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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader, Spencer Henry, and I'm back from the dead. If your new here Cult Leader is a podcast about cults, well sometimes, crimes and of course, moida, you might be thinking, hey Spencer, I would love to see pictures from the episodes. How about get alerts when they are posted? Well, guess what? You can follow along on the link in the description.

I'm going to go online at Cult Leader Podcast and get all the hot goss. I cannot believe it's November. I don't know what happened this year. It's just not been great. I hope everybody had a safe Halloween. I hope everyone's feeling good. Mercury leaves retrograde on November 3rd. Finally, thank God that's also election day. So we'll see what happens there. I have two photo shoots for work this week in LA. And it's crazy because they've already started boarding up a lot of the

businesses and anticipation of the election. So 2020, I already know is going to be on some weird dystopian shit for the rest of the year. Not that 2021 is looking more promising, but we'll see. We'll see. We're holding out. We're holding hope, holding faith, whatever you got, hold on to it. If you follow me on my personal Instagram, Aspects or Henry, one of the ways that I have been coping with the amount of anxiety I've had lately is I've been doing a lot of little crafty projects. And I'm excited because

I have some good ones planned for the holidays. And okay, wait, you guys, I'm only saying this because I've talked to you guys in the last two episodes about Christine McConnell, who is this creepy craft icon. She followed me on Instagram the other day. And I don't really ever get excited about anything, but that that sent me I'm like, I need to up my fucking craft game. If Christine McConnell herself is going to be seeing them. So let's get to it. The reason we're all actually here. Shut up.

We've seen your fucking pumpkins. We've seen your ghost recently. It's well, some I recently a TikTok came out and I forget the guy's name, but I kept getting tagged in it and people were sending it to me.

And it was about today's story subject, Bel Gunness, who had a plethora of different names. And I was like, come on, you guys have already done this. But then I do that a lot. And I went through the episodes to share enough. I have not, but I have talked about it. So for you guys who don't know,

cold leader actually started on Instagram. I would do these murder stories every few days. And then eventually it turned into this podcast. So I went through my stories archive on Instagram. And I found it. And back in April of 2018.

I did a story on it. And I actually really miss doing those. It was so much fun. So who knows, maybe maybe I'll pop one out in the next couple months here.

I'm giving myself a couple months to even do that. But it was fun because people could like respond and interact. And I love obviously doing the podcast, but I missed that instant interaction. So I want to eventually maybe do like a live stream recording or maybe a virtual live show.

If you guys would be into that, let me know. I know other podcasts like my friends at morbid have done a few. And I think people really enjoy them. So that is that is all I'm saying until the pandemic end.

And then obviously I'm dying to hopefully get out there, meet you guys do some real life live shows once, you know, shit semi back to normal. And I promise we're going to move into a recent case next week, not super recent, but more recent because like last week today's story takes place primarily in the 1800s. But it is so wild. You'll be into it for sure. So Belle.

Belle Gunn is where do we begin? She looks miserable. Every time I see a picture of her, I'm like, she is the great, great aunt of Miss Trunchbell from Matilda, like picture Miss Trunchbell in Lizzy Board and Era. I need you guys to have the visual.

Belle was born Brin Hill, the Paul's daughter on November 11th of 1859 in Salbu, Norway. I swear it's like this weird coincidence lately where I always cover people around their birthday.

But she was a Scorpio through and through for sure her father Paul was a free Mason. Her mom was a busy stay at home mom. They had seven children prior to giving birth to Belle. She was the youngest of eight. Listen, we're in the 1800s. I don't have a ton of information on her early formative years or anything like that.

No former ghost of classmates have come through on the Ouija board to tell me anything. I do know there was one instance that was particularly shaping in Belle's life.

The story is fucked. So it happened when she was 18. She is actually pregnant. We don't know who the baby father is, but she was at this country dance. And apparently this guy comes up to her, kicks her in the stomach after some sort of altercation.

And it causes a miscarriage. But since this dude happened to come from a super wealthy family, they were able to bribe away any sort of prosecution.

So he faced no legal consequences, even though he literally kicked her in the stomach, causing the miscarriage. Those around Belle found a huge shift in her personality after this traumatic event occurred.

I guess not long after the man who had kicked her actually died from stomach cancer. And it's like, well, that's karma, dude. It's a little ironic that he kicked her in the stomach. And he died because of his stomach. I don't know. Weird, witchy, something or other.

Her family was kind of the opposite of his, right? They didn't have a lot of money. And Belle knew that she wanted to live a life that was different than the one that she grew up in. So she super idolized one of her older sisters, Nelly, who had immigrated to America.

Belle knew that she wanted to follow suit. So she spent the next three years working as a servant on a farm in order to save up enough money to move to the US.

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