This Week In Dust

For decades, Rhode Island's institutionalized wrote home. Some letters reached their families. Some were never delivered at all. This episode follows the slow mail of the Ladd School in Exeter, Rhode Island — the years of pencil and ink, of fare saved and never spent, of visits planned and missed, of mothers who wrote every other Sunday for as long as their hands held a pen. Drawing from case...

The gun came from inside the school. Not smuggled. Not stolen. Handed over in the dayroom by a visitor the superintendent waved through himself, sold to a nineteen-year-old the state had been raising since he was two. By Saturday night, staff knew the boy had it. They knew who he wanted to kill. They watched, and they waited. Rhode Island’s first recorded school shooting was not a failure of the s...

She wore a veil and carried the state with her. In this episode, we examine Mary Frances McTernan, the first social worker at Rhode Island’s Exeter School, later known as the Ladd School, a woman who dragged Catholic judgment into the lives of the institutionalized and made state custody feel like damnation. Through letters, reports, and archival records, this story follows how one nun reached int...

One was shot through his living room window. One collapsed at the piano playing his own composition. One was fired for straitjacketing a murderer. Between 1888 and 1974, ten men ran Rhode Island's State Hospital in Cranston — and not one of them survived the job intact. This episode traces the brutal, repeating pattern of what happened to the men who sat in the superintendent's chair, and...

A missed broadcast leads to something far stranger. House Dogs in the Turnips is the posthumous memoir of Dr. Joseph H. Ladd; the longtime superintendent of Rhode Island’s Ladd School. But this isn’t a discovered manuscript. Built from decades of state reports, letters, and archival records, the book reconstructs Ladd’s voice from the inside out. What emerges isn’t a ghost story, but something mor...

In 1916 Pawtucket, a double suicide shocks the neighborhood, but the headlines only catch the surface. Behind the deaths of Anthony and Elizabeth Nuttall lies something far worse — a daughter committed to the Ladd School, a sex trafficking ring in 1910s New England, and an institutional system that branded young women as permanent moral degenerates. The experts said she was lost forever. They were...

A nameless girl, a fleeting encounter, and a fabricated bloodline that rewrote American history. In 1912, the infamous “Kallikak” study turned a story about lust into a nationwide crusade to police sex, purity, and who was allowed to have a family. What followed reshaped institutions, courtrooms, and the lives of thousands labeled “unfit.” Drawing from archival records and later investigations, th...

In the winter of 1800, a naked, scarred child was captured in the forests of Aveyron, southern France, silent and seemingly unreachable. Labeled a “wolf boy,” he became a national obsession and a medical battleground, with Enlightenment-era authorities arguing over whether he was incurable or shaped by isolation. This episode traces how that single case helped ignite the rise of special education,...

A secret camera. Locked wards. Christmas carols on the radio and suffering hidden in plain sight. In 1965, two outsiders risked everything to capture the American institution’s darkest secrets — smuggling out images the public was never meant to see. Inside, they found a world defined by silence and control: children warehoused, adults forgotten, punishment disguised as care. Their exposé would ig...

A blizzard wipes the map clean. Inside Rhode Island’s Exeter School, the road home vanishes for patient and superintendent alike. One lost in the whiteout, the other in the system’s quiet machinery — both searching for a way back. This episode unearths the human cost of state custody, the silent currency of labor, and the erased footprints left behind at the edge of a forgotten cemetery. Original...

In 1851, Rhode Island’s towns auctioned their poor to the lowest bidder. This episode exposes the grim reality of the poor farm system—where children, the elderly, and disabled people were chained, locked in sheds, or left to starve for the sake of municipal budgets. Drawing from the original Hazard report, we follow the stories of Willard Wade, Mary Slocum, and Rebecca Gibbs—lives marked by suffe...

In 1910, a terrifying disease erupted inside Rhode Island’s state asylum — patients wasting away with dementia, skin lesions, and panic no one could explain. Experts blamed everything from contaminated maize to exotic germs, but the real cause was hiding in plain sight. This episode uncovers how pellagra spread behind locked doors, why officials tried to bury the evidence, and how one physician’s...

