəm/ | The ritual act of driving out evil spirits from persons, places or things that are possessed by them. |
| vulture noun | /ˈvʌlt͡ʃɚ/ | Any of several carrion-eating birds of the families Accipitridae and Cathartidae. |
| psychiatric adjective | /ˌsaɪ.kiˈæt.ɹɪk/ | Of, or relating to, psychiatry. |
| cemetery noun | /ˈsɛm.ɪˌtɛɹ.i/ | A place where the dead are buried; a graveyard or memorial park. |
| curse noun | /kɝs/ | A supernatural detriment or hindrance; a bane. |
| eerie adjective | /ˈɪɚi/ | Inspiring fear, especially in a mysterious or shadowy way; strange, weird. |
| kilogram noun | /ˈkɪləɡɹæm/ | In the International System of Units, the base unit of mass; conceived of as the mass of one litre of water, but now defined by taking the fixed numerical… |
| moped noun | /ˈmoʊ.pɛd/ | A lightweight, two-wheeled vehicle equipped with a small motor and pedals, designed to go no faster than some specified speed limit. |
| starve verb | /stɑɹv/ | To die because of lack of food or of not eating. |
| haunt verb | /hɔnt/ | To inhabit or to visit frequently (most often used in reference to ghosts). |
| famine noun | /ˈfæm.ɪn/ | Extreme shortage of food in a region. |
| seizure noun | /ˈsi.ʒɚ/ | The act of taking possession, as by force or right of law. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| call off verb | To recall; to cancel or call a halt to. |
| die down verb | To become less virulent or strong; to subside. |
| dig up verb | To excavate something. |
| get back verb | Return to where one came from. |
| head off verb | To begin moving away. |
| run away verb | To flee by running. |
| run out verb | To use up or consume all |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
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 | are filled · are believed · was cursed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | those who thought · people who stared · man who collected |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 15 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, wasn't, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: seizure /ˈsi.ʒɚ/, suspicious /səˈspɪʃ.əs/, flesh /flɛʃ/, caption /ˈkæp.ʃən/, compassion /kəmˈpæʃ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: exorcism /ˈɛk.sɔɹˌsɪ.zəm/, psychiatric /ˌsaɪ.kiˈæt.ɹɪk/, cemetery /ˈsɛm.ɪˌtɛɹ.i/, originate /əˈɹɪd͡ʒɪneɪt/, undercover /ˌʌndə(ɹ)ˈkʌvə(ɹ)/
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 survivor, doll, disturb.
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.