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When gaming enthusiast Joshua Barbeau met Jessica Pereira, he knew he had found his soulmate. But his happiness didn't last. Jessica died from a rare health condition aged just 23, leaving Joshua struggling to cope with his grief, and his life. Eight years later, in 2020, while playing around with a website that used AI to create bespoke chatbots, Joshua had an audacious idea. He decided to create a chatbot based on his beloved Jessica. It's an experience that he says helped him finally find closure.

Growing up in North Carolina, Ron Gollobin would often take himself off to the surrounding swamps on the hunt for frogs and other wild creatures. It was late one night in 1959, in an area known locally as the Sandpits, that Ron and his friend became spooked by a sound in the brush, which sent them running for their lives. Ron didn’t see what had made the sound but soon began embellishing the story. Before he knew it, he'd invented 'the Sandpit creature', a local legend that spread further than he could ever have imagined.

Kai Hoss discovered in a school history lesson that leading Nazi, Rudolph Hoess, was his grandfather. He had been the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was in charge of organising the killing of more than a million people in gas chambers during the Second World War, the vast majority of them Jews. After the war Rudolf Hoess was tried for his crimes, and executed. Kai also discovered that his father, Hoess's son, had grown up in a nice house just outside the gates of Auschwitz, within sight of the crematorium. But Kai could never get his father to talk about it, and then they were estranged for decades.

Atoosa Sepehr never spent any time in her mother's kitchen growing up in Iran. She focused on her studies and by her mid-twenties she was a high-flyer in the male-dominated steel industry. But at home she was stuck in an unhappy marriage. Overnight, she fled Iran to make a new life for herself in the UK. She turned to family recipes to stave off homesickness and found a new lease of life cooking the food from her home country.

Presenter: India Rakusen

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(Photo: Cassette tape; Credit: Getty Images)