Ghosts and a dark, secret history: The unsettling true story behind St. Joseph's Orphanage.

This is an extract from Ghosts Of The Orphanage by award-winning journalist Christine Kenneally, published by Hachette Australia. 

It is a shocking exposé of the dark, secret history of Catholic orphanages - the violence, abuse, and even murder that took place within their walls - and a call to hold the powerful to account. Centreing on St. Joseph's, a Catholic orphanage in Vermont, Kenneally investigates and shares the stories of survivors.

This case is also featured in Mamamia's True Crime Conversations podcast this week. 

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Content warning: This story includes graphic depictions of violence that may be distressing to some readers.

It was a freezing day in January 2016 when I passed through a long-locked door and first set foot into what had once been St. Joseph's Orphanage. The beautiful, spooky old hulk of a building was dark and frigid, and as I walked through the hallways, the sound of my feet against the worn wood floors was amplified in the long corridors.

In the cold winter light, the basement dining room, once an optimistic yellow, had an uneasy green tinge. Here and there the paint blistered. I tried to picture all the children sitting here at their little tables, eating their food and keeping their heads down, dreading the consequences if they got sick.

I walked up the stairs, above the lattice-panel doorway that led to the confessional, past the polished wood posts, past exposed brick and moldering mortar. 

A dark corridor ran the length of the building, as it did on each of the three other floors. Polished by generations of children, the floor still reflected a dull gleam. 

To one side opened a room of cupboards, their wooden shelves blanched with dust, the children's numbers still clearly marked: 53, 19, 34 ...

After years of talking to former residents and reading their words, I felt like I already knew every nook and corner. 

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Here in the confessional, on one side of the wooden grill, a young boy told a priest that another priest had touched him. The priest's reaction to this story was angry and dismissive.

Now, I knew, he was also an accused abuser. 

Here at this bench in a side room, children were pulled in from the corridor and deputised as godparents in quick baptismal ceremonies conducted over abandoned newborns.

Here on this floor, a young girl had been forced to troop up and down the hallway, staggering with exhaustion in the middle of the night. Here was the freezing bathroom where a nun swung a girl by her back brace until she bounced off the walls. Here at the elevator door, a girl had clutched each side of the doorway in a mad panic as two nuns behind her tugged her into the small space.

Here, finally, on the top floor, was a pinched, steep staircase caked in dust, and at the top of it, the attic. Every inch of the building below had been assigned a clear purpose. 

But the vast, eerie attic, with its immense crisscrossing beams and dark rafters, felt almost like a forest, a wild place.

It occurred to me as I stepped nervously across the loft that the Sisters of Providence had probably been frightened of the attic, too. Even when they punished children there, they often went up in pairs. Except maybe for Sister James Mary, who had seemed so energised by rage and hatred and control.

Here among the statues and old chests, she had strapped an unhappy teenage girl named Sally Dale into a chair and told her that the chair was electric and would fry her. 

I stood on the loft and looked around. I tried to conjure up Sally, to see her in the chair. I wanted to tell her that I knew what happened to her. She had not been forgotten. Her words had lived on. But all that was left were echoes and dust.

In the fall of 1994, Sally Dale of Middletown, Connecticut, received an invitation in the mail. A two-day reunion would be held at the Hampton Inn in Colchester, Vermont, for 'survivors' of St. Joseph's Orphanage, which struck Sally as an odd word to use. 

She hadn't been in touch with anyone from the orphanage for a long time. She thought about the place as little as possible. But she was curious to see some of the old faces and find out who was still around.

Her husband Bob would drive. Bob had looked after Sally since they married and treated her son and daughter from her first marriage as if they were his own. Now that the children were grown, she didn't have to worry about leaving them as she always had when they were young. 

She and Bob lived on the ground floor of a triplex, with her son, Rob, and his wife in an apartment above them. When Rob returned late from night shift at the prison, Sally always waited up. She left the front door open a crack and the light turned on. 

Only when she heard Rob call out, "Good night, Ma!" did she go to bed.

On Saturday, September 18, the first day of the reunion, Sally was only a few steps inside the hotel conference room when a man exclaimed, "You little devil!"

It was Roger Barber, who had been a boy at St. Joseph's with his two sisters. Little devil, that's what they used to call her. She hadn't thought of it in so long.

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"Sal, you look good for everything you went through," one of Barber's sisters said.

"You were our Shirley Temple of the orphanage!" said the other. She reminisced about the way Sally used to sing 'God Bless America' and 'On theGood Ship Lollipop' when she was little.

Sally remembered some of those things. She sometimes remembered bad things, too, such as times when the nuns hit her. But it was long ago. 

She recognised few of the fifty or sixty people in attendance. Debbie Hazen was there, and so was Katelin Hoffman, along with Coralyn Guidry and Sally Miller, but many of those women had lived at St. Joseph's after Sally left.

Some of the women recognised each other not by name but by the numbers that nuns used to identify them: Thirty-two! Fourteen!

The first day's events began with Philip White, a tall, friendly looking man who explained that he was a lawyer. He introduced Joseph Barquin, who was a resident of the orphanage in the early 1950s, and some other people who were there to help. 

One man spoke about the Bible and turning to God in times like these, and two therapists said they were available for anyone who wanted to talk. Local journalists were on hand, too.

Sally still remembered some of the little boys she had cared for in the orphanage nursery at that time, but if she had looked after Barquin, she didn't recall. He stood up and told everyone about a nun taking him into a closet and doing terrible things to him. He still had scars. 

Roger Barber spoke next. He said that a nun told a group of older boys to rape him. As about leaving them as she always had when they were young. 

As the morning went on, more of the former residents told their stories, and more of them became increasingly upset. Some began to melt down in the meeting room and the hotel's hallways. 

One lanky, weathered man stood up and addressed another man before the whole crowd. He said he had come that day because back in the orphanage he bullied the man. He felt bad about it his whole life and wanted to say he was sorry. 

Then one woman spoke about how nuns wiped her face in her own vomit, and Sally started to remember that the same thing had happened to her. She could hear the voice of one sister telling her after she threw up her food, You will not be this stubborn! You will sit and you will eat it.

One woman said she'd watched a nun hold a baby by its ankles and swing its head against a table until it stopped crying. 

As Sally listened to the awful stories, something ruptured inside her. She shook her head and began to say, "No, no, no, no, no, it's not true." 

But it was too late. The spell was broken.

Her memories of St. Joseph's were already flooding back.

This is an edited extract from Christine Kenneally's book Ghosts Of The Orphanage. RRP $28.50.

Image: Hachette.

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