داستان انگلیسی روانی ها٫ ترسوها و حیله گران

ACTIVE LISTENING MAIN STORY

PSYCHICS, COWARDS AND CON ARTISTS

Tucker Blandford and Alex Lanchester seemed to be a match made in heaven. Alex was a British student studying abroad in the US.

Tucker was a young set painter. They met at a movie theater that Alex worked at and soon fell in love. Alex says those early days were wonderful. She says, “Tucker was such a gentleman and was always buying me dinner and beautiful vintage jewelry. I’d never been in love like that before. Every Sunday he would take me out for pancakes, it was so sweet.”

Their year-long romance was coming to an end as Alex prepared to return to England. The thought of leaving was heartbreaking, but then Tucker popped the question, and Alex said yes.

After she returned to England, they talked daily making plans for their wedding the following year. As the big day approached, everything began to fall into place. The wedding dress was bought, the venue was booked, photographers were hired, and invitations were sent out to all the guests. At last, they were ready to tie the knot.

And then tragedy struck. Just one week before the wedding, Alex received a call from a man saying he was Tucker’s father. He said Tucker had become depressed and killed himself.

Alex said she couldn’t breathe and was absolutely devastated.

After calming herself, she called Tucker’s parents back. His mother picked up the phone, but she had no idea what Alex was talking about. She said Tucker was fine. And she didn’t even know that Tucker and Alex were planning to get married. Tucker had told his parents they had broken up when Alex returned to England.

The man who called her claiming to be Tucker’s father was really Tucker himself. The truth was Tucker just had cold feet. Instead of telling Alex how he really felt, he faked his own death. He admitted everything to a reporter saying, “I’m a terrible, awful person. I know I shouldn’t have told her I was dead, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

While Alex is probably lucky to have avoided tying the knot with a spineless coward, she was heartbroken at first. She said, “Looking back, maybe I was naive. But I really loved him and I never thought he would go to such extreme measures to dump me. I’ve cried until I felt numb but now I’m just really angry.”

It’s hard to understand what was going through Tucker’s head when he decided to impersonate his father and fake his death. James Verone’s reason for pretending to be someone he wasn’t was more cut and dry. James was unemployed and struggling to get by. He was living off of food stamps and doing his best to make do, but his health was also failing. He couldn’t walk well because of a pain in his foot, and he needed surgery on his back. He tolerated the pain in his foot and back, but when he then discovered a strange lump in his chest, he knew he needed a doctor.

With no job and no health insurance, going to jail was his only answer. In prison, he would receive free health care and be able to get surgery and the lump in his chest checked. He said, “I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic. That’s what I came up with.” James had never committed a crime before, but he was at his wit’s end. He left his house and first went to the post office. He mailed a letter to the local newspaper saying, “When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me. This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar…I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

He then went to the bank without a gun or any kind of weapon. He just had a note that said, “This is a bank robbery, please only give me one dollar.” He handed the note to the teller and was given a dollar in exchange. He then told the teller, “I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police.” James was arrested, and before he was even sent to court, he was given medical attention. It’s unclear how long James spent in prison, but he did say if it’s not long enough to get fully healed, he’d just have to rob another bank.

While James had to trick his way into prison, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, tricked their way out of prison. Unlike Tucker, they didn’t fake death, but rather madness and psychic ability.

Jones was a British officer during WWI fighting the Turks in what is now Iraq. He was captured and marched 2,000 miles over 62 days to the Yozgad prisoner of war camp in Turkey.

The seed for their escape from Yozgad came from an innocent postcard Jones received from his aunt. She suggested that he and the other prisoners entertain themselves with a Ouija board.

They cut out paper squares with letters and numbers, placed them on a table and used a glass as a pointer. Out of boredom, Jones secretly took control of the pointer and pretended that a spirit was writing messages through the Ouija board.

The other prisoners were easily fooled, and they weren’t the only ones. The camp interpreter, a man named Moїse was very interested. All the prisoners hated Moїse for stealing their packages and taking bribes. Jones saw this as a perfect opportunity to mess with him. Jones told the other prisoners to tell Moїse that he was a powerful psychic. They created a wild story about Jones having been captured by a tribe that shared their psychic secrets with him. Moїse ate it up and asked Jones to use his powers to get him information that he could use to hit on the female prisoners. Jones strung Moїse along with fake information supposedly received from the spirit world.

Moїse was so impressed by Jones’ powers, that he told the camp commander about the psychic prisoner. From then on, the commander said prisoners were forbidden from sharing information received from spirits in their letters home.

Jones thought that there must be a way to use Moїse and the commander’s gullibility to escape, but he needed help. He told them that an Australian prisoner named Cedric Hill was telepathic.

In actuality, Hill was an amateur magician. Jones and Hill used a magic trick to demonstrate his powers of telepathy.

Moїse and the commander were greedy and thought they could use Jones and Hill’s powers to make them rich. Earlier in the war, Armenian prisoners had been massacred at Yozgad. One of these Armenians was a very rich man who was rumored to have buried his money. Jones and Hill were happy to help their captors find it.

The spirits told Jones that the Armenian didn’t want to tell any one person where he buried the money. Instead, he buried three clues to where his gold was and told three different people where the clues were. Jones said that two of the people had died, but their spirits revealed the locations of the buried clues.

Jones and Hill learned how to write Armenian and buried these clues ahead of time. Moїse and the commander dug them up, but without the 3rd clue, they were useless. The holder of the final clue was a businessman living in Constantinople. Hill tried to use his telepathy to access this man’s mind, but the distance was too far.

Moїse said they would have to travel there. At first, Jones and Hill said no, they must stay in the camp and be with their friends, but Moїse persisted. Finally, they agreed.

With Moїse’s help, Jones and Hill faked madness to get permission from the camp doctors to travel to a mental hospital in Constantinople. Moїse just wanted the money, but Jones and Hill saw this as their ticket to freedom. Their plan was to act so crazy in Constantinople, that they would be released in a prisoner exchange.

Their plan went off without a hitch. After six months of persistently faking madness in a Constantinople mental hospital, they were put on a prisoner exchange ship and sent to England.

Of course, not before making Moїse believe that the 3rd clue was lost, but not to worry. The spirits had said he was not just going to be rich. He was also going to rule the world. They said he must go home and wait. When the time was right, all would be revealed. Until then, the spirits said, “he must walk humbly, do justly, and live a righteous and austere life.” Moїse happily returned home. That was the last they ever saw of Moїse, but they did receive three letters from him over the years, asking when they would return to Turkey and help him fulfill his destiny.