The author and his baby

Babies spend nine months floating around inamniotic fluid, so their swim game is, as the French say, on fleek. You everlook up swimming babies on YouTube? Those lil fuckers can't be older than sixmonths, straight up swimming underwater with their eyes open like full-grownadults.

If you can, do a water birth,that's the real deal. Get that thing holding its breath and splashing aroundright off the bat. Water births are nice for the baby because the warm waterwill remind it of its old crib and ease the shock of existence. The baby willcome out fully hydrated. Need to hydrate to live. Sweet hydrogen. That hydro.Remember that Bone Thugz song where they were like "blowin thathydrooo"? Sweet tune.

But back to what I was sayingearlier: babies are beasts, dog. There's nothing they can't do. You seen thatbaby playing Guitar Hero? Oh waitjust looked that up and it's obviously just a commercial, never mind. I musthave been super high to think that was real last time I watched it. But still,babies are wild capable creatures.

No matter what, babies are about to be hellabetter than you at everything. If you suck at swimming the baby's gonna be atleast OK at swimming. If you're hella wavy at swimming the baby's finna beMichael Phelps. If you're Michael Phelps your baby's finna be a literal actualdolphin.

Dog, get the baby in the water, I'm telling you.Dunk the baby. Don't be scared, it won't drown. It knows how to hold its breathand close its eyes on instinct. I fuckin' kid you not. It's a trip. It might bea little surprised and maybe even cry, but keep the energy positive and lightand it will be too distracted by how ill the water is to freak out. Move thebaby around and watch the baby kick its tiny legs. The baby will thank you forit. Gets all the muscles moving. The baby will look and feel better after acouple laps at the natatorium. Plus swimming tires babies out. Lil fucker willbe out like a lamp.

Take the baby to the beach let it play in theocean, mane. That's Yemaya, old school Yoruban type name for the spiritualocean lady who be running shit. She's the Star of the Sea, the Mother of Pearl.She's good for weddings, funerals, births, and other general rites of passage. Youneed to get the baby familiar with her cause she's a mother figure and she'sabout the waters, which are essential to life. You need to get your baby up onthe various lessons and concepts and really get it familiar with water, whichcontains the essence of life. Why you think fools baptize babies? Water is wildspiritual, son.

Bathe the baby, bruh. Baths are essential, plusthey're relaxing as fuck. Throw a little sea salt and eucalyptus oil in thebath, spruce that bitch up. These are cleansing thangs. Burn a white candle anda blue candle for Yemaya. Burn some palo santo and maybe some sandalwood maneclear the air. Give the baby a bubble bath. Let the baby play with a littlerubber duck. The rubber duckie is the one, man. Having trouble getting the babyto sleep? A little bath before bed gets it super blissed out. Sleep is a bigone. I'll tackle that one in the next column but this week's topic is water:swammin', bathing, the earth's natural waters, Yemaya, etc. If you're stillunclear reread what I just wrote, I dropped some serious gems in this one.

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

Sohail Ahmed

Sohail Ahmed, 23, was raised in a hardline Islamist household in London's East End. He was taught to despise his country of birth, all of Western culture and everyone who wasn't Muslim. Conversely, he was always gay and, at heart, a humanist, struggling for years with the intractable problem of holding the chauvinistic views of radical Islam, which were directly opposed to his nature.

Below, he tells me about his upbringing and his journey to where he is today.

On 9/11, my hatred crystallised into something solid and pure. I was nine.

My family are from Kashmir in Pakistan and they raised me, and four younger siblings, in East London. When I was six, they were befriended by another family in our tower block who swiftly turned them from pretty much apolitical into austere, harsh Salafi Islamists.

From then I saw the world through the prism of radical Islam, and every attempt to make sense of reality was analysed through it. Life was a battle between good and evil, belief and unbelief. There was a huge contradiction between who I truly was and the odious, reactionary views I held. Always the internal voice saying, 'This is wrong,' while being so convinced of my beliefs that they ended up drowning out any semblance of reason.

Perhaps the first and greatest of these contradictions was my being a virulent homophobe who was also gay. I've always been attracted to boys. Ever since the age of about eight or nine, I had these feelings pulling me toward them in an enchanting way.

Hitting puberty very early, I started messing around with boys at 14 years old. It would always be unknown people strangers met online or just at secluded spots, because nobody could ever, ever find out. Afterwards, I would be so disgusted and utterly ashamed. However intense the pleasure, afterward nothing remained but a hollow ache. There's a prophetic narration that says: "When a man lies with another man, the throne of heaven shakes." That's how serious it was; I truly felt like dying.

Getting closer to Allah was always held up as the way to get rid of sinful thoughts, so I prayed more, became more "pious", grew out my beard and fell further and further into revolutionary Islam.

At 16, my mind was so corrupted and hate-filled that I considered a bomb attack on Canary Wharf. Being attracted to an unspeakable atrocity was ultimately the expression of this huge self-destructive streak. I wanted to show my piety and zealousness to Allah, but was truly terrified of spending an eternity of conscious torment in fire for my sexuality. It's hard for secular people to understand how real Hell is to the devout. The threat of an everlasting inferno backlit all of my thoughts and behaviour.

There was this incredible cognitive dissonance. The more I toyed around with guys the stronger my homophobia became. I'd join in with bigoted jokes and slurs and really believe them too. Looking back, it was obviously self-hatred an intense loathing of myself deflected onto others as a coping mechanism.

I've always had a problem with violence, too; 7/7 tore at the sinews of my heart and mind. I was both repulsed and attracted. It was absolutely horrific, but I convinced myself at the time what needed to happen. On a "rational" level I was happy, on an emotional level devastated. I was told bloodshed and death were the only engines of implementing Sharia to bring about perpetual peace. The destruction is made necessary as Islam is true so it must win. It is the Truth the last and final revelation. All else is commentary.

At university, the Islamic Society already had hardened members, and I became a key figure. We held prayer and study groups, turning Muslim pupils on to our noxious worldview. We'd host these incredibly poisonous speakers and present them as religious authorities. Once they're given that unchallenged platform, nobody questions them.

I'm filled with shame and embarrassment looking back on my part in stultifying the minds of others. One of the best friends to grace my life during this time ended up fighting jihad in Syria. He messaged me from ISIS ranks and said he'd call again in a few weeks, but never did.

That was over a year ago.

I began to listen to the doubts and internal niggling voice around 21. Looking into evolution, intellectual and philosophical arguments against theism, and studying Enlightenment thinkers really opened up this whole door of reason. The mind-forged manacles of blind and dogmatic faith began to loosen. I swiftly abandoned the whole project of revolutionary Islam after the glaring fallacies and absurdities were illuminated by the warm glow of rationality and empiricism.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: The Psychology of a 'Lone Wolf' Terrorist

In a fiery argument with my parents I spat that Islam probably wasn't even true. They went through my internet history looking for atheist material, or whatever, and they found well, other stuff.

My father said I was worse than a dog. He made me go through exorcisms to cast out the devils djinns that were obviously possessing me, and for two months I was exorcised every day. We even went to a "professional". The man couldn't look at me straight, like he thought I was immediately going to try to shag him if he made eye contact.

With a hand placed against my sweating head, he started reciting the Koran, humming the cadences in soft, absorbing notes. Something really weird happened, as the animal, fear-driven part of my mind took over for a moment. There was this overwhelming urge, as the scriptural Arabic rolled softly off his tongue, to thrash and wail about like those people you see in videos. To just lose control. It was this powerful, barely-repressible feeling bubbling up from deep within me. It took everything to stay still, and the moment still gives me pause.

After two months of this pseudo-spiritual pantomime I tried to kill myself because it was so fucked up and distressing. The attempt failed, and I had to move out and leave the toxic surroundings, or I really would have died.

Paradoxically, when radical I was much more sexually involved with guys than after coming out. Because it was so wrong and forbidden it became something fetishised and thus enchanting and tempting.

I'd imagine some of the hardcore Islamists and preachers will be gay. Sexuality is mixed up and connected to radical views in many different and dialectical ways. Look at all the married Evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists who get caught banging guys and still aggressively deny they're homos. It's exactly the same here, but just less talked about because it's so, so taboo in Muslim communities.

LGBT Muslims are one of the most silenced and fear-cowed minorities. There are many more than people think, but the penalties for saying you're a former or gay Muslim are severe. From social ostracism to violence and very believable threats of death, the cost of speaking out is extremely heavy.

WATCH: 'Homegrown Radicals', our film about young Canadians travelling to Syria to join the Islamic State.

Freud said: "Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires" and that resonates so powerfully.

I'm not an atheist, but now hold a very deist conception of God. No divine intervention, no dogmatism, no scriptural inerrancy, no world caliphate, no celestial violence and no miracles like Mohammed splitting the moon in half or flying to heaven on a winged-horse, all things which even very intelligent Muslims believe as empirical fact.

For now, I'm just happy to be alive and living without a mask; existing and following my instinctual desires, without illusion.

@ThomasHornall

More on VICE:

I Went to an Islamic Exorcism in the Back of a Glaswegian Nail Salon

Young, Gay, British and Muslim

Leaving Islam Behind Is a Scary Prospect for Britain's Ex-Muslims

This article originally appeared on Broadly.

Photo via Wikipedia Commons

Memory endures, though it does so unevenly. Such is the message of Salvador Dal's 1931 dorm room print The Persistence of Memory, and such is the takeaway of the surrealist painter's legacy. Adolescent boys who will one day run multi-million dollar corporations salivate over Daland his theoretical elevation of the repulsive to art, rarely having to confront the fact that he was a cruel narcissist of a human being.

Over and over again, following high-profile rape scandals and domestic abuse, intellectual thievery and explicit racism, people have asked, hesitant yet hopeful, if it's possible to separate the art from the artist. The subtext of this question, usually outwardly expressed as a kind of philosophical fluffing, is: Can we please just purely enjoy our favorite catchy songs, cool-looking paintings, and well-written sentences without having to think about the suffering their creators engendered? With Dalan openly obnoxious man who willfully claimed necrophilia, cruelty to animals and people, fascism, self-obsession, and greedto do this seems particularly egregious.

Born to a middle-class family in Spain in 1904, young Salvador was ruthlessly ambitious from an early age, he writes in his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dal. "At the age of six I wanted to be a cook," he begins modestly. "At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since." The book continues in this vein for some 400 pages, illustrating, literally and figuratively, how a man might have come to a method of art-making called "critical paranoia," which involved accessing and developing subconscious fantasies and desires and memories to maintain simultaneous sanity and madness. And then making paintings about it.

Read more: You Don't Have to "Imagine" John Lennon Beat Women and ChildrenIt's Just a Fact

I say it's particularly egregious to try to separate Dal's personality and behavior from his paintings because 's works are explicitly engaged with the preoccupations (masturbation, necrophilia) he claims in his autobiography; he feared female genitalia (until he met his muse, Gala) and preferred to masturbate in front of a mirror. Pieces like Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano are heavy-handed in their psychological symbolism: Death is a mindfuck for an artist! (He also told the British journalist Mick Brown he "never believe that I will die in any way.") Some of his fuck-authority antics are interesting: He once drove a Volkswagen Beetle covered in grass through Paris, for example; another time he gave a speech in a scuba suit, which almost killed him. Other endeavors, often in the service of art, are cruel: When Dal collaborated with Philippe Halsman (who also made a book about Dal's mustache) to make the iconic Dal Atomicus photo, the process required 28 attempts, which would have been fine except for the fact that each of those attempts involved throwing three cats into the air and flinging buckets of water at them. (Dal also had a pet ocelot, Babou, which is questionably ethical.)

