In Episode 376 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger investigate Exeter, Rhode Island, to see the former site of the Ladd School. Built in 1908, the former Rhode Island School for the Feeble-Minded has a dark history of neglect, patient abuse, and even murder. We explore the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy in-depth. Though the buildings are all gone now, history has left behind a stain that can never be washed away.
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Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[DRIVING]
RAY: So we’re driving on Main Street in Exeter, Rhode Island.
JEFF: We are.
RAY: Usually you expect a Main Street to be full of businesses and buildings. But not this one.
JEFF: No, this is pretty rural.
RAY We’re passing a HUGE cemetery on our left right now, but otherwise I don’t see anything but trees.
JEFF: Bare to the right up here.
[BLINKAH]
RAY: Okay…
JEFF: And we can pull over right there by the side of the road.
[CAR STOPS / WE GET OUT]
JEFF: We’ve reached our destination, Ray.
RAY: I don’t see anything but some trees and a huge empty field behind it.
JEFF: Right, but this is the place. Not that long ago those fields were filled with the ruins of a dark and haunted complex. A place where controversial experiments took place on kids. A place with sinister history and missing and murdered children. We’ve come to Exeter to investigate the haunting of the Ladd School.
[INTRO]
JEFF: I’m Jeff Belanger.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger, and welcome to Episode 376 of the New England Legends podcast. Thank you for riding along with us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England one story at a time. We can’t do this without you, so please reach out to us anytime through our website with your story leads.
JEFF: We’ll explore the history and haunting of the Ladd school right after this quick word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
RAY: So we’re staring at an empty field in Exeter, Rhode Island.
JEFF: We are.
RAY: The last time we were in Exeter we were searching for the vampire Mercy Brown.
JEFF: That’s right!
RAY: The town of Exeter was formed in the year 1742. Of course, there were people living here for thousands of years before that. The Narragansett people for one. But after 1742, Exeter became a farming community. It’s remained mostly a quiet town ever since. Exeter made the news back in 1892 when Mercy Brown was pulled from crypt as a suspected vampire. But since then, the town mostly stayed out of the news. MOSTLY.
JEFF: Mostly if not for a controversial facility known as the Ladd School. Originally called the Rhode Island School for the Feeble-Minded, the complex opened as a farm colony in 1908. They based the school on the Templeton Colony, which was the annex of the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded in Waltham, Massachusetts. That facility became better known as the Walter E. Fernald State School.
RAY: Okay… wait a minute.
JEFF: Yeah?
RAY: I looked this up. We explored the Fernald School way back in Episode 154.
JEFF: We did.
RAY: We uncovered how that facility in Waltham was experimenting with feeding radioactive bowls of oatmeal to the children in the 1940s to test the effects of radiation. Those poor boys were human guinea pigs.
JEFF: That’s right. That was the story.
RAY: And I also recall that Dr. Fernald was experimenting with eugenics.
JEFF: He was.
RAY: One of his goals was to cleanse society of what he called quote “defective and inferior” genes. His words, not ours.
JEFF: So very Adolph Hitler of him.
RAY: Right?!
JEFF: One of Dr. Fernald’s proteges was Dr. Joseph Ladd… the first superintendent of the Rhode Island School for the Feeble Minded.
RAY: Wow! So there’s a connection between the Ladd School and its counterpart in Massachusetts.
JEFF: Absolutely. Like many facilities like these there were some good ideas and practices that helped people, but also a darker side that still haunts us. And now we have an empty field.
RAY: But it wasn’t always empty.
JEFF: No. Take a look at this picture.
RAY: Wow! There were some huge buildings here.
JEFF: There were.
RAY: And this one doesn’t look like some of the old asylums we’ve checked out in the past. Some of those look like old college campuses. This one looks like some modern architecture from the 1970s. It’s a five-story building that’s round with orange and tan panels between the many windows.
JEFF: Yeah, that was the John E. Fogerty Hospital building that was added in 1962. They don’t make architecture like this anymore for a reason.
RAY: Because it’s ugly?
JEFF: That’s the main reason. Yeah. It’s hideous and doesn’t hold up. In 1916, Ladd changed the name of the facility to the Exeter School because the term “feeble-minded” was not en vogue anymore. In the first half of the twentieth century, the school evolved from a place to help those who mental disabilities learn farm work, trades, and to be self-sufficient, into a facility that was part hospital, part detention center for kids, and part boarding school, and a place for some dark ideas and experiments on people referred to as “inmates.” In 1928, the newspapers called this place a quote “Dumping Ground” for the unwanted. It was over-crowded and lacked a hospital. By the mid-1900s, it wasn’t just people with mental disabilities housed here, there were unwed mothers, immigrants, criminals, and others who couldn’t quite stand up for themselves making it a dark and dangerous place. So let’s head back to 1952, and see this facility in full vigor.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s December of 1952. Dwight Eisenhower just won the presidential election in November and will take office next month. “You Belong to Me” by Jo Stafford is the number one requested song on the radio right now, but here in Exeter, Rhode Island. Folks are unsettled.
JEFF: They are unsettled. People should be ramping up for the holidays, but instead, the Exeter School is getting a lot of unwanted attention.
RAY: It sure is. First, some of the views of its superintendent, Dr. Joseph Ladd, are pretty controversial.
