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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader, Spencer, Henry, and boy and I scared of demons. More on that to come, but first, I hope you guys are all surviving 2020 because this is by far the weirdest year I think a lot of us have ever experienced.

I mean, we're already halfway through August, which is what made me even think about this, and at least in California, we're nowhere near ready to operate as normal, and it's crazy. They're like taking away mailboxes to prevent voting. There's apparent fire tornadoes in Northern California like I cannot keep up. Anyways, I feel like I kind of acclimated to this new life now. I fucking hate when people say like, oh, the new normal. But in the beginning, everyone I know, and I'm sure most of you were like, ah, chaos, what's happening? What am I gonna do with all this?

This time at home, we were making bread, we were doing art classes, fucking Zoom parties, and all kinds of shit. And now it's just like, well, another day, it's just weird. This year is so weird. You know what else is weird? Demonic possession. Hello, segue. Today, we are talking about a case of demonic possession. Now listen, when I'm writing and doing research for my episodes each week, I get the occasional stomach churn. Right? Some of these details are obviously horrifying.

Because I'm so engulfed in finding the information in such a factual way, as I like build out timelines, I generally don't get too freaked out about the cases. Because I'm simultaneously deciding where to put ABC with XYZ. But the entire time I was doing research for this case, I was like, not well, it scared me. So hopefully it scares you too. So again, after 2020, I don't know if anything can scare us.

But if something will, it's gonna be the exorcism of Annalise Michele. Annalise was born on September 21st of 1952 in Bavaria, West Germany, to Joseph and Anna Michele. She had three sisters, Gertrude, Barbara, and Rosetta that were all born after her.

Religion held a really strong place in Annalise's family. Their grandma, who looked after them, was mostly responsible for their introduction to religion. They were devoutly Catholic and attended mass twice a week. Annalise was a super sweet girl. In school, she was a very sharp student. She excelled academically and had hopes of one day becoming a school teacher herself.

A seemingly normal childhood, but around the age of 16, something traumatic happens when Annalise suffers a convulsion. It was while she was at school and it was probably really scary for her. She'd like blacked out in class and began walking around days. Annalise wasn't aware of what was happening to her. But friends and family were called her being in a Translake state that day.

Things seemed normal for a while afterwards, but about a year after that first episode, she has another one. She wakes up in a Translake state again, wets her bed, and this was followed by a series of convulsions. Her body was just shaking.

After this second occurrence, she ends up visiting a neurologist with her mom, which is where they give her a diagnosis for the first time, and they tell her that she has something called temporal lobe epilepsy, often referred to as TLE.

The causes of TLE can usually be traced to a traumatic brain injury, brain infections brought on by meningitis, stroke, cerebral tumors, as well as genetics.

TLE is not, however, the result of psychiatric illness, which remember that for later on.

Now, of course, when I was researching TLE, the symptoms included some common things like deja vu, sudden anxiety, a rising sick feeling in the stomach, difficulty in speaking, and I'm like, wow, I have experienced all of those.

But I feel like I could read the symptoms for anything and make it about me, which is like a superpower or hypocondria. I don't know, you can call it what it is.

Temporal lobe epilepsy, though, is actually super interesting. I started reading about it, and it can cause what's called the Geshwin syndrome in patients, which is a behavioral syndrome consisting of hyper-religiosity, which means that patients find themselves with intense religious feelings.

It's also said that if they grew up in an intensely religious household, it could bring up feelings of extreme atheism, which is just wild, and I wonder how this attributes to a lot of cases of demonic possession.

But the brain is just fucking, it's amazing. It's so weird what our bodies can communicate internally. I guess externally too. I mean, have you ever seen me do a flip?

After she gets her diagnosis in June of 1970, she has put on a medication to control her epilepsy. It's called dilantin. It's a pretty common anti-seizure medicine, but it didn't alleviate the problems that she was experiencing.

Analysts begin having frequent hallucinations throughout the day, expressing that she was seeing, quote unquote, devil faces, which religious or not is terrifying.

A month later, they decide to change up her prescription. They give her a percussing in, which is an anti-psychotic medication typically prescribed to patients displaying symptoms of schizophrenia.

So she's still having these episodes, right, every once in a while. She's not experiencing the convulsions and everything, and the medication has seemed to somewhat control that and subside some of those symptoms.

However, she is still having these random flashes of the devil faces and things like that, which I feel like I have a lot of empathy for people that suffer from any sort of illness that makes them see hallucinations, because I think that that is just something that is so scary.

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