"Dal Atomicus," Philippe Harsman, 1948. Photo via Wikipedia Commons

The beloved painter was also violent. At age five, Dal writes in his autobiography, he pushed a boy off a high suspension bridge; at six, he pre-meditated a "terrible kick" to his three-year-old sister's head "as though it had been a ball." Not simply childish not-knowing-better, this baseless cruelty continued as Dal got older; often it seemed he cultivated admiration only to become disgusted with those he sought it from. For five years as a teen he teased a girl who was in love with him, exciting her with kisses and touching but then refusing to give her anything more. (Vaginas are scary!) When he was 29, he "trampled" a girl who remarked on the beauty of his bare feet"so true that I found her insistence on this matter stupid"until his companions "had to tear her, bleeding," from his clutches.

But wait, there's more! Just as Dal was kicked out of university, the French poet Andr Breton also expelled him from the Paris Surrealist Group for, essentially, being a political asshole: Dal refused to imbibe the spirit of Marxism and expressed sympathies with Hitler, though according to Eric Shanes in his biography The Life and Masterworks of Salvador Dal, the Hitler thing seemed "to have been motivated more by the painter's desire to offend Breton." It could easily be argued that this attitude sucks anyway, but later, Dal's fascism was more assured: Dal began to revere the dictator Francisco Franco as "the greatest hero of Spain" (he liked concentration camps and was responsible for the deaths of between 200,000 and 400,000 people) and painted a portrait of his daughter on a horse. According to Brown, who spent a weekend with Dal in 1973, years later the artist professed to subscribe to an ideal system of government that aligns with these preferences, sort of: "One king that rule very strongly the country, and underneath the maximum of anarchy! One ruler, the more authoritarian as possible, with one crown decorative and symbolic to put on every magazine cover."

Read more: Mother Teresa Was Kind of a Heartless Bitch

Breton also christened Dal with his nickname, "Avida Dollars," or eager for dollars, which he earned because he was. In the 1970s, Dal demanded $100,000 an hour to star as the "emperor of the universe" in Alejandro Jodorowsky's ambitious and failed Dune film project. In the 1980s, near Dal's death, he was found to have committed countless instances of fraud by flooding the art market with his signature; he would sign blank sheets of paper that fakers could then print with seemingly verifiable imitations of his paintings and sell.

With so many issues, it's tempting to ask: Is he for real? It's hard to say. Part of the point of The Secret Life of Salvador Dal is an obviously blurring discussion of false memories and fantasy; some of it he certainly made up to become famous. Eleventh-grade literary analysis points to the obvious awareness Dalbrings to the tone in his autobiography: The chapter headings ("Anecdotic Self-Portrait," "False Childhood Memories," "True Childhood Memories") are self-referential, and the title gestures to the way one might describe scandals committed by someone else. Indeed, in his (negative) review of the book, George Orwell argued that Dal's "wickedness," whether real or imagined (but at least real in its harmful influence), was the artist's cheap strategy to both become and move beyond Napoleon. Perhaps on some level the upturned mustache was a device, not just for seeming quirky but so that everywhere Dal went, he could expect recognition. After all, when he emerged from a car in Barcelona's Las Ramblas street, writes Brown, he did so "acknowledging the applause and the cries of 'maestro' from passers-by with a regal wave of the hand."

(Stock image of a guy smoking alone on a bench via)

Women are not often seen as predators. The notion of female sexual abusers has never permeated Britain's collective consciousness in the way the tabloids' parade of paedo bogeymen has.

But that's not to say they don't exist. Last month, Caroline Berriman, a 30-year-old teaching assistant, avoided jail after being found guilty of having regular unprotected sex with a 15-year-old male pupil. A two-month fling which the boy has said has left him "scarred for life."

Some might say the boy in question should suck it up and be grateful he got to shag his fit teacher. Others would say an illicit sexual affair, escalating to the point of the adult's daughter calling the boy "dad" and her planning a secret escape for them, is too much for any teenager.

Words like "sexual assault" and "rape" tend to be reserved for men who prey on women and girls. Women do not rape but instead, we're told, seduce their victims in Lad Bible art-cupboard-fantasy romps, as in the case of Berriman. This week, a 20-year-old woman who had sex with an 11-year-old boy she was babysitting received a suspended prison sentence after the boy's father said he was "sex mad" and "fully up for the experience".

Like the teenager in the Berriman case, my story started when I was 15. My teacher was a local woman, in her twenties, with a sibling in the year below me.

She was short shorter than most of the older kids and pretty with blonde hair and an athletic figure. She was one of those teachers who didn't mind chatting with the popular kids as if they were her best mates. The girls wanted to be her and the boys wanted to fuck her. I never thought I actually would.

One day, I pretended I needed to call my mum after school to ask for a lift. I asked to borrow my teacher's phone. But, instead of calling my mum, I sent a text to my own number, handed her phone back and set off for my triumphant walk home. It was a decent practical joke, a small victory for teenage lad. I had just bagged the number of the fittest teacher in school who should I tell first?

I pulled out my phone and couldn't believe what I saw. Beneath the text I had sent myself was a second, longer passage:

"Cheeky. When you coming round for a cuppa?x"

Pre-empting that this might be going somewhere it probably shouldn't, I saved her number under a fake name. "Mia".

I visited Mia at least two or three times a week after school, often still wearing my uniform. We would sit on her sofa, watching Friends, and kiss for hours. She would ask me about my day and we would laugh at the students and teachers neither of us liked. After two weeks, I lost my virginity.

WATCH: VICE Travels to Manchester to meet those users addicted to Spice

This felt like more of a nightmare. The sex itself was pretty shit. Any 15-year-old boy tasked with pleasuring an older woman is going to feel the pressure let alone when it's his first time.

Mia was aggressive, demanding and loud. I did my best to imitate what I had seen in internet porn and she seemed to make all the right noises. At times it was awkward as fuck and I was filled with uncertainty. Not long after, she made me promise that I loved her. The thing is I really did.

As the months went on, the relationship became a drain. Mia forbade me from hanging out with some of the prettier girls in my year group. If she was annoyed she would ignore me as we passed one another in the hallway, knowing I couldn't ask her what was wrong there and then. She said she was jealous of her friends, who were getting married and moving away, while she was fucking around with me "a kid".

She would visit my drama class, ostensibly to run a few things by our teacher, but always hang around to watch me perform at the end, eyes fixed on me the entire time. It was as things begun to get worse that she told me she had lost our baby.

We had been having post-sex cuddles one night when she started bleeding out onto the sheets. At the time, we both assumed she had unexpectedly come on her period. I thought it was pretty funny, she was embarrassed, and I went home for the night. "It is a school night after all."

Mia called me the next night to say she had spent the day in hospital after miscarrying our child. She'd only been pregnant a few weeks. At the time I couldn't properly comprehend it. It didn't compute in my head that I could create a child I still was a child I didn't know what to say. Mia didn't like talking about it. We never did.

Cannabis is a great recreational drug but it can do bad things to people with secrets. I was getting stoned at least three times a week by the time I was 16. My mates would spend hours chatting shit about their girlfriends sometimes what the sex was like, what arguments they had, where they were going on holiday and I couldn't say fuck all.

Sometimes I would come home, baked to high heaven, and just talk to myself about everything alone in my room. I couldn't tell anyone I was in love. Even worse, I couldn't tell anyone there was no way it could last. I decided to end it after one particularly stupid incident.

I had been out with my mates and said I was going home, I was too tired. I walked over to Mia's. We spent close to two days making our way around the house, having sex in every room. The outside world ceased to be and I hadn't stopped to consider what my parents might think of the fact my phone had been off for close to 48 hours.

When I got home my mum was in tears. The police had been around and were on the cusp of declaring me a missing person. Enough was enough. I sent Mia a text:

"We can't do this any more."

A reply:

"OK"

Professor Kevin Browne, a mental health expert at Nottingham University, says: "Female offences against teenagers are largely a mystery because victims don't come forward. Boys are almost expected to enjoy that kind of abuse, to an extent because of the patriarchal nature of our society, and not admit how scared they are by it."

I came close to killing myself three times. Twice trying to OD on painkillers and once throwing the steering wheel of my car off a dual carriageway at 90mph. I came out of all three incidents relatively unscathed (although I have to ride a bike to work now). My GP prescribed antidepressants to balance out my moods.

After hearing Mia had supposedly slept with more kids from school, I reported her anonymously to the police. I told them I didn't want to make a statement but if they had a look through her Facebook messages they would find everything they needed. The last I heard she was no longer working at the school, her house had been sold and her social media profiles deleted.

Female abusers are relatively rare. They are estimated to make up as little as 5 percent of offenders. But they do exist and, even today, more needs to be done to encourage their victims to speak publicly. I am still trying.

As told to Martin Coulter. Identities have been altered to protect anonymity.

More like this on VICE:

Would Signing a 'Consent Form' Really Protect UK Students from sexual Assault?

I Slept with My School Teacher and It Was Great But the Aftermath Was Terrible

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Look at me getting high as shit and you can't do fuck all about it. Photo via Flickr user rpavich

Jessica Dascal is blowing a smoke ring from a dab rig in my face through FaceTime. It's emanating from a beautifully elaborate venti-sized contraption adorned in a "Starbud" decal resembling the green coffee logo basics all know and love.

It's the 26-year-old restaurant manager's day off from work and she does not plan to leave the couch. There, she will take dab hits all day consisting of 98 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. While smoking from a dab rig gets her "high-school high," she doesn't deem it an efficient delivery system.

Dascal's mission for the weekend is to buy an e-cigarette so she can get high at work. She's now watching a scrawny high schooler on YouTube demonstrate how to smoke weed from an e-cigarette. Her T-shirt, bunching up at her torso as she sits cross-legged, features a man rolling a joint.

"See? I'm rolling a joint now but it's not practical," she says, sealing the paper with her tongue. "I want to smoke at work. On a 12-hour shift, my boss has smoked with me. He knows I'm a huge pothead and he's OK with it. But he wouldn't be OK with me smoking an actual joint. He said, 'Get one of those vapey thingies, and do what you want.'"

Until then, she pops a Jolly Rancher infused with butane hash oil (BHO), a liquid form of hash. "I take the cherry always," she says, waving a Ziploc bag-full in colors you'd ascribe to bell peppers.

"Weed is my medicine. It's my sleeping pill, my anti-anxiety medication, my borderline personality disorder treatment," says the Montrealer who goes through an ounce and a half a week. "I was diagnosed are experiencing a higher absolute blood level of THC," he says. The "high" of getting caught may explain its prevalence among thrill-seeking youth, according to Kelly.

Ultimately, e-cigarettes do intrinsically alter the neurobiological and psychological impact of the drug. "On the other hand, reducing exposure to the other ingredients and resulting consequences for the respiratory system of smoking natural forms of cannabis (including mixing hashish with tobacco) may have benefits," Kelly says, particularly regarding those prescribed medical cannabis.

