Ghosts of the Orphanage
A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The shocking secret history of twentieth-century orphanages—which for decades hid violence, abuse, and deaths within their walls
For much of the twentieth century, a series of terrible events—abuse, both physical and psychological, and even deaths—took places inside orphanages. The survivors have been trying to tell their astonishing stories for a long time, but disbelief, secrecy, and trauma have kept them from breaking through. For ten years, Christine Kenneally has been on a quest to uncover the harrowing truth.
Centering her story on St. Joseph’s, a Catholic orphanage in Vermont, Kenneally has written a stunning account of a series of crimes and abuses. But her work is not confined to one place. Following clues that take her into the darkened corners of several institutions across the globe, she finds a trail of terrifying stories and a courageous group of survivors who are seeking justice. Ghosts of the Orphanage is an incredible true crime story and a reckoning with a past that has stayed buried for too long, with tragic consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Kenneally (The Invisible History of the Human Race) paints a beyond disturbing picture of human cruelty in this shocking exposé of decades of abuse of children housed in orphanages across multiple countries in much of the 20th century. In thousands of institutions in the U.S., Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, and other countries, as documented by official inquiries and corroborated by Kenneally's research, children were routinely emotionally abused, beaten for falling asleep during punitive nighttime exercises, whipped, submerged in baths, raped, and even killed. Those crimes were routinely concealed by their perpetrators or their colleagues, "who sought to protect them or the reputation of their" institution, most of which were religious. Kenneally shares the stories of such individuals as Sally Dale, who, while at Vermont's St. Joseph's Orphanage as a child in 1944, "witnessed a nun throw a boy through an upper-floor window to his death," and was herself "thrown into Lake Champlain and told to swim or drown" around the same time. Kenneally asserts that her exposé pertains "to acts that are happening right now," and that the grim reality is a product of an insufficient reckoning, since "organizations that ran orphanages still deny the full reality of what happened inside them, still refuse to take true responsibility for the consequences, and still sit on the records." This harrowing true crime story is essential, if deeply difficult, reading.
