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 wrong.

Based on original research from the Ladd School Historical Society and Archives.

Music: "Endless Nightmare" by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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, this episode unravels how a moral panic became “science,” how heredity became a weapon, and how one myth helped justify decades of control over the bodies of women, the poor, and the institutionalized.

Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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, and how the same ideas later fed the machinery of asylums and eugenics, a lineage that runs from Paris to New England and into Rhode Island’s infamous Ladd School.

Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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 ignite a national reckoning, forcing the country to confront what it tried so hard to ignore.

Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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 records and a rare memory trace the journey from hope to anonymity inside the institution for the “feeble-minded.”

Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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 suffering, survival, and a system built on cruelty.

Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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 shocking self-experiments finally exposed the truth.

Based on original archival research from the Ladd School Historical Society and Archives.
Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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 under the banner of institutional care.

Based on original research from the Ladd School Historical Society and Archives.

Music: Shivering From Hell" by Frequently Asked Music and "Endless Nightmare" by Oliver Garcia; licensed via Motion Array.

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 School for Boys and Oaklawn School for Girls, where the state’s experiments in obedience left lasting scars — and the traces still haunt the land.

Archival audio excerpt from Juvenile Delinquency: Welfare Programs for Youth (National Probation Association/U.S. Office of Education, 1936)

Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.

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. Through a tangle of belief and skepticism, we follow those who swear they’ve felt the cold grip of the unknown, and those who insist nothing ever haunted these halls.

Music: “Endless Nightmare” by Oliver Garcia, licensed via Motion Array.