As for getting away with getting high on the job, Dascal couldn't be more elated about her newly acquired e-cigarette, I learned after checking on the status of her mission. "I cough at every puff of this thing," she says, "but when I switch the nicotine to hash oil, it's a nice cough."

Follow Marissa Miller on Twitter.

(Photo by Urban via)

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Last night, three Romanian priests got caught stealing a dead man's hand in Greece. However, this wasn't your run-of-the-mill grave robbery, because that hand belonged to a saint, Haralambie, who, according to the Romanian Orthodox Church, is supposed to protect you from plague and famine.

Local media reports that the priests, who were visiting the Mega Spileo Monastery in Kalavryta, along with 40 other people, decided to simply swipe the holy relic. The Greek monks were used to such attempts, and an alarm went off, alerting security. The Romanian priests made a run for it and, like any good pick-pockets, threw the holy hand into some nearby grass, because they knew that it if you're not caught red-handed with the item you've allegedly stolen, it's very hard to convict you of theft.

If you don't get why these people are so keen on getting hold of a dead person's hand, that's because it's an Eastern European custom. Here, people go on giant pilgrimages where they pay to sit in line for hours, even days, just to kiss the glass covering these relics. These pilgrimages have become a giant business for the Romanian church, which only allows them to be done using their travel agency. Because any money the church makes cannot be taxed, it's a very lucrative business.

The priests may well have been trying to get in on some of this action by bringing the holy relic back to Romania and saying they had miraculously just found it, all in a bid to gather a bigger flock. Of course, their plan backfired spectacularly and now they've been suspended from their priestly authority while they're under arrest in Greece.

Ber asked that I did not show her face as she's had enough exposure lately. So far, the scandal has caused her to lose her job as a teacher at a local school. Photo by the author.

This article originally appeared on VICE Mexico

"That video was recorded well over a year ago," says Ber. We're sat in her living room in So Paulo, where she's invited me hoping I can help her disprove the 'little pass challenge' story that made the rounds a few weeks ago. "It was a bad joke in a WhatsApp chat that got taken completely out of context."

On the 19th of September, an article titled 'The Cocaine Challenge': The latest trend among rich Mexican girls' appeared on the Mexican news agency SDP Noticias' website. According to SDP, "rich Mexican girls" had taken the Ice Bucket Challenge to a new level; videos of young women snorting a line of cocaine and then challenging their friends to do the same were going viral.

"On September 17, a friend told me he'd been sent a WhatsApp video of me doing coke by a random acquaintance a man from Ecuador who lives in Miami," Ber continued. "I didn't think too much of it. I assumed it would just stay between friends of friends. But then the next day, another friend called to say his friend had also been sent the video on WhatsApp."

Ber, who appears in the most popular of the three videos that went viral, says hers was recorded in October 2014. "We didn't come up with the "challenge", we just saw a video of a man doing the so-called "little pass challenge" and thought it was funny and stupid. So we did the same as a joke in our WhatsApp group of about 15 close friends."

The video started gaining traction between the 17th and 18th of September. "On the morning of the 19th, another friend told me she'd also been sent the video. A few hours later, my sister in law sent me a link to the SPD Noticias article about it. That's when I thought, 'I'm fucked.'"

In the article, Ber is described as "a blonde, good-looking young woman standing in front of a beautiful private landscape", wearing an "expensive black dress and jewellery."

"I bought that dress for less than $20. The jewels I was wearing were a pair of earrings that my mum gave me and my engagement ring. I was all dressed up because I was on my way to a friend's wedding in a hotel in Nayarit," she explains. It seems as if someone at SDP Noticias just assumed Ber was wealthy and that was enough for both local and international media to reuse the information without ever bothering to question it. Once the SDP article was published, the story spiralled out of control.

"Within hours the video was on several YouTube profiles and all kinds of websites around the world. They all claimed the 'little pass challenge' was a new trend among young, rich people. I can see how it might have looked like that and how one could have reached that conclusion but I'd expect better from a journalist. That sort of reporting is extremely irresponsible. I lost my job because of all this, " Ber maintains.

There were three videos that circulated and linked to the story: Ber's video; a video of her friend Betty also taking part in the "challenge"; and one that features a blonde girl who Ber doesn't know that doesn't even mention the challenge. All the girl says in that video is, "It ain't easy."

By Sunday 20th of September, other media outlets had cited the original article, making the alleged "trend" even bigger. "By Monday, the media frenzy had calmed down and I thought it was over. Unfortunately, it exploded again on Tuesday. It was published in newspapers like Publmetro, Sin Embargo, Milenio, Excelsior, Remezcla, Fusion, El Universal, and even made it's way onto TV."

Screencap of Primero Noticias "investigative" piece on the trend. (Via Primero Noticias)

On the 26th of September, news anchor Danielle Dhiturbide presented a report on the trend on local TV station Televisa. The report featured an interview with someone who many assumed to be Betty Ber's friend from the second video.

"Betty was never interviewed," says Ber. "They talked to some girl via Skype and blurred her face. The girl claimed she did it because of peer pressure and somehow everyone assumed Betty and that girl were the same person. But the girl in the video said she was 18. Betty and I are 30."

In a letter toVICE Mexico, Dhiturbide maintains Televisa never claimed the girl was Betty: "We looked up the trend in social media and found that the first post on the topic belonged to this Twitter user, so we got in touch with her. She is an 18-year-old student from Tabasco. She asked us to hide her identity on air. Obviously, we showed the viral videos too since they were the reason we did the report in the first place, but we never claimed the two were related," she writes.

They may have not explicitly made the connection, but in my opinion Televisa did not try hard to make a distinction either. In the voice over, Dithurbide is heard saying: "We searched posts related to the topic on websites like Twitter, Facebook, Vine and Instagram, and this 18-year-old girl was the first to mention the coke line challenge."

For her part Betty says: "A friend called me telling me he had seen the video in the news. I was out of town and had just arrived home the same day the programme was televised. I knew immediately that I was going to be caught in a scandal."

Watch our documentary, 'How Pablo Escobar's Legacy of Violence Drives Today's Cartel Wars':

Meanwhile, Rafael Jimnez, who also appears in the news report as an "Internet Expert" took to Twitter to voice his anger: "I didn't ask for them to credit me as such, I just told them what I thought about the topic but they twisted the meaning of my answers." Jimnez, who has 20 years of experience in digital communication, said that the staff did explain to him what the interview would be about but the questions he was asked were generic.

"Dhiturbide wasn't even there. It was only her crew. I told them that I knew nothing about the topic but they only used the soundbites they needed," he's said. "It's one of those things that people blow out of proportion to make clickbait articles without any actual basis. It isn't proper journalism. If it weren't for the SDP article, the scandal would probably never have grown so big. The media simply repeated what they'd said without doing any research. I hate being part of such bullshit."

Betty. Photo courtesy of Betty.

Ber admits: "I know I'm the one to blame and I never should have recorded that video. But the media could have simply said the videos were going viral and that's it. Why would they give false information, like my social class or my age? Why would a girl lie and pretend to be my friend? If people are allowed to go on important media outlets like Televisa and make up stories as stupid as this, then who are we supposed to believe?"

She also said that she hasn't been contacted by any media and only agreed to talk to me because her "reputation is going down the drain thanks to a moment of stupidity; all because of a joke between friends that got blown out of proportion."

@soyalemendoza

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(Photo: Levenshulme Facebook group)

A couple of days ago, word spread that a very industrious weed dealer named Jay had been leaving testers of his product stapled to business cards around the Manchester suburb of Fallowfield. There was a little baggy containing enough for a sample spliff, a phone number and a ClipArt picture of a motorbike, implying Jay is both quicker and slicker than his competition.

Residents were shocked: "It's outrageous people are just targeting the students," said one. "Fallowfield has now got an international reputation as the place to party and get your drugs." Which was maybe reaching a little bit.

It's unclear if Jay's business card was actually real, or if it's just some fucking joker having a laugh and trying to rile up local Radio Times readers. After all, the vast majority of weed smokers bar the kinds who can and will tell you the best strain to help you overcome insomnia don't have much need for samples; they just buy whatever their guy's got in.

However, drug dealers handing out business cards is a very real thing. It seems a relatively open invite to police to set up a sting operation, but whatever I'm sure they've got the risks covered somehow. Some cards are as simple as a name and number printed on some paper; some invest in customised lighters; some employ fancy graphic design and weights and prices and all sorts of other completely transparent evidence of intent to supply.

Here, have a look at some of the ones we found on Twitter. (For whatever reason maybe the vast student population a lot of them seem to come from Leeds.)

(The tweeter of this one wanted to remain anonymous)

(The tweeter of this one wanted to remain anonymous, too)

(And this one)

(via @ash_tomlinson96)

(Another anonymous one)

(And another)

(via @SmashDaPicnicUp)

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The situation, as it stood, couldn't have looked much worse. A man had cornered a tearful, terrified woman in the lobby of a block of flats and wouldn't let her leave. If another person entered at that moment, the woman would say the man was a complete stranger. She'd say she had no recollection of how she'd got here.

The third person would quite reasonably deduce that, in all probability, the man had drugged the woman and, if they had a shred of human decency, would come to her rescue by whatever means. Maybe they'd call the police. Maybe they'd beat the shit out of him. After all, he was clearly planning to rape the woman. There was almost no explanation in which the man came out looking like a goodie. Almost.

I played the hypotheticals through in my head and, to a God I decided in that instant was real, I prayed. I prayed that as long as I stood there with my girlfriend in the midst of a severe dissociative episode, no other soul would appear. God, if you're reading this: I owe you one.

We were in bed early one Christmas morning when she first told me about her dissociative identity disorder (DID). At this point, our relationship was eight months old, and she'd been open about pretty much everything from the beginning apart from this. I don't think it was so much that she was worried it'd scare me off, but that she had to know she could trust me completely with this information virtually no one else knew.

She explained the condition very briefly to me at its worst, she said, she would not only struggle to identify who she was, but even what she was; unable to process the concept of her own humanity. It caused her a great deal of pain talking about it, which I think was probably a major factor in so few people knowing. For her sake, I didn't really ask any questions or press her on it further. When she finished talking I told her it didn't change anything and that I loved her regardless. Four months later, I saw for the first time what she described.

The night began with us watching a movie at a friend's place. About halfway through the film I noticed a shift in her breathing, becoming faster and shallower. This wasn't particular cause for alarm she'd suffered severe anxiety since long before we met, and was generally pretty good at overcoming it. I rubbed her back and shoulders in an attempt to reassure her, but it gradually became more and more apparent that this panic wasn't going to shift. After about 20 minutes, she whispered in my ear: "We have to leave. I'm about to dissociate."

We quickly gathered our stuff and apologised to the hosts, claiming we were both just exhausted and needed to get home to sleep. Once we got out of their building she placed her hand in mine. "Promise me that whatever happens, you will not let go," she said. I promised.

As we walked along the street I could see it beginning to take hold; she was becoming visibly confused by her surroundings. I managed to flag down a taxi straight away. There were a few moments of good fortune that night; this was the first.

