Are Ripley'S Believe It Or Not Artifacts Authenticated By Experts?

Tristan Hayes' life took a sharp turn, one moment he was on the cusp of his dream then suddenly found himself drowning. Trauma surgeon residency was brutal enough; losing his scholarship was a knockout blow. Desperate, he swallowed his pride and became "Titan" at Club Inferno. Six months, and he was their star, his body a commodity. Tonight was his last dance – he was booked for a bachelorette party for a bride-to-be linked to the Mafia family. He remembered the haze of perfume, the clamor, the hands pulling him closer and the willing mouths tasting him. He remembered the bride, her eyes wide, her laughter turning into moans and gasps. He entertained the women, the night ending with the bride's face covered in his thick sticky seed. After this night, he wanted to close this chapter of his life. He wanted to forget it all. He should have. Tristan awoke in a cold, unfamiliar room, the fear paralyzing. Now, bound and gagged in a concrete cell, the memory was a burning brand. He learned why they called Giovanni Sokolov "The Siberian Winter." Giovanni, a face carved from granite, stood before him. "My bride," Giovanni’s voice was a low growl, "You entertained my fiancée, She died a week ago, trying to run away with a man. Your seed was the catalyst. You helped her betray me." Giovanni leaned closer, his eyes devoid of warmth. "She was running away, Dr. Hayes. You helped her crave forbidden fruit. You opened the door to betrayal." He smiled, a cruel, predatory expression. "Now, you will pay the price of her betrayal. You will take her place... as my companion in bed... my slave and my plaything. Don't worry I'll make you'll enjoy every second of it."

The day my father was diagnosed with liver cancer, I took out the cash gift I had received from my wedding to cover the emergency costs. The bank teller counted the amount multiple times. At that moment, I learned that out of the twenty thousand dollars cash gift Peter Grant’s family had given me a year ago, eighteen thousand dollars were counterfeit. I went home with the fake money to demand an explanation. My mother-in-law, Deborah, stepped on my father’s picture and called him a worthless man who deserved to die. Peter refused to divorce me. He demanded that I pay back the twenty thousand dollars in cash before he would agree to the divorce. When I refused, he started a live stream. He held up my undergarments for tens of thousands of viewers to see. “Look at what my wife is wearing. Is she trying to save her dad, or is she trying to seduce him? “We’ve been married for a whole year, and she hasn’t even given me a single child. Now she wants a divorce? This is marriage fraud. She scammed us out of the cash gift!” The comments section hurled insults at me. Someone threw dung on our front porch. Someone even edited my family’s faces onto old-fashioned funeral portraits and posted them online. The whole internet said my family deserved to die. What they did not know was that when that money was put into the safe, the whole thing had been caught on camera. The security seals on the cash bundles were covered in Peter’s family’s fingerprints. They also did not know that I had picked up the wrong medical report. The one with cancer was not my father. It was actually Deborah. Later, Peter knelt on the floor begging me to give him some money to save his mother. I kicked his hand away and said coldly, “I still have your counterfeit eighteen thousand dollars. I’ll give it all back to you. Is that enough to cremate your mother?”

We had agreed to spend the New Year with our own families, but at the last minute, my husband, Drake Murrell, changed his mind and insisted I go back with him this year. I agreed, planning to take this opportunity to finally tell him the truth about who I really was. When we first got married, my parents told me to keep a low profile so that Drake, who came from a single-parent household, wouldn’t feel pressured. So I hid the fact that I was the daughter of the richest family in the capital, the Thorntons. When we returned to his hometown, I specifically bought my mother-in-law, Diana Murrell, a pair of gold bangles. She accepted them with a beaming smile, praising me again and again for being such a thoughtful daughter-in-law. However, the next day, as I passed by the old oak tree at the edge of Willow Creek, I overheard her talking about me with a group of people. "Oh, you have no idea. My daughter-in-law is absolutely ridiculous!" My hand froze midair, still holding my phone, as I instinctively ducked behind a haystack. I heard her continue loudly, "She bought me a pair of gold bangles this year. The moment I touched them, I knew they were fake! I’m telling you, they’re probably those cheap online knockoffs, like the kind that cost next to nothing and start fading the moment you wear them!" I was stunned with anger. She called pure gold fake? Looks like the million-dollar New Year gift I had prepared for her wasn’t necessary anymore.

On the night I get dismembered, my girlfriend, Victoria Hewitt, announces her marriage to the world. Clad in the wedding dress that I've personally designed, she soon marries her first love, Joseph Danford, happily. When Victoria receives the news of my death, she merely smiles before claiming that I'm a pathological liar. But what she doesn't know is that I've died for her sake. Later on, Victoria constructs a sculpture out of my bones. She develops a habit of hugging it every day since then.

I die in the basement after being burned by acid. My family doesn't recognize me, and they don't call the cops. My mother picks up the scalpel that hasn't been used in years and debones me. My father excitedly mixes my skeleton with concrete and turns me into an exquisite statue. My sister uses the sculpture she's made out of my flesh and portrays herself as a genius sculptor whom everyone admires. Later, the sculpture is shattered, revealing half a broken finger inside. That's when everyone panics.

On Valentine's Day, as my girlfriend, Christy Lawrence, and I stroll along a tourist hot spot, a photographer asks me, "Care to take a photo? Oh, you brought someone new again!" I brush it off as a joke, but Christy stops the photographer and says seriously, "He told me I'm his first girlfriend. How can you make up a lie like that?" The photographer snorts. "This young man here brings a different young woman with him to take a photo here every six months. I still have the photos to prove it!" He brings out his phone and shows us a photo of a couple—the man looks exactly like me. All of the surrounding tourists start eyeing me scornfully. I take my phone out and make a call. "Hello, I suspect that someone has stolen my identity. Could you please send a police officer over?"