Zombies, incantations and dolls full of pins… the version of voodoo that most of us get has been suffused with decades of Hollywood magic, and a dusting of light xenophobia.

But the reality of Haitian vodou is much more complex – and way more fascinating. So, how did slaves reconcile their own folklore and religions, with the Catholicism that colonisers were forcing down their throats? Who are the main lwa – or spirits – of vodou? And how can an offering of black coffee, rum and cigars help you to commune with the dead?

Find out in this week’s ShortHand!

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Trapped in a soundproof underground bunker, sleeping in a coffin-shaped box, abused and forced to watch news footage of her December 1992 disappearance on a loop, 10-year-old Katie Beers wondered if she’d ever see the world outside her makeshift prison ever again…

But one thing her captor didn’t know? Katie was a survivor.

This is the story of a little girl who fought against the odds – and managed to escape a lifetime of abuse.

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Rage-inducing viruses that spread through bites; a flesh-eating fungus that controls its host like a puppet; deadly pathogens trapped for millennia in Arctic ice… sometimes nature is more gruesome than fiction.

From the Walking Dead to the Last of Us, stories of contagion are never far from our screens. So what are the closest real-life scenarios that could turn our world into a full-on zombie wasteland? (And, what makes insects go on a sex-crazed, amphetamine-fuelled rampage until their literal butts fall off?) This is the ShortHand.

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Somehow, perhaps the worst deep-sea diving disaster in history – one that led to two men being crushed, three men boiling to death, and one man being liquified and shot out of a five-inch hole – happened above sea level.

How? Well, join us off the coast of Norway for a little explosive decompression – and find out what can happen when the pressure of diving just gets too much…

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In the summer of 2017, 26-year-old Anna Sorokin was arrested in Manhattan with a stack of unpaid hotel bills and fraudulent loan requests in her wake. She’d been calling herself Anna Delvey: an uber-wealthy German heiress. In reality? She didn’t have a penny to her (fake) name.

Armed only with an untraceable accent and a passion for fashion, Anna tried to pull the designer wool over the eyes of some of America’s biggest financial institutions, in her bid to secure multi-million-dollar loans…

And the worst part? She almost got away with it.

Was Anna a con artist? An inspirational Robin Hood in high heels? An insufferable wannabe? Or all of the above?

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Tens of millions of dollars flowed onto the canvas from the tip of Wolfgang Beltracchi’s brush. His talent? Unquestionable. His methods? Perfect. His ability to recreate the works of other artists? The greatest there has ever been.

Alongside his wife Helene, Wolfgang Beltrachhi sold an unknown number of paintings, passed off as the work of 20th-century artists, to some of the most respected galleries and collectors in the world. In the process they made millions of dollars, and created a scandal so deep that, even today, nobody wants to touch it.

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Mystery, mayhem, and death followed Michael X all the way back to Trinidad.

Hacked to death and left in shallow graves, the bodies of Gale Benson and Joseph Skerritt were found at Michael X’s house. Whispers of black magic and rumours of espionage rippled through the island.

How could a young, wealthy British socialite like Gale Benson end up buried alive in the Caribbean? And why would Michael X want her dead?
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Intimate and explicit images of A-list celebrities – that’s what the world woke up to on the 31st of August 2014. “The Fappening” saw thousands of leaked celebrity nudes dumped onto 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter. It gave unprecedented access to the most overtly private images anyone could imagine – but how on earth did it happen?

This week on ShortHand we’re taking a deep dive into the grubby world of AnonIB and leaked-nude “collectors”: users who hoard and circulate explicit images without the subject’s consent – celebrity or not. So how do these images come to be online? And how do we stop it from happening?

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