Hackneyed as it sounds, the silence was eerie. This was a woman who made most extroverts look like JD Salinger, someone who could engage even the surliest of bouncers in cheery conversation and charm them enough to let her obviously underage friends into bars. And she just sat there, staring out of the window. For the first time in our relationship she was speechless.

I squeezed her hand and said, "I love you." She looked at me blankly for a few seconds then turned back to her window. I knew I couldn't take it personally and tried to rationalise the matter after all, it wasn't like she was mad at me and giving me the silent treatment after a fight. She simply didn't know who I was. In retrospect, it feels a little selfish that I even stopped to consider how her nightmarish ordeal was affecting me, but it was inescapable. It was a deeply and uniquely upsetting situation.

In the eyes of the woman I loved, I was now a stranger. I was crushed.

The last 10 minutes of the journey went by without incident. She remained calm in spite of the sheer terror she was clearly facing, for which I was (again, perhaps selfishly) grateful I didn't fancy explaining to our driver the specifics of a condition I myself knew next to nothing about. I had just enough cash for the fare when we pulled up outside her apartment building, another tiny but glorious stroke of luck.

I opened my door and, careful to not let go of her hand, awkwardly manoeuvred myself out and pulled her with me. We crossed the road, walked through the courtyard and through the front door into the lobby of her building. This was when things got difficult.

I guess, up to this point, we'd been in public, and the presence of the taxi driver would have provided a certain level of reassurance. Now she was alone with a man she had, to her knowledge, never met before. And while it was her building we were entering, this too was unfamiliar in her current state of mind. Although she was able to identify that she was dissociating, she had no idea how she got here. If you've ever tried to lead someone back to their tent while they're K-holing, it was a little like that, only amplified to a whole other level.

Picture the situation: a relatively small woman suddenly becomes aware she is inside a building she doesn't recognise with a strange man who is significantly larger than she is. She did what any woman would do in that situation: ran, pulling her hand out of mine and making for the door. I was surprised by my reaction as instinct kicked in and I leapt after her, wrapping my arms around her waist and lifting her away from the exit.

Physically restraining a distressed woman, it turns out, is not an action that says, "No, really, you're safe with me," but I had no other choice. Had I let her run out at night into streets she couldn't possibly navigate, she could have faced serious, life-threatening danger. I placed her in a corner and stood a few feet back, acting as a barrier between my girlfriend and the door. I spoke softly and raised my hands, the universally-accepted body language for, "Seriously, I'm chill."

She cowered in the corner. "If you come one step closer, I'll scream," she warned me. I stayed put. It was then the hypotheticals entered my head. As we already know, whether by sheer good luck or act of god, we remained alone. Helpful as this was, it didn't change the fact I was still standing in a lobby with a woman who had no idea who I was and wouldn't let me take her to her flat.

"You have your phone on you, don't you?" I asked her. She looked into her bag and nodded. "Do you know who George is?" She nodded again. George was an ex-boyfriend, one of her oldest friends, and the only person outside of her immediate family, doctor and me who knew about her condition. As someone who'd been in her life significantly longer than me, she had more memories attached to him and so hadn't forgotten who he was. "Call George," I said.

'This is perfectly normal,' I thought, as she scrolled through her phone looking for George's name. 'I'm just a guy, standing here, getting my girlfriend's ex to vouch for my existence.'

Her first attempt went through to voicemail. Quietly and tearfully, all she could say was "help me" a dozen or so times. I wondered if he was at work. It could have been hours before he was able to check his phone. In our last stroke of good fortune for the night, he called back a few seconds later. I can't remember exactly what was said or how long they talked for; it might have been a minute, it might have been five. She mentioned that there was a man here she didn't know who was claiming to be her boyfriend, and in a sort of exaggerated stage whisper I said, "George! It's me!"

She listened for a little while longer and then passed the phone to me. "He wants to talk to you." I spoke to George for a couple of minutes. I've never been so relieved to hear the voice of a girlfriend's ex. He calmly talked me through the next steps to get her into her flat, sit her down and pull up something she'd seen before on Netflix. Familiarity was key, he told me. I thanked him and returned the phone. They talked for a few more seconds, then she hung up.

"George says I can trust you."

I took her by the hand once more and led her up the stairs.

Once we were inside her flat, things got easier. I closed the door behind us and she immediately sat down on the wooden floor and told me her feet hurt. I helped her take off her shoes and then pulled her up, before walking her round the room, pointing out the framed photos on her wall and asking if she recognised the people in them. "That's me!" she said cheerily. "And that's George!" This helped a lot.

In the space of a few minutes the dynamic of our relationship had shifted from one of me as her would-be attacker to a bizarrely paternal thing. As her boyfriend, both of these were a little odd, but at least with the latter she was no longer afraid. For the rest of the night we watched TV together while I waited for the woman I loved to return.

A few hours after she first told me, I took some time to read up on dissociative identity disorder. As with many mental illnesses, there's a lot of speculation and theory surrounding the condition, which is understandable when you comprehend what a convoluted labyrinth the human mind is. However, DID is considered "probably the most disputed of psychiatric diagnoses", with "no clear consensus regarding its diagnosis or treatment".

It's a rare condition, but one that crops up in popular culture a huge amount. If you've not heard of DID before (I hadn't), you probably know it as multiple personality disorder, to which it was formerly referred. Its representations in fiction are often quite harmful, with multiple personalities frequently portrayed as good versus evil, such as in Jekyll and Hyde. As with schizophrenia and other conditions, sufferers are often portrayed as murderous sociopaths when the reality is they're far more vulnerable to being attacked.

Many people suffering from DID report sexual or physical abuse in childhood, which has led some researchers to believe that DID is a reaction to trauma. I already knew that, growing up, my girlfriend had repeatedly been beaten by her father, so it's likely this played a part in her condition. Another hypothesis suggests that DID is caused by therapists "recovering" memories from patients that then cause them to behave a certain way but this didn't apply to my girlfriend.

For her, the episodes occur sporadically; she could go months or years without suffering one, but they could also happen several times in a relatively short time span. They almost always happened in times of extreme stress. She'd later tell me that dissociative episodes happened when her brain was unable to cope with the stress, so it would essentially remove itself from her body for a short period of time to give her a break.

About three hours into the episode, I could see a few faint glimmers of her personality reappearing. She recognised a favourite character and a grin spread across her face. A little while later I asked if she knew who I was. "I know you," she said. "I love you." It meant a lot to hear those words.

When we finally got into bed that night she fell asleep instantly, emotionally and physically exhausted. She'd wake up with no memory of what had happened, and wouldn't want to know. I lay awake a little while and wondered if there's anything more terrifying than the human mind.

I doubt there is.

@markduffyphoto

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Andre Johnson, AKA Christ Bearer

Last year, one of the biggest mental health-related stories to hit the mainstream was the case of Andre "Christ Bearer" Johnson, the Wu-Tang Clan-affiliated rapper who hacked off his own penis while high on angel dust and suffering from depression. The media frenzy surrounding his story was intense; he went from only being known among underground hip-hop fans to being plastered across the pages of nearly every newspaper and celebrity gossip magazine. It was bullying on a grand scale, with mainstream journalists mocking him for a potentially fatal act of self-harm. For Mental Health Awareness Day, I decided to get in touch with him to see what impact the actions of the press had on his recovery. The following story is a narration of his thoughts on this matter.

2014 wasn't exactly my year. My life had descended into a fog of depression after being prevented from seeing my daughters by their mother, and I was feeling as if nothing was going right. Then, just as I thought my situation couldn't get any worse, it did in a dramatic way. I had been smoking weed and PCP one day, trying to blot out the misery of life with drugs, when I lost all contact with reality and took the somewhat insane step of cutting my own penis off and jumping from a balcony. Dark, destructive thoughts had been running through my head under the influence of the dust, and I just thought, 'Fuck it. Maybe I'm better off without this thing so I can't have any more kids, seeing as things are going so badly with the ones that I've already brought into this world.'

Luckily, I survived the incident. It was a horrific episode that would have destroyed a lesser man, but I'm a member of the Original Nation of Islam, and believe that the indomitable spirit of All Mighty God Allah that permeates throughout my entire being allowed me to overcome it. This horrific act of self-harm was only the beginning of my ordeal, though. Unfortunately, we live in an era where the media see the mentally ill as a circus act. Rather than wishing me a speedy recovery, they harassed me constantly and did their best to try and mentally break me.

The media shit-storm surrounding what happened was crazy. While I should have been focusing on getting better and still had two more surgeries to go, I was bombarded by reporters from almost every publication in existence, which forced the hospital to move me from room to room so that I could get some privacy. Clearly, the press were more concerned about making fun of a life-threatening episode than they were about the fact I could have died.

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After I'd been discharged from hospital, my depression was compounded by celebrities I had previously held in high regard making jokes at my expense in an attempt to profit from my misfortune. Some might argue that I brought my situation on myself by taking drugs, but when the story was first broken, the media didn't know that I was on dust at the time. They even reported that it was depression, not substance abuse, that had led to the incident. They weren't hounding me in a bid to highlight the dangers of drugs; they just wanted to sell copies of their publications by capitalising upon my personal tragedy. Urban radio personality Charlamagne even went as far as to label me "Donkey of the Day", a spot usually reserved on his show for people who have said or done something stupid. That doesn't exactly send out a positive message about people who are struggling with mental health issues. I was also ridiculed by major newspapers with wide circulations, whose journalists really should have known better.

According to Professor David Lester of Stockton University, who has studied suicide among famous people, treating celebrities like this puts their lives in danger. "It's similar to cyber-bullying, which frequently results in suicide," he says. "The psychiatric disorder increases the risk of suicide further."

I'm only really known in hip-hop circles, so I can't imagine what people in the wider public eye go through when they suffer from mental illnesses. Professor Lester's sentiments have been echoed by Patrick Corrigan of the Illinois Institute of Technology, who was the editor of the book, The Stigma of Disease and Disability. "Making fun of a celebrity's mental illness not only worsens his or her challenges, but worsens the stigma of mental illness," he says. "Stigma can be as problematic for people as the symptoms of their mental illnesses."

READ: The VICE Guide to Mental Health

Luckily, I had my faith to help me overcome these trials and tribulations. Your values determine what you do in life, and belief in being your own personal Jesus is an integral part of the Original Nation of Islam. I am the god of my own world, so change had to come from within. I rose above all the criticism, made self-deprecating jokes about my accident to keep my spirits up and continued to make my music in the hope of empowering others.

The fact still remains that the media are complicit in contributing to the stigma that's placed on mental health issues. A radical change is needed, or we will remain in the dark ages, where people who suffer from psychological problems will continue to be ostracised and treated as figures of fun. The media defines societal opinions, but also reflects them, so just as I was ultimately responsible for my own recovery, we are all responsible for bringing about the change we want to see.

Hopefully it will come sooner rather than later, because it's desperately needed.

Visit Christ Bearer's website, or add him on Twitter.

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Francisco Goya'sCasa de Locos (via Wikimedia)

When most people finish university, they either get a job or go travelling. Unfortunately, I'm not most people. Since the age of 18, I've suffered from social anxiety disorder, a mental illness characterised by severe shyness and a fear of social situations. I could have gone travelling, but sitting in the corner not saying anything in a far off land would have been very similar to doing the same thing in the UK. As for entering the world of work, that was never going to happen I felt as if I was physically unable to speak whenever I had to talk to anyone I didn't know, and not many employers will give a position to a candidate who doesn't answer any of the interview questions. Instead, I started taking drugs to give me the confidence to socialise, and then became involved in petty crime to get the money to buy them.