In early 20th-century Rhode Island, young women deemed sexually promiscuous or simply defiant faced a "treatment" that doctors insisted was scientific progress. Wrapped in water-soaked sheets and bound to their beds, these women experienced something the medical establishment called hydrotherapy — but what was it really? This episode examines the methods used to control female bodies und...

Behind locked doors and under watchful eyes, Rhode Island tried to save its “wayward youth” by putting them on parade. Boys drilled in military formation. Girls lined up on the lawn, performing for crowds of young millworkers. But what looked like “correction” was often something stranger: a public theater of shame, spectacle, and control. This episode peels back the curtain on the Sockanosset Sch...

Every Halloween, Rhode Island’s most infamous institution stirs with ghost stories — chilling true accounts of hauntings, poltergeists, and unexplained encounters at the Ladd School. Former staff, urban explorers, and locals recount phantom footsteps, voices in the dark, and vanishing lights, all pulled from the viral Facebook thread that resurfaces each October. But not everyone is convinced. Thr...

Urban legends swirled for decades around the abandoned Ladd School in Exeter, Rhode Island — secret tunnels, hidden experiments, wild farm plots, and stories of people still living deep inside the ruins. But where did these rumors come from? And how close were they to the truth? This episode follows the strange overlap between myth and fact, as history reveals something even more unsettling: a rea...

In early 20th-century Rhode Island, love could be a crime inside the walls of state institutions. This episode unravels three real stories of relationships that turned volatile behind locked doors — where longing was pathologized, intimacy was policed, and the consequences were severe. Drawing from rare case files, newspaper archives, and institutional records, we explore how the state criminalize...

Beneath moss and cracked stone on the edge of Exeter, ninety-one lives lie hidden — silent, unclaimed, and nearly erased. Historic Cemetery No. 35 isn’t just a graveyard. It’s a ledger of vanished names, lost families, and secrets the state tried to bury for good. Who were they? Why did no one come? And what does the earth remember when everyone else has forgotten? Journey inside the Ladd School’s...

In 19th-century Rhode Island, tuberculosis was a relentless killer — and desperation gave rise to vampire folklore. Families exhumed loved ones, cut out hearts, and burned them in hopes of stopping the disease, while the state built almshouses and asylums that only spread the contagion further. From the famous case of Mercy Brown to hidden deaths inside Exeter and Howard, this episode traces how f...

In 1940s Rhode Island, accusations of witchcraft weren’t confined to the distant past—they were used as evidence in modern courtrooms. This episode uncovers the true story of Concetta DeSanto, a woman whose poverty, immigrant background, and belief in curses collided with state power and psychiatric authority. Drawing from rare archival records and forgotten case files, we explore how folk beliefs...

When the state labeled Marina Couture “feeble-minded,” it was the start of a decades-long sentence — poverty, family rejection, and a brutal system that refused to let go. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on a hidden chapter of Rhode Island’s institutional history, tracing Marina’s journey from mill worker to “streetwalker” to a life defined by judgment and survival inside the almshouse a...

In 1952, a nine-year-old boy disappeared from the Exeter School — later known as the Ladd School — and what followed became the largest manhunt in Rhode Island history. Bloodhounds, helicopters, and hundreds of searchers scoured the countryside, yet the trail only grew stranger. This episode revisits the disappearance, the search, and the unsettling questions that remain. Music: “Endless Nightmare...

In 1955, lawmakers toured the Ladd School — and what they found shocked Rhode Island. Overcrowded dorms, understaffed wards, and human suffering described in chilling detail led one legislator to call it “the home of the eternally doomed.” This episode takes you inside that visit, and into the shadows of an institution on the brink of collapse. Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed...

At the turn of the 20th century, Rhode Island's State Farm at Howard housed the almshouse, asylum, prison, and reformatory. Through the rare firsthand account of Dr. Henry Aaron Jones, a physician who spent decades inside, we uncover shackled arrivals, the doctrine of force in the prison, exploitation of asylum patients, and the degradation of the almshouse. Yet Jones also pushed for reform—be...

In 2006, heavy rains in Cranston, Rhode Island exposed something no one expected: human remains buried beneath a modern roadway. What followed was a stunning archeological investigation into a long-lost cemetery—once used by state institutions to bury the unclaimed, the poor, and the forgotten. This episode follows the discovery of the State Farm Cemetery, the stories revealed through forensic and...