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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry and Cult Leader is recorded in front of a live studio audience.

The studio audience is hot dog and she's so sleepy. I swear all she wants to do is sleep and watch movies. I don't know.

Whose daughter is this? I don't know where she came from. I hope everybody had a nice weekend. Mine included a lot of ordering food and watching movies and sleeping, which is just...

I deal. Wait, I also went to Palm Springs for all of 24 hours and I have a funny story, but I can't tell you guys yet because I haven't told Madison yet.

And I told her that I would tell her on the next obituary. So you're gonna have to wait. But all I'm gonna say is that my friends Sabia that I went with booked us a hotel that she found online that I think she wanted us to die at. It was insane.

We were going because she was looking at some houses out in Joshua Tree and Joshua Tree is about like 40 minutes from Palm Springs. The area we were staying in...

Well, we were going to stay in was in Desert Hot Springs, which is like 20 minutes from Palm Springs, 20 minutes from Joshua Tree. But it ended up being a scary situation. It's funny.

A quirky evening. I love Palm Springs so much. I get jealous anytime. Madison's there right now. And I'm extremely jealous. I just want to be there all the time. Anyways.

So I went to Palm Springs for like a day, right? And then I came home and I watched probably one of my most favorite new lifetime movies. It's called The Cheerleader Murders. And not only is it just thrilling and dramatic.

This soundtrack is like Pinnick at the Disco and Fallout Boy just very much a pop punk vibe of you lifetime. I think I like the sight of you. I know people are gonna ask. It's on the Lifetime Movie app I believe. I watched it on Amazon Prime. I was telling Olivia to watch it. And it's a little confusing when you search for it on Amazon.

If you search like The Cheerleader Murders, it's gonna pop up and be like season one, 299. But it's just the movie. So if you're looking for a good one, I got you. Now for today, we've got Amoida. We've got a ghost. We've got West Virginia all terrifying in their own way. Just kidding. Well, kind of. West Virginia, don't get mad at me. Okay. I'm just teasing you. I'm yanking your chain. Never even bend to West Virginia.

But I have seen the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia about the White Family, which is truly a cinematic experience. It's got tap dancing elders, prescription pills, a real whirlwind. I was laughing earlier because I keep telling myself like, oh jeez, you know, we've been covering a lot of older stories on here. The 30s, 40s, 60s. Let's try and get a little more current here. And then wow, what do you know? Here we are in the 1800s. You'll see by the end though. Why I'm so obsessed with this story. I know older stories. I think people are like, oh, it's gonna be cool.

I think people are like, oh, it's gonna be boring. It's gonna be like, well, think about Jack the Ripper. How fucking brutal was that? Today's story is not as brutal, but it's actually insane. Also, at the end of the story, I'm going to bring up a childhood memory for probably a lot of you.

Now, we are in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. The year is 1897. I don't have an 1897 accent. So sorry. Okay, first up, we have Elva Zona Hester. Born in 1873, she was raised near the Richlands, not a ton of background info on her because, you know, just 1800s things.

No, where does it ever say Elva's dad's name, but her mom is a big part of the story and her name was Mary Jane Hester. Elva was an attractive girl at the time, sought after by a lot of the gentlemen and not so gentlemen in Greenbrier.

And her mom was like the ultimate helicopter mom cock block. If a guy wanted to talk to her daughter, she had to go through her first. And if she didn't like them, she'd fucking let them know.

Elva, on the other hand, often went against her mother's wishes, which led to her giving birth to a child out of wedlock in 1895. Out of wedlock, by the way, it sounds like such a dated term. It is a dated term, but it feels just bad to say.

They had only been together for a short period of time. Elva and this guy don't even know his name. He ended up taking off when she was about a month pregnant. And then no idea where that child went.

Because nowhere in my research did I hear or see or read any mention of the child anywhere.

I know these background details are a little spotty, but I promise as we move into this story, they don't really matter.

About two years later, October of 1986, Elva meets a drifter named Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shoe. He went by Trout Shoe, and that's what we're gonna call him from here on out.

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