It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that the socially anxious are too timid and hermit-like to become heavily involved in crime, but according to psychotherapist Jacob Barr, who frequently treats patients with this condition, the socially anxious sometimes feel as if there's no other option than to quell their fears and insecurities with drugs. "Too often sufferers of social anxiety disorder will feel that they have a simple choice either to live each day with low self-esteem and anxiety, or to escape into the world of addiction," he says. "Sadly, many choose the latter. A cycle of self destruction is then set in motion, and it's not surprising when a life of crime quickly follows suit."

Although anxiety typically causes people to avoid risky behaviour, Dr Monique Ernst, who has co-authored a paper on the link between risk-taking and social anxiety, believes that the opposite can be true when they're placed under stress. "Neuroscience brings support for a neural substrate of risk-taking in social anxiety," she says. "The neural circuit implicated in reward-and-risk-related processes has been found to be hyper-responsive in socially anxious adolescents." In layman's terms, there are potential neurological motivations for the socially anxious to become involved in criminal activity when placed under what they perceive to be extreme pressure.

In my case, my brain interpreted any and every social interaction as "extreme pressure". Things had gradually got worse since I left home for uni, to the point where I felt terrified speaking to friends I'd known since childhood. My mind was constantly abuzz with negative emotions, and I acted a way that I never would have done in a million years if I had been thinking clearly.

The end to my short-lived life of crime came at 6 o'clock on a Monday morning, when my door went flying off the hinges and six burly drug squad officers stormed into the hallway.

"Where are the drugs?" an over-zealous drill-sergeant type copper bellowed inches from my face. "We know they're in here! Tell us where they are, or we'll rip the place apart!"

The drugs weren't even hidden; they were in a big bag in the middle of the floor that might as well have been labelled "drugs".

"They're in that bag over there," I told them, figuring I'd only delay the inevitable by lying.

"We've caught you bang to rights," the drill sergeant shouted.

'Erm, yeah,' I thought to myself. 'I think I gathered that.'

The guy seemed to scream fucking everything he said, even though I was fully cooperating, which I thought was a bit uncalled for. But then again, the police had been gathering intelligence on me for months, so I guess it was the culmination of a lengthy operation and he was pretty excited. From his point of view, I was another dangerous drug dealer who had been heroically removed from the streets.

READ: The VICE Guide to Mental Health

Going to jail is frightening for all first time offenders, but even more so for somebody who can hardly say a word and has the social skills of a ham sandwich. In the run up to my sentencing date, I felt as if my heart was going to beat out of my chest. I was as scared of standing up in front of a room full of people as I was of getting locked up. Fortunately, the judge didn't criticise me too heavily or spend a long time reprimanding me, which would have left me a gibbering wreck. He did, however, sentence me to two years in prison, which I thought was a bit excessive for a first time offender who had been caught selling ecstasy, not crack or heroin.

After being sentenced, I was placed in a sweatbox and taken to a remand prison, where I was to be held until they decided what jail I would be held in for the majority of my sentence. Upon arrival, I was ordered over to a table with a member of staff sat at it and asked a series of questions to determine my risk of self-harming and to see whether or not I had any mental health issues. It wasn't a great system for determining if inmates needed treatment; there was no privacy, and other prisoners were milling about in earshot. Mentally ill inmates are often derogatorily referred to as "fraggles" by the cons and treated quite badly, so the prison authorities could have been a bit more discrete.

On the next table along from me, another con was kicking off at the fact that somebody had had the audacity to ask him about his mental health. "I'm not a fucking mental case!" he shouted. "Why the fuck are you asking me that?" That pretty much summed up the other prisoners' attitude towards the issue of mental health.

I told the woman doing the interview that I had social anxiety disorder, and she put me down for a course designed to help at-risk inmates cope with prison life. The course consisted of sitting and drinking cups of tea for ten minutes, then using some gym equipment while a guard took the piss out of how unfit we all were. It was useless in terms of helping inmates with mental health issues, but got me out of my cell for an hour, so I wasn't complaining. Unfortunately, it was hit or miss whether or not the guards would unlock my door and take me out for it each morning, so I only actually got to attend around one in three sessions.

READ: I Was Relentlessly Harassed By the Media After Cutting My Own Penis Off

I put in for counselling almost as soon as I entered the prison, but didn't see a counsellor until at least six months through my sentence. I only ended up seeing him twice and, to be honest, he didn't seem to know a whole lot about mental health. He seemed like a random screw who'd been assigned the role of counsellor, not a trained professional.

I was promised help with my anxiety when I got out of prison, but that didn't materialise at all. Despite having to attend weekly probation sessions and repeatedly asking about the treatment I'd been told I would receive, I was still never referred to the local mental health service. I could have done with some counselling, because it's hard adjusting to normal life again after spending years behind bars. I was used to being around people who talked about crime constantly, and struggled to revert to my former self. The few friends I had left soon drifted away as I bored them with stories about the well-known criminal faces I'd met and violent incidents I'd seen in prison. The other cons had talked almost exclusively about that kind of thing, but my mates were all university educated and couldn't have cared less that I had worked on the servery with a local Mr Big or seen somebody get beaten half to death with a can of tuna in a sock. It was weird and morbid to them, and not stuff they could relate to.

For a while, I found myself hanging around with criminals and no one else. It was weird, because I'd cut off all contact with the people I met in prison for fear of getting caught up in their lifestyle, but gravitated towards other ex-cons a short time after being released. I went through a period of being completely cut off from mainstream society and only interacting with people who existed on the margins. Fortunately, after accidentally taking an overdose while on a night out with some crims, I decided that I was going to end up fucking my life up even more if I carried on being around people like that, and chose instead to plunge myself into a state of really intense isolation, where I had no contact with anyone at all other than people from online social anxiety forums. This was a really lonely, soul-destroying period, but culminated in me making a concerted effort to drag myself out of solitude and connect with some of my old law-abiding friends again.

I've still got social anxiety today and have received very little help, which isn't great, considering the fact that I explained to the probation services that it was the root cause of my offending. I was only in two jails and can't generalise to the whole of the British prison system. All I can say is that if my experiences are reflective of the overall state of mental health services for offenders, then there's little wonder the recidivism rate among mentally ill inmates is so high. While I'd be lying if I said I didn't witness some good work being done to rehabilitate inmates for example, the excellent vocational courses offered by the jails I was in it's clear that when it comes to mentally ill prisoners, some are being released without the problems that led to their crimes being addressed. And surely, this can only lead to future offences being committed.

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Sean Connery didn't have to grow up with puffy nipples. Still from Zardoz

Let's be clear. As a guy, growing up with puffy nipples sucks.

Everyday before entering the locker room at school during my teenage years, I would pinch my nipples. The left one first, then the right one, and I'd wait until they were both erect before turning around to face people. If the room was cold, I'd have about a minute until my body adjusted to the temperature and my nips set back into place. If the room was warm, about half that time.

When they did relax back into their original form, I'd have to turn away from my peers, quickly swipe my hands across my chest, and then wait until the illusion returned. Of course, this would only work a few times before my body caught onto the trick and my mammary glands stayed permanently puffy. Thus, all of my changing, deodorizing, and general hygiene needed to be done in a short, two-minute window, unless I wanted to be laughed at for having deflated marshmallows on my chest.

The condition I had (and still have to some degree) is called gynecomastia, and it's actually a pretty common trend among young men when going through puberty, although it sometimes persists afterward.

Characterized by the development of breast tissue both in and/or around the nipple, gynecomastia is oftentimes much worse than I had it. For many men with the condition, actual big, honking breasts begin to develop on their chest. For me, I just had a bit of puff in my nips that made me embarrassed to take my shirt off.

The cause of breast development in men really can't be narrowed down to one specific source, but we do know that there are a variety of factors that can contribute to it. These factors, such as high estrogen levels, misuse of anabolic steroids, and long-standing deposits of fat from childhood are all generally considered the most common ways in which the condition develops, but sometimes men develop breasts in mysterious ways.

Read on Motherboard: What the #DadBod Teaches Us About Us

In 2013, a study found that German soldiers who performed the time-honored military tradition of slapping a rifle against one's chest during ceremonial drills began to notice breast growth on the side of the chest that was being impacted. Interestingly, the other side stayed normal, suggesting that physical pressure may be able to stimulate breast growth.

The research concluded that the only effective treatment for the soldiers' gynecomastia was breast reduction surgery, but for many men suffering from the embarrassing plight of cream puff-looking nipples or bulging breasts, the idea of being cut open for a largely-cosmetic reason is a hard pill to swallow. It certainly was for me, and it wasn't until very recently that I became comfortable with my nipples being slightly puffy.

Prior to my 18th birthday, I had attempted to cure and cope with my gynecomastia in a number of ways. Growing up as an overweight kid, I figured that starting weightlifting and losing the flub I gained from years of slamming back donuts and Goldfish crackers would be enough to kill my nipple problem for good. After developing an athletic build, I found that, low and behold, I still had loose lumps hanging off my now lean chest that made the average person gawk.

I also tried to fine tune my diet to eliminate phytoestrogens and BPAchemical compounds that have been linked to gynecomastia onset and recurrence. I made a conscious effort to cut out soy products, to eliminate my use of low-quality plastics, and to stop using hygiene products with particles in them. On top of this, I increased my intake of saturated fat and other healthy lipids to encourage balanced hormone production. None of these things helped.

At one point, I become so frustrated with not being able to go to the beach without having a panic attack that I began to research makeshift methods of keeping my nipples erect. One of the methods I found online suggested buying a bottle of liquid bandage and spraying it onto my nipples after they were hard. This, shockingly, did not work and just made me feel like an idiot.

Another method recommended buying a chest binder to hide the outline of the nipples under a t-shirt, but since I didn't have actual breast tissue surrounding my nipple, I felt this was kind of extreme and decided to pass on it. Many sufferers of gynecomastia employ this method, however, even going as far as buying chest-binding compression shirts.

There's also the various environmental and social factors you have to be aware of. For example, if it's cold outside, you're in luck! You can walk around shirtless and not have to worry about your nipples being anything less than diamond-cutting hard. People will genuinely think your nips are just like anyone else's. If it's warm out, thoughlike in that horrible period known as "summer"be prepared to think of a rotating series of excuses as to why you're not stripping down to your swim shorts and diving in the pool like the rest of your friends.

Coping mechanisms aside, I think it's safe to say that any man who has a problem with their breasts is eventually going to consider the idea of surgeryI certainly did and got close to actually going through with it numerous times. After all, not everybody can go on wearing baggy shirts and skipping the beach/pool scene forever, especially when growing up in an age where the fear of missing out is a clinically-defined phobia.

And the statistics show a rise in men who are choosing to slide under the knife. With a 33 percent increase in male breast reduction surgeries being reported by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (APAPS) over the past five years, breast reduction in men is becoming more common than ever.

A man with severe gynecomastia. Photo via Wikimedia.

According to Toronto plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Lista, most men he sees come in with the same concerns I've had throughout my lifebeing that of general embarrassment and humiliation. He does add, however, that most men will never achieve the perfect image they're looking for, even with good surgery.

