ShortHand: Foreign Accent Syndrome

The mythical lost island of Atlantis has puzzled historians for millennia, with its powerful technology, advanced society, and crystal powered weapons of mass destruction. Or has it?While the lost kingdom was first mentioned by none other than Plato several millennia ago, its existence as a real tangible place has only been taken remotely seriously for the last couple of hundred years. So what turned the tide and led to an allegory for the importance of a well run government turning into a full blown aquatic conspiracy?--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

AI-generated love songs and texts referring to his own wife as “Spawn of Satan” were only part of the baffling and bizarre testimony given by Caleb Flynn, on trial for the murder of the mother of his two children, Ashley Flynn. The two lovers at the centre of Alshley’s death, Caleb Flynn and Alleigha Botner, had shared tens of thousands of messages, describing how they wanted to see Ashley dead, so that they could finally be together. Read aloud in court, parts of their story were so blood-boilingly selfish it was hard to hear, while other parts were so deeply cringeworthy that even Ashley’s family found themselves laughing at just how pathetic the man who killed their daughter really was.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Imagine waking up one day and suddenly speaking with a French, Japanese or Jamaican accent. That’s what happens to sufferers of an extremely rare – but very real – brain disorder known as Foreign Accent Syndrome.So what’s going on? Well, while it makes for intensely shareable content, it’s no picnic. But also, if you dig into the science, it tells us all sorts of amazing things about how the brain processes language.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

When the wife of former American Idol contestant Caleb Flynn was shot twice in the head at close range – while her two daughters slept just metres down the hallway – Caleb blamed an intruder.What he didn’t reveal (at least at first) was his affair with the significantly younger Alleigha Botner, who he’d met at church. Or, how dependent he was on Ashley’s father’s family business. But none of that would stay a secret for long.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

A fire has been raging under the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, for more than 60 years – and it’s nowhere near done.After the vast underground coal deposits under the former mining town caught alight, sinkholes in the road opened up into flaming pits, billowing thick smoke through town. Toxic fumes seeped up through the floorboards and poisoned people in their homes. And in the town’s cemeteries, the flames even reached up from below and swallowed up the dead themselves…--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Recorded under a full moon, RedHanded’s guide to all things lycanthropic tells the whole hairy story: from Ancient Greek tales of curses, through the gruesome wolf trials of the Middle Ages, all the way through to whatever yassified teen-heartthrob vibe we’ve got going on nowadays. --Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Welcome to part two of our annual Halloween story-swap, where we take turns to try and freak each other out... with the very worst stories we can unearth.This week, Hannah has the horrific true story of Tsutomu Miyazaki, Japan’s infamous ‘Little Girl Killer’ whose incel-adjacent muder spree took the lives of four young girls. Then, Suruthi tells us the terrible true tale of Vilma Trujillo, a 25-year-old mother of two, who was burned at the stake after telling her church she was about to birth a serpent.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

At first, stories of European witch-panics were nothing more than idle gossip to the settlers of New England. But soon – faced with inexplicable blights, punishing winters, and stories of people carried off into the night by indigenous tribes – suspicions of black magic became very real indeed...Picking up where we left off in Europe, H&S explore how the madness of the witch-hunting craze made its way to the New World. So strap in for sinister rituals, lots of piss-based magic, and how it all came to a head in the little village of Salem, Massachusetts.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

In Part 2 of our special spooky series on all things witchy, we take a look at how the hag-hunting insanity spread to the British Isles: thanks to a paranoid new king and a 19-year-old, self-styled Witchfinder General.Plus: what really goes down at a witches’ sabbath, and why did women make up 90% of the thousands killed?--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

With Halloween fast approaching, it’s time for our annual tradition at RedHanded: a classic spooky story swap. In this first spine-tingling episode, Suruthi takes us into the forest of Ibadan, Nigeria, to a real-life house of horrors where black magic rituals and sinister government secrets collide. Meanwhile, Hannah tells the terrifying story of Ruthie Mae McCoy and the real life Candyman – proving that dark forces really can lurk just beyond the bathroom mirror…--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram