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 files, intercepted letters, and the school's own correspondence records, we examine the patient distance the state kept between living people.

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

The book: Exeter Girls, Volume I. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504934?maas=maas_adg_2EF8DB7918BF3F3B64402220044CCFE5_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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

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 system.

It was the system, working.

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

The book: House Dogs in the Turnips. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504969?maas=maas_adg_CB587186D6291B70C0F00DD4DEE4AA25_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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

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 into courtship, family life, labor, and liberty, turning love into suspicion, privacy into evidence, and every small freedom into a test of obedience.

The book: Exeter Girls, Volume II. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504942?maas=maas_adg_2F3BE7099A7D0782577CA255E0D6F932_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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

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 why the institution finally destroyed the position itself.

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

The book: Vox Humana. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504950?maas=maas_adg_4F641E2EF7222C0D3186C423DC073975_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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

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 more unsettling: a man defending his legacy in his own words from beyond the grave.

This recounting of history in the first person evolves into a confession — assembled through a deliberate ritual of reconstruction that treats the archive as vessel and the author as amanuensis.

The book: House Dogs in the Turnips. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504969?maas=maas_adg_CB587186D6291B70C0F00DD4DEE4AA25_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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

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.

The book: Exeter Girls, Volume II. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504942?maas=maas_adg_2F3BE7099A7D0782577CA255E0D6F932_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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.

The book: Exeter Girls, Volume I. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504934?maas=maas_adg_2EF8DB7918BF3F3B64402220044CCFE5_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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.

The book: House Dogs in the Turnips. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504969?maas=maas_adg_CB587186D6291B70C0F00DD4DEE4AA25_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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.

The book: House Dogs in the Turnips. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504969?maas=maas_adg_CB587186D6291B70C0F00DD4DEE4AA25_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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.”

The book: House Dogs in the Turnips. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982504969?maas=maas_adg_CB587186D6291B70C0F00DD4DEE4AA25_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas

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