"What emotionally stable. Some people have an emotional overlay that exceeds what can be actually accomplished with the surgery. If somebody says, 'I can't get a job because of this,' or, 'I can't find a girlfriend because of this,' then there is a deeper issue that is probably not going to be resolved, even after surgery."

Related: VICE investigates the double eyelid surgery craze in our documentary about 'Seoul Fashion Week'

The irrational fear that Lista spoke of is something I lived with for a long time. For many years, I was physically unable to complete tasks while wearing a tight shirt. In fact, my wardrobe selection for the day would fundamentally determine how sane I was going to be, and if I wasn't able to find a loose shirt or something to mask the outline of my nipples, I would skip appointments, class, work. Just about anything that would put me in a social situation.

There are some tasks you really can't avoid without stripping down, though. Before getting laid for the first time, I genuinely believed that girls were going to lose their shit, put their clothes back on, and dip once they saw my inflamed chest-danglers. On a number of occasions, I bailed at the last moment or made up excuses as things were getting hot and heavy. When I eventually lost my V-card, the girl I was with asked me why I didn't take my shirt off. I laughed awkwardly and told her I was cold.

As time went on and my condition got less severe (like it does for most men exiting puberty), even the slight puff that was left in my relatively-normal nipples bothered me. I visited plastic surgeons to get consultations and a variety of opinions about how to fix my issue, and I almost always got the same answer: they could operate on me, but it probably wouldn't make the issue better. Lista noted this as a lasting effect on men whose gynecomastia has improved over the years.

"Sometimes people complain about a big nipple rather than a puffy nipple, meaning the sizethe diameter of the areolais big, and that's really hard to fix without a lot of scarring. It might just be something that you have to live with it."

Nowadays, my nipples aren't as bad and I'm generally comfortable with what puff is left. Even so, I still catch myself flicking my nipples once on each side as I enter locker rooms or public pools, and the anxiety that used to accompany taking off my shirt still lingers like a hum at the back of my head.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Terrible Bombings
128 PEOPLE WERE KILLED AT A PRO-KURDISH PEACE RALLY IN ANKARA
It was the deadliest attack in Turkish history

Bomb blasts at a pro-Kurdish peace rally in the Turkish capital of Ankara killed at least 128 people and injured almost 300 more this weekend.

The Turkish government has called the blasts a "terrorist act" and says it has evidence the attacks were carried out by two suicide bombers.

The bomb blasts happened on Saturday morning, seconds apart, at a rally for peace attended by pro-Kurdish party supporters, labour unionists and members of other civic and left-wing groups.

On Sunday, thousands gathered at the blast site to mourn the victims, with fights reportedly breaking out after police prevented pro-Kurdish politicians and other mourners from laying flowers.

Israel-Palestine
SIX PALESTINIANS WERE KILLED AS VIOLENCE ESCALATED
Five Israelis were wounded in knife attacks in Jerusalem

This weekend, four Palestinian teenagers were shot dead by Israeli security services in Gaza and Jerusalem; knife attacks in Jerusalem left five Israelis wounded; and Israeli jets hit targets in Gaza, killing a pregnant women and her daughter, in strikes responding to two rockets fired from Gaza.

Four Palestinians, aged 12, 15, 16 and 19, were shot dead by Israeli police on Saturday after being involved in separate knife attacks in Jerusalem, Israeli police said.

On Sunday, Israel launched an airstrike on a Hamas target in Gaza, killing a pregnant Palestinian woman and her young daughter. Israel said it was responding to rockets launched from Gaza.

Twenty-two Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed in the last two weeks in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza as violence has escalated, raising concerns that a new Palestinian "intifada" may be starting.

ISIS Meets Russia
THE SYRIAN ARMY ADVANCED AFTER HEAVY RUSSIAN AIRSTRIKES
Russia said they hit 55 Islamic State and other targets in 24 hours

The Syrian army advanced against Islamist insurgents in Idlib province, western Syria, after Russia stepped up its airstrikes, it was reported this weekend.

The Syrians, supported by Hezbollah militias, have taken areas of Idlib province, south west of Aleppo, previously held by the Army of Conquest, an Islamist group made up of al-Qaeda's Syrian wing and other groups.

"In the initial stage of our operation, our aircraft destroyed the principal and largest logistical hubs of the IS terrorist group," the Russian defence ministry said of its intensive 24-hour bombing raids against IS and other Islamist groups.

Scary Shit
PEOPLE DRESSED AS CLOWNS HAVE BEEN TERRORISING A KENT TOWN
Tonbridge is now on "high alert"

(Photo by Steven Depolo via)

(via)

The Kent town of Tonbridge is on "high alert" after reports that people dressed in clown masks have been chasing children through the streets.

The headteacher of Hillview School, where the children are students, sent an email to parents explaining that staff know of two separate incidents where pupils have been approached by two people wearing white clown masks.

"Students are already communicating with each other on social media, and you may already be aware," she added. "Should you have any concerns, please contact the police directly, not the school."

Buy Gregory's comics and visit his website and tumblr.

I don't know this guy, but the look on his face (and his cat's face) definitely says "I spend too much time online." Photo via Flickr user Bill Olen

Welcome to Netiquette 101, in which we'll be using cyber-case studies to teach you basic but valuable cyber-lessons in being a better cyber-citizen. Today, we discuss how much internet is too much internet.

Case Study: "How do you come up with ideas for this column?" is something that no one ever asks me, but here's the answer anyway: Every week, I go to Google, type the word "internet" into the search bar, click the news tab, and see what appears. This week what popped up was a report from Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital that claimed teens who are "heavy internet users" are more likely to develop high blood pressure.

A "heavy internet user" is defined as someone who's online at least 14 hours per week, in case whether you were wondering whether this category includes you (it does). "The findings add to growing research that has shown an association between heavy internet use and other health risks like addiction, anxiety, depression, obesity, and social isolation," said a press release announcing the study. Are teensour most precious natural resourcein danger of dying out because of too much screen time?

What We Can Learn: First off, 14 hours of internet per week is nothing. Anyone with a conventional office job is basically on the internet eight hours a day, five days a week. When you factor in the amount of time that a person is fucking around on their phone and using the internet at home after work, we easily spend 50 or 60 hours per week online.

On Motherboard: Why We Would Should Worry About Hackable Hearts

Obviously, it's not as if the internet is infecting our kids with high blood pressure through Vines of raccoons being cute or Tumblr posts tagged #cisprivilegethe problem seems to be that when you're cruising the information superhighway, your IRL body is atrophying like Jello left out in the heat.

That's why Andrea Cassidy-Bushrow, the study's lead author, included some advice in the release: "It's important that young people take regular breaks from their computer or smartphone, and engage in some form of physical activity."

Everyone from Michelle Obama to your dad tells you to exercise, of course, but that doesn't make them wrong. If you have a teen in your life, make them to get off the internet and read a book. They'll get bored and go outside, guaranteed.

Recommended: Watch VICE visit a South Korean video game rehab facility

Case Study: "Internet addiction" sounds like a made-up affliction on par with "chocoholism." But it is, as they say, a Thing, as demonstrated by a 2009 story from Newsweek writer Winston Ross.

According to Ross, his brother's addiction to the internet had reduced him to living in a tent off a highway in Oregon, subsisting off food stamps, and bumming computer time at the Oregon State University computer lab. Ross writes of watching his brother, "eyes focused on a computer screen, pausing only to heat up that microwaved meal. He plays role-playing videogames such as World of Warcraft, but he's also got a page of RSS feeds that makes my head spin, filled with blogs he's interested in, news Web sites, and other tentacles into cyberspace." It's a grim story. "I know that homelessness... will kill my brother someday," Ross writes. "He's been consumed by computers for most of the past two decades. Maybe he's a lost cause."

What We Can Learn: There's definitely a line between "heavy use" and addiction when it comes to the internet, and it's pretty clear when someone crosses it.

Case Study: One thing Ross touched on in his Newsweek story is reSTART, an honest-to-gosh internet addiction rehab facility in the Seattle area. It offers an eight- to 12-week program in which participants surrender all their tech and stay in a beautiful woodland facility, participating in "wilderness adventures" such as backpacking, climbing, and water sports. It is to netheads to what those fancy-schmancy Malibu rehab facilities are to Scott Disick: less an actual place to confront your demons and change your life and more of an aggressively pleasant place to dry out (or unplug) for a while and reconnect with the rest of humanity, rather than the bottom of a Patron bottle or your smartphone. According to the Huffington Post, all this costs $25,000

What We Can Learn: The internet is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but at bottom it's a machine that lets you tap into whatever stimuli your neurons are itching for. Worst-case scenario, you create your own little hermetically sealed world and drop into it. That might mean playing 18 hours of World of Warcraft per day, it might mean being a white dude who's really into arguing about rap music with other white dudes on Twitter. Either way, those little worlds are pretty deeply rewarding to the people in themthey're comfortable, and small enough that it's easy to gain a tiny bit of status. The problem is, that status can come at the expense of everything else, including your perspective, your health, and even your home. There are a lot of rabbit holes out there, and getting out of one can be a costly proces.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user Mike Licht.

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The dining quarters of Vivos Europa One. All images courtesy of Vivos Group

As we roll down US Highway 41 inTerre Haute, Indiana, my guide insists I give him my iPhone.Then he tosses me a satin blindfold. The terms of ourtrip were clearI wasn't to know where we were going or how we got there. That's because we're on our way to theundisclosed location of an underground bunker designed to survive the end of the world, whatever form that apocalypse takes.

When I remove my blindfold, I am standing in a grassyclearing looking at a boxy concrete structure that serves as the entrance to aCold Warera government communications facilitygutted and reborn as Vivos Indiana. This is the Ritz Carlton of doomsday shelters, a hideout where residents can wait out a nuclear winter or a zombie apocalypse in luxury and style while the rest of humanity melts and disintegrates. The living area has 4 meter ceilings, sumptuous black leather couches,wall art featuring cheerful Parisian street scenes, toweringfaux ferns, and plush carpets. Faith Hill croons from a large-screen TV setin front of three rows of comfy beige reclining chairs. The cupboardsare stocked with 60 varieties of freeze-dried andcanned foodstuffs; an evening meal might include spaghetti aglio e olio topped with skilletfried steak chunks, a fresh tomato-and-zucchini salad fresh from the hydroponicgarden, and decadent turtle brownies. An eight-by-nine bedroom is designed for four people (there arelarger units for six) and comes with double-queenbunks clothed in 600-thread-count ivory sheets and duvet covers worthyof a four-star hotel, a comparison highlightedon the Vivos website.

I plop down on a Sealy's Presidential Pillowtop mattress and decide,yes, a person could sleep here quite soundly while the world burns.

Read: Prepping for the Apocalypse at a Doomsday Training Camp

There are pet kennelsfor furry friends large and small, a gun safe (duh) in which to houseweapons, a small gym, medical facilities, and asound-proofed engine room housing two generators that run on diesel fuel storedin a 115,000 litre tankenough for over a year's supply. Another room containshigh-grade filters that scrub incoming air of nuclear, biological, and chemicalparticles.

