This Week In Dust

The Long Between

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

Just Like Everybaby Else: Rhode Island's First School Shooting

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

The Quiet of the Cloister as Reprieve: Holy Vows in the Hands of the State

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

Another Body for the Chair: Fired, Broken, or Dead

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

House Dogs in the Turnips: Dictation from the Dead

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