Content note: discussion of ableism/sanism, forced medical procedures, the fucking patriarchy

Welcome to the Spooky Sconnie podcast, the show that talks about the spooky, paranormal, criminal, and just plain odd Badger State. While we're known for sportsball and food, there's a lot more to learn about Wisconsin if you know where to look.

In this first episode, I cover St. Coletta's School in Jefferson, Wisconsin, lobotomies, and the Kennedy family.

Further reading

• History according to the school

Transcript

You're listening to the Spooky Sconnie Podcast. I'm your host Kirsten Schultz. I have lived in Wisconsin for 12 years now and one of the things that always surprises me and that has pushed me to create this podcast is when we talk about odd things, creepy things, paranormal things, there are only a few things that people think about when they think about Wisconsin and usually quite frankly it's Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, and as creepy as those two motherfuckers are, there is so much more to this state then either have them or beer or cheese or the packers. And that's really what I want to talk about on this podcast. We'll touch on things from aliens to cryptids to plain odd facts to haunted towns, to serial killers and true crime. It will be a really fun journey and I'm really excited that you're listening. I hope this is something that you'll wind up liking and subscribing to, to kind of break with the traditional podcast thing.

----more----

Um, I do just want to list kind of my social media at the top of the show in case you want to peek around. The twitter is at SpookySconnie - that's s-p-o-o-k-y-s-c-o-n-n-i-e and our instagram is SpookySconniePodcast, so just pop the name of the podcast in there and the facebook page is also SpookySconniePodcast. So, hopefully that makes it easy for you to find. I think that's all the social media I've got set up right now. If you have creepy Sconnie stories you want to send in, you can send them in at [email protected]. And I will eventually work on doing some listeners episodes, um, with this being the first episode of the podcast and want to do something like super creepy or super terrifying. But I wanted to do something I was really interested in.

And um, as someone who lives with a number of chronic illnesses and deals with mental health issues, something that I was surprised to learn recently was that Rosemary Kennedy, lived in Wisconsin for the bulk of her life and that has to do with a place called St Coletta's in Jefferson. Jefferson is a city that's about halfway between Madison and Milwaukee. Madison is our capital, uh, and where the Wisconsin badgers reside and where I reside, and Milwaukee is probably the most well known Wisconsin city. It sits on the West Bank of Lake Michigan and um, that's where Jeffrey Dahmer played around. So... Some very different spaces as well, geographically, Milwaukee's very flat. Um, the, the glaciers back in the glacier moving era of the world, um, moved through that area pretty quickly. So there's a lot of flat land, whereas the further west you move in Wisconsin, you actually get to what is known as the driftless area where the glaciers didn't move through.

And so I'm in Madison and, west of here, we have a lot of rolling hills and things like that. Jefferson is, I would say it where it starts to get a little hilly, um, but not enough to where you're like, whew, rollercoaster on