According to Robert Vicino, founderand CEO of survival prep company the Vivos Group, when the shit hits the fanthese facilities will house those who have had the foresight to pay the $35,000 units have reportedly sold out.) Vicino says he's sold all but around a dozen of the 80 spots in the Indiana bunkerthough a few are reserved for his immediate family. He says he's currently talking tobuyers for the new German facility, including one uber-wealthy prepper who mightjust buy the whole shebang.

Read on Munchies: Post-Apocalyptic Dining in Atlantic City

At the end of my bunker visit, I thought of a newsociety Vicino was trying toenable. Some ofthe wealthy are not only refusing to read the realwriting on the wallsuch as inequality being aglaring problem that requires our wholesociety to confront it head-onbut are living in theirfantasies. To some, an escape to gold-plated survival shelters isthe answer when reality falls apart for everyone else.

But the entrepreneur has high hopes for the future of his company: "Vivos will build, outfit, stock, and sell as many shelters as we can, while time still permitsand there is market demand. We cannot predict when, or if, the time will come where mankind is safe from both natural and manmade extinction level catastrophes. People don't believe something will happen, until it does!"

The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, ajournalism nonprofit, provided support for this article.

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Photo via Flickr user Joakim Formo

On August 9, after a night of drinking at The Windjammer, a watering hole near Charleston, South Carolina, a woman got into an Uber with her male friend. Their driver, Patrick Aiello, drove the friend home, but when the woman asked to be taken home next, Aiello began driving around aimlessly. When the woman pleaded to be let out of the vehicle, he pulled off the highway, parked the car, and, she alleges, proceeded to violently rape her.

On Thursday, that womanalong with another woman who accused an Uber driver of sexual assault in Bostonfiled a federal lawsuit against the company. The suit claims that "by marketing heavily toward young women who have been drinking while claiming that rider safety is its #1 priority, Uber is instead putting these women at risk."

The suit is the latest in the exhaustive chain of stories about women being assaulted while trying to get home in what they believed to be the safest way: hailing an Uber. Since August, there have also been stories of "imposter Ubers," or men taking advantage of this myth of safety by posing as Uber drivers. In Boston, a man tried to lure a student into his car (she refused after she compared the car's license plate to the one listed on the Uber app); a man in Fort Worth, Texas saw two college students waiting for an Uber and pretended to be their driver. A 19-year-old college student in Tallahassee, Florida got into what she thought was her Uber before the driver proceeded to expose himself to her and demand sexual favors.

Last December, a woman in Boston got into the Toyota Camry that she assumed was the Uber a friend had ordered for herat which point the driver, Alejandro Done, allegedly beat, strangled, and sexually assaulted her. Done was a registered Uber driver, but may not have been the driver assigned to the woman that night. Instead, reports suggest he decided to pose as her driver when he saw her waiting. (Done's DNA has also been linked to other sexual assaults in the area.)

The response to these events has usually been sympathetic, but cautionary: Women need to be careful. Always cross-check the license plate on the vehicle and the photo of the driver. Text the driver using the number listed in app. Keep your wits about you, and you won't become a victim. Dave Sutton, a spokesperson for Who's Driving Youan initiative from the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association, which has lobbied against apps like Uber and Lyfttold me that the recent incidents were "not just a fluke."

"It's a very real trend, and something that young women need to become very aware of," Sutton added.

All of which is to say that despite the trappings of modern technologyand sometimes because of themthe burden is still on women to figure out how to get home without getting raped.

On Motherboard: Uber's Phantom Cabs

"For women, there's this myth of safety," said Jaclyn Friedman, editor of Yes Means Yes, an anthology about sexual consent. That myth goes something like this: If you stay in a group, if you dress modestly, if you don't drink too much, if you don't walk home alone at night, if you check the license plate of your Uber driver, then you won't get raped. And if you do get raped, then you must've missed one of the marks on the checklist.

Uberwhich has marketed itself largely on the basis of safetyfits into that narrative. College campuses have even promoted Uber use as a way to foster campus safety. After a sexual assault at the University of Southern California, the school sent out a campus alert warning students to "avoid walking alone" and use Uber instead; they reversed that policy after a USC student was later raped by an Uber driver.

"It's a false sense of security. There's no set of things you can do to make sure you don't get raped," Friedman said, adding, "if this approach was going to work, it would've worked a long time ago."

Read: The Problems with 'Anti-Date Rape' Tech

In reality, women get raped whether they get in real Uber cars or fake ones; whether they're drunk or sober; whether they walk home alone at night or go home with someone they met at the bar. General safety precautions, like background checks for drivers or traveling in groups, are useful but not foolproof. What this results in is a pervasive sense of fear, but also a sense that rape is just an occupational hazard in the business of being a woman who chooses to leave her house.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, an urban planning professor at UCLA, has extensively studied the relationship between women's fear and transportation. "Every study shows that women are much more fearful of being in public than men," she explained. "It is mostly the fear of victimization, fear of being assaulted, fear of being raped."

Loukaitou-Sideris hasn't conducted research on women's fears as they relate to Uber specifically, but she has surveyed transit agencies across the United States and found that only 3 percent of them offer any type of program designed to make transportation safer for women. In her research, she notes that "few researchers, transit agencies, or policymakers have directly asked women riders about their safety needs or sought to identify women's proposals and preferences regarding safe and secure travel."

So what would a female-driven solution to the transportation problem look like? Loukaitou-Sideris says one idea is to choose companies with female drivers, like She Taxis, which emerged out of Uber's rape scandals earlier this year. Sutton suggests taking rides only from companies with easily identifiable cars and verifiable background checks on their drivers. Friedman was reticent to suggest measures women should take, saying it would be "just another onerous thing women have to do ," but suggested self-defense classes for women "who feel like there are literally no safe ways to go out."

Uber has not made clear whether or not it will make companywide changes in light of the recent lawsuit. In a statement provided to VICE Thursday, a spokesperson for the company said: "Our thoughts remain with the victims of these two terrible incidents. We proactively worked with law enforcement in Massachusetts and South Carolina at the time to share information and aid their investigations. Both drivers have been permanently removed from the platform."

The new lawsuit hopes to, at the least, undermine Uber's claim that they are the "safest rides on the road." Which makes it hard not to conclude that for women, there are no safe options.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

IMAGE VIA ROD HERREA/FLICKR

This article originally appeared on Broadly

Savannah, Georgia is a city of death. It hangs in the air as thickly as the summer humidity, and Savannah's unofficial designation as "The Most Haunted City in America" draws thousands of tourists every year.

The city's appearance hides its ghostly reputation. Tourists also visit Savannah for its beauty, and some residents allege Union General William Tecumseh Sherman spared the city because he couldn't bear to burn down a beautiful city. The truth is Sherman wanted the city's cotton and ammunition supply, not its architecture. Over 200 years later, visitors will find haunted house-style buildings within the boundaries of the Historic District. (They're all north of Gaston Street.) An unsuspecting visitor could wander through the lavish mansions without knowing about any of the horrors that took place.

That was my job.

For nine months after I graduated college, I worked as a guide on a popular evening ghost tour. After I learned all the stories in the company's script (it took me three months), I spent most evenings entertaining tourists from across the country. A few stories came across as fairly light, but most repackaged the rape, abuse, and lynching of vulnerable women into family friendly entertainment.

The tour started out with the tale of Bo-Cat Delancey. In the company's retelling, he murdered his wife during the Great Depression to cash in her life insurance policy. If the tour trolley didn't suffer a major transmission failure at the end of River Street, the tour would continue and begin to loop its way around historic landmarks across the city.

At Wright Square, the location of the courthouse and the city gallows, I told the story of Alice Riley, a young Irish indentured servant who authorities accused of murdering her master. Riley was sent to work for William Wise, an old man sent across the Savannah River to Hutchinson's Island after he tried to travel from England to Savannah with a prostitute he claimed was his daughter. Wise's shitty behavior didn't stop there, and my scripted mentioned the "unwanted advances" he made as Riley bathed him. I then talked about how she used her "feminine wiles" to convince another servant named Richard White to help her murder Wise. The couple allegedly strangled and drowned Wise. Shortly after the death, authorities caught the accused killers. Riley announced her pregnancy at the trial, but the town hanged her anyways. Her son son died shortly after her execution.

Recently, several historians unearthed new information: In court Riley depicted Richard White as the mastermind behind the murder plot. She said he coerced her into helping him, not the way around. Additionally, there was a great deal of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiment in Savannah at the time, which may have come into play at the trial.

But why let something as inconsequential as historic research stop tourists from enjoying a soap opera about a desperate teenage girl who wanted to escape an abusive work situation?

Most recently, The Olde Pink House was the site of a tense, three-hour hostage situation during which a gunman had a standoff with Savannah's SWAT team in May 2012

After we circled around Wright Square, the tour continued towards Madison Square and the Sorrel-Weed House. The mansion was built in in 1841. According to rumors, the builders dug up bodies belonging to soldiers killed in the square during the 1779 Siege of Savannah.

This isn't why the house was featured on the tour. I told my guests about Francis and Matilda Moxley Sorrel, the wealthy well-connected couple who owned the house and frequently entertained General Robert E. Lee. Following the company script, I told the factually flawed story of how Matilda committed suicide after walking in on her husband Francis "in the throes of passion" with "a Haitian slave woman named Molly."

Let me strip away the script's bullshit: Matilda may have committed suicide after she discovered her husband had raped his slave, and in the story, Molly's suffering didn't end there. At the tale's conclusion, a group of men, who some locals allege may have been Francis and his sons, lynched her.

After I finished telling the family version of the Sorrel story, I played a glitchy recording of an Electronic Vocal Phenomenon (EVP) taken during the Atlantic Paranormal Society's 2005 investigation of the house. On the fuzzy, staticky tape, a woman screams, "Help! Get out! Oh my God!" Every night, I asked guests what they had heard, and white tourists always made smarts comments. Once, on a charter tour for auto parts managers, a man yelled, "Sounds like my regional manager!" His buddies all laughed.

While doing research for this story I ran across something even more disturbing: The entire tale could be fake. According to ghost blogger James Caskey, there are issues with the story's timeline. He says his research shows a lack of census records for Molly, and the Sorrel family moved out of the house nine months before Matilda's death. Either a powerful man raped and lynched one of his slaves in the Sorrel-Weed House, or someone decided to make up a story about Francis Sorrel raping a slave to drive tourist interest in the house.

At work, though, I feared men more than the ghosts.

During ghost tours, guests would occasionally ask if I'd ever seen a ghost, or exclaim with delight when they saw lens flares or specs of dust in their photos. I always bullshitted and talked about seeing strange figures in windows, or congratualted folks for capturing images of "orbs." My job was to feed into the city's mythology, not destroy it.

At work, though, I feared men more than the ghosts. Drunk tourists heckled me and tried to grab me. On my worst night, I kicked a rowdy group of ten drunk adults and one sober 4-year-old child off my tour. The men walked back to the beginning of the tour, with the intention of "teaching me a lesson." A coworker who resembled Wolverine convinced them to turn around.

All of Savannah's ghost stories are rooted firmly in the city's past. People are shocked to hear about men dueling behind Colonial Park Cemetery and tossing the loser's body over the fence into the graveyard, as if men suddenly stopped solving conflicts with violence at the turn of the 21st century. Just last week, a County Commissioner allegedly brandished a gun after a contentious town hall debate.

