Pod Insights Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries 179. How Reddit Shut Down the Worst Troubled Teen School in America About this episode In 1970, a man with no clinical training opened a "therapeutic boarding school" in the Maine woods. For forty-one years, students inside were subjected to organized beatings, forced fight rings, and psychological torture while journalists, state investigators, and even Congress failed to shut it down.
Then, in 2010, one anonymous Reddit post did what none of them could.
TW: Child Abuse, mention of suicide, addiction
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0:00 Kaelyn Moore? This episode is brought to you by GU Skincare. GU just launched their Heal and Seal Trio, a simple three-step Korean skincare routine that replaces those complicated seven-step regimens. Polish pads to exfoliate, toner pads for dark spots and