JEFF: So true. Just a few years ago he was quoted in the Providence Journal as saying quote: Many states have already passed sterilization laws for eugenic purposes, and I hope Rhode Island won’t stay behind much longer. Unless something is done to stop the propagation of the mentally deficient, we cannot expect the coming generations to be predominantly virile and sound in mind and body. In that case, a general deterioration of intelligence and the preponderance of inferior stock is inevitable, especially since the trend all along has been for smaller families in the higher grades of the population. Modern society circumvents nature’s law of the survival of the fittest, but we mustn’t go too far in allowing not only the survival but also the multiplication of the unfit. End quote
RAY: Yikes! I mean, who decided what’s fit and unfit?
JEFF: Exactly. It’s a slippery slope into evil.
RAY: The other reason the Exeter School can’t stay out of the news is because a nine-year-old boy went missing back in late September. Gary Hayman suffered an illness when he was three years old that left him mute, which is how he came to be an inmate at the Exeter School. On September 23rd, he seemed to vanish from his room. At first, they thought maybe he ran away. Search parties formed, and the State Police as well as volunteers from the U.S. Marines searched for signs of him. Back on October 10th, the search party made a troubling discovery. Near the banks of the nearby Queen’s River, they found the shirt, pants, shoes, and socks that belonged to young Gary. Dr. Ladd himself identified the clothing pointing out the boy’s name tag was stitched into the shirt.
JEFF: At that point, the search party believed the chances of finding the young boy alive were slim.
RAY: Slim but not impossible. As news of the missing boy spreads in newspapers across the nation, others were gripped by the story and wanted to help. That’s when Lady Wonder jumps into the mix with a psychic prediction on where the boy can be found.
JEFF: Okay, we need to give some context on Lady Wonder. First of all, she’s a 27 year-old horse in Richmond, Virginia, who communicates using a crude sort of giant typewriter. She’s been known to make predictions. Gary Hayman’s mother read about the horse a few days ago when the horse helped authorities find the body of a missing Massachusetts boy. So Mrs. Hayman called the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper asking if a reporter could go ask Lady Wonder about her son. Reporter Bill McIlwain agreed to go.
RAY: When McIlwain asked if young Gary was alive, the horse spelled Y-E-S. The horse then spelled H-U-R-T for hurt. McIlwain then asked where the boy could be found, and the horse spelled truck. When he asked where the truck could be found, the horse spelled Kansas. McIlwain asked again for confirmation, and once again the horse spelled Kansas.
JEFF: Thinking maybe this was a kidnapping, Gary’s mother asked Rhode Island authorities to pass on information about her son to the police in Kansas. The mother is desperate.
[WALKING IN WOODS]
JEFF: It’s now December 1st, 1953. Over a year has passed since Gary Hayman disappeared. Someone reported a strange find out here in the woods of norther Exeter so we’re checking it out.
RAY: I can see the police are already here….
JEFF: What is that they’ve got?
RAY: They’re taking down a bag that’s hanging from the limb of a fir tree.
[RUSTLING WITH BAG]
RAY: Oh man. I can see it’s a human skull!
JEFF: Are there any other bones around?
RAY: I don’t see anything. Just the skull.
(PAUSE)
JEFF: Back at the Exeter School, the skull is compared to an X-Ray taken of Gary Hayman’s head just before he disappeared. The police are certain they have a match, confirming the young boy is dead. The rest of his remains are never found.
RAY: If this was the only strange story to come out of the Exeter School that would be one thing. But it’s not, it’s just the most heart-wrenching and gruesome. There are other stories of patient neglect, mistreatment, and even murder. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
JEFF: In 1956, Dr. John Smith from Connecticut was chosen to replace Dr. Ladd. In 1958, he renamed the institution the Dr. Joseph H. Ladd School. They built that ugly hospital building we mentioned earlier. A PR campaign tried to change the hearts and minds of the public, but employees and patients continued to raise alarms.
RAY: In 1977, a state-appointed investigation found an assortment of health violations. By the 1980s, the U.S. government’s deinstitutionalization shut down pretty much every facility like the Ladd School. The facility closed for good in 1986.
JEFF: Many buildings sat out here abandoned and falling into ruin. Urban explorers had their way with the structures, and reports of ghosts leaked all over the Internet. These were the ruins of buildings with secrets. In the two-thousands, the buildings were razed one by one. The final four were brought down in 2013. Today, there’s nothing left but a large empty field.
RAY: We should also mention that just down the street from the massive cemetery across the street from us, is Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Number 35. It’s in this small patch of land. 84 people who died at the Ladd School are buried there. Keep in mind, the 84 burials only represent bodies who either weren’t claimed by families to be buried elsewhere, or who couldn’t afford burials anywhere else.
JEFF: When I grew up going to church, I remember one of the hymns they used to sing on the regular. Thoe chorus goes: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.” I never forgot those lines. I believe a society is judged by how we take care of those of us most in need. If that’s the case, then the story behind the Ladd School should haunt us.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: And it will. And that brings us to After the Legend where we take a deeper dive into this week’s story and sometimes veer off course.
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To see some historic pictures of the old Ladd School, click on the link in our episode description, or go to our Web site and click on Episode 376
Before we let you go, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts because we don’t want you to miss a thing. And it’s free! You can also join us in our New England Legends Facebook group, and visit our website to see all of the things Jeff and I have going on. You can see dates to see my band The Pub Kings, and a link to buy Jeff’s holiday book, The Fright Before Christmas: Surviving Krampus and Other Yuletide Monsters.
We’d like to thank our sponsors, thank you to our patreon patrons, and our theme music is by John Judd.
Until next time remember… the bizarre is closer than you think.