According to local legend, Alice Riley wanders around Wright Square, searching for her dead son, right where a drive-by shooting recently injured a man on the corner of West Oglethorpe Avenue and Bull Street. I don't know if that man will be featured in a ghost tour.

Savannah is a beautifully adorned exquisite corpse, and the ghost tour industrial complex will continue to capitalize off the suffering of its dead to a captive audience of tourists.

Photo via Flickr user Ann Larie Valentine

Welcome back to Florida Stories, a column where staff writer Allie Conti tells us some of the lessons she's accumulated in her decades of living in the Sunshine State and making her parents sad. If you have a Florida Story you'd like to share, email her here.

I'm still not sure where the Ouija board came from, but I first remember seeing it out of the corner of my eye as I smoked a Pall Mall with my bare feet dangling off the porch. It was the kind of boring early fall day that makes you wish something supernatural would happen, the kind of slow afternoon that's so peaceful and sun-dappled you can easily imagine serial killers lurking just out of sight behind oak trees and in pickup trucks roaming the streets. Maybe you had to be there.

I was living that post-college summer in a mess of a house my mom called the "locker room." Two of my roommates were a pair of Catholic twins who had grown up on a horse farm in Ocala. Sean was a runner who had just started his graduate degree in urban planning; Dylan was a Sasquatch of a dude who had knocked out a front tooth during a drunken tumble while pissing off the porch and never bothered to get it looked at. He was so fixated on the flatscreen television, which was constantly playing ESPN, day or night, that when it had blown out months before he screamed hysterically and then broke into my room through a window to steal my tiny set, claiming he couldn't sleep without it. He was basically a troll guarding the entrance to our kitchen; there were times I swore he hadn't moved from his throne in the living room for weeks on end. He often slept there and snored.

As different as they were, the two boys had been raised with the fear of God in them, and whatever the status of their Christian faith, they were loaded to the gills with superstitions. While I had assumed the only deities they recognized were the University of Florida Gators, their upbringing had instilled in them an unshakable belief in curses and demonic possession as wellor so I found out when I mentioned the Ouija board on the porch.

Previously: Why You Should Never Try to Hide a Runaway Florida Teen in Your Dorm Room

First they panicked, then they instituted a moratorium on touching it. This was broken a few hours into the night, when the normally sedentary Dylan made a dash for the porch while Sean and I and our third roommate, Michael, looked on.

Dylan fiddled around outside with the board while Sean appeared to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "Get back inside, goddammit!" he would periodically wail.

After what seemed like an eternity, he did. Then Dylan sat in his well-worn recliner, took three shots of Evan Williams, and started to weep.

If you have never seen a man the size of a linebacker wail with guilt and drunkenness and dread at being a sinner in the hands of an angry God, let me tell you: It's no fun at all. Meanwhile, Sean was rocking himself in the corner and repeating, "this isn't right, this isn't right" over and over.

"WHAT DID THE OUIJA BOARD TELL YOU?" I finally screamed.

Dylan poured another shot, wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his Gators shirt, and inhaled the whiskey.

"Sixty-nine devils," he replied.

"Oh my God," Sean screamed before collapsing on the floor.

At this point, Michael interjected, possibly figuring that someone had to be the voice of reason and there wasn't anyone else around.

"Come on guys, he has to be making this up," he said to me and Sean. "What does '69 devils' even mean? There are devils? Sixty-nine of them? There are two devils doing a lewd sex act? Like, the clothing company the Gap has devils?"

Unable to assuage us with jokes about jeans, Michael grabbed one of the axes lying around the house (it was that sort of place) and took the board on to our front lawn, where he reduced it to kindling.

"It's going to be OK, I'm banishing you from the spirit world," he announced as we cried. "Fuck ghosts!"

After it was completely smashed to bits, he started peeing on the remnants. We then all took turns ritualistically peeing on the remnants, for reasons I cannot recall but made sense at the time.

Immediately I felt better.

Sean, however, was not satisfied. He got a weird look in his eye and, as a final flourish, doused the surrounding area with almost an entire bottle of lighter fluid, then lit it on fire. This turned out to be a terrible idea. The flames got dangerously close to our house before we fought them off with water and dirt. By this time the four of us were all cryingout of fear of the fire, panic in the face of the supernatural, smoke filling the air, or some combination of the four.

When the fire was out we went back inside the house feeling extremely unsettled. No one spoke; Dylan was practically catatonic. We figured it was best to go to sleep and forget the whole thing.

Years later, wondering about that "69 Devils" business, I asked Dylan what the fuck had happened to him out on that porch, and whether he had been fooling us. His answer: It was a prank.

"I thought the 69 would've been a dead giveaway, but were more focused on the devils aspect," he explained.

I don't know if that's truethat crying of his was pretty convincing. Perhaps he had gotten spooked and was now trying to play it off as if it had been a prank all along. And whatever the spark that set it off, that was an intense evening that drained all of us physically and emotionally. Michael got the worst of it, however, because of a strange coincidence that almost ended in murder.

To back up: When I woke up the next morning there was a person asleep on the porchnot an uncommon occurrence back thenand Michael looked like he'd had the roughest night of his life.

Apparently, after we all went to bed, Michael woke up in a panic. "I was staring at the ceiling, because I had this weird feeling, this intense feeling, that there was something next to my bed," he recently confessed. "I told myself, 'It's fine, you're OK, you're having a bad day because your friends are acting emotionally funny, and there's no inimical spirit next to you.'"

He refused to look so as to even humor the thought that there was something evil afoot. The plan was to stare at the ceiling, count down from ten, and close his eyes at zero. But when, he got to "two," he could sense that whatever was next to him had moved.

"I had no idea what was going on and so I jumped out of bed and on top of whatever it was," he told me.

"I'm sorry officer," the thing apparently said as Michael grabbed for the axe, which he'd brought into his room after getting spooked by the Ouija board incident. "I'm not drunk, I swear."

According to him, a completely fucked up college student had wandered into our house while we were running in and out dealing with the fire and had eventually tried to pass out in Michael's room, where he came about two seconds away from dying from an axe blow.

I don't believe in the power of curses, or so I tell myself, but when I look back on that night and what we did, it seems impossible to explain our actions without resorting to the supernatural. What if that drunk kid had been mauled by Michael's axe and we had to explain ourselves to the cops and the courts and the media? What would we have said when asked why we thought it was OK to light our yard on fire? ("To kill the ghosts real good, officer"?) Why was Michael's first instinct, when confronted by the unknown, to kill it with an axe? Why was our house full of axes in the first place? Even if it was intended as a prank, was there something ominous in the phrase "69 devils" that infected us?

I don't know the answers to those questions. All I know is that no one ever burned their house down playing Clue or Monopoly. Stick to the non-occult board games, kids.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

This story originally appeared on MUNCHIES.

Ghana, a small nation nestled between the Ivory Coast and Togo, offers a thriving nightlife and delicious, delirious drinks, but you have to know where to go. Luckily, I was visiting my American friend and her Ghanaian husband, who is a prominent member of the Ga tribe, in the capital city of Accra. He knew the town like a priest knows the Bible, and I was promised a fun night out.

Little did I know how it would end.

We started off at Republic, an upscale bar in the Osu district that's been heralded for fancy drinks made with akpeteshie, or Ghanaian palm moonshine. Akpeteshie is strong enough to put hair on your nipples, and it's a favorite among hardcore drinkers in Ghana, as it is cheap and extremely efficient at getting you drunk. You can purchase shots of akpeteshie in most dive bars for 50 pesuas, less than 15 cents US. Republic, meanwhile, offers frozen akpeteshie-based drinks for 12 cedis, or around $3 (2.6).

I had been in Accra for over a week, and the number of Caucasians I had seen prior could be counted on one hand. Looking around at Republic, I said to my friend, "So this is where the white people are at."

We didn't stay long. I ordered a tasty number resembling a mojito, which was blended with brown sugar and mint, but my friends were anxious to introduce me to their favorite elixir at the next stop.

After a short drive, we arrived at another Osu locale to partake in the delights of a drink named Amena cocktail of marijuana-infused akpeteshie, Sprite, and other "secret" ingredients. My friend explained that it was named Amen because it will make you feel like you have to go to church after you drink it. The bar owner put it more succinctly: It'll make you say Amen and knock you the fuck out.

We walked into the tiny indoor space, which resembled a 70s man-cave. It was heavily air-conditioned, the cool air thick with the smell of mothballs. After a few rambunctious salutations between my friend's husband and the owner, our order was placed with the bartendera girl that I doubt was old enough to buy cigarettes in the US. She lined up our plastic cups (adorned with crazy straws and ice) on the dark wood bar before grabbing a two-liter Sprite bottle and pouring a forest green liquid to the brim.

With my first sip, I knew the evening was about to be taken to the next level. The weed, earthy and herby, dominated the drink; mixed with the sweetness of Sprite and the strength of the akpeteshie, it made for a powerful punch. I jerked my head to the side and raised an eyebrow as my lips formed into a punctuated "O," letting out a breathy whistle. Though hefty as hell, it was scrumptious. I dove in for a second sip, and a refreshing, fiery sensation took root in my belly. I smiled and toasted my friend: "Hallelujah!"

We went outside to the temperate, subtropical evening and found seats at ramshackle tables on the side of the road. The nightlife of Accra was spilling into the streets as locals turned cars into tabletops and stood chatting or dancing on the asphalt. Music filled the air.

My friend ordered another Amen for us to share. The liquor was coursing through my blood stream, but I knew the weed would take some time to kick in. Although marijuana is illegal in Ghana, I was told that a small bribe can keep you away from any jail time if you happen to be caught in possession of it. The same relaxed rules were in place for the bar; they pay the cops regularly to leave them and their congregation in peace.

Despite its laws, Ghana has a laid-back approach to marijuana. The tribe that my friend's husband is from, the Ga, are known to be Rastas and smoke ganja liberally. Joints had been passed around frequently during my time in Accra. The availability of weed seemed to be as abundant as "Hail Marys" in a Catholic confessional.

We finished our Amens and headed to the next destination: a proper English pub named Honeysuckle, where the DJ looked like he had lost his way after a long party binge in Manchester during the 90s and never found his way back home.

It was then that I noticed the casino-esque print of the pub's carpet beginning to swirl.

For me, as with many people, ingesting weed has a much more psychedelic effect than smoking it. I battened down the hatches for a full-on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas momentum to set in. I went to the bathroom, and as I came out, my perception shifted. People playing pool in the smoke-filled room looked like I was watching them on a movie screen at the end of a tunnel. The slight incline in the floor made me feel like I was walking up an escalator moving backwards. I could've sworn I heard angels singing outside in the sub-Saharan African wind.

Undeterred by this, we chugged a couple of Savannahs (a popular Ghanaian cider) and moved on.We drove around on dark, dusty, bumpy roads past checkpoints with police armed with machine guns, careening to and from hidden clubs around the city. The night became a blur after the alcohol of the Savannahs trumped the THC. I watched gals shake their shit with a fervor that made Miley Cyrus look like a newborn fawn finding her footing.

In the haze, I think I started speaking in tongues. I remember feeling glorious, soaring like a halo. I was in heaven.