This Week In Dust

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.

Nothing But Trouble To Face: The Nuttall Family Suicides

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.

Blood and Sin: Lust, Eugenics, and the Kallikak Myth

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.