Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice

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. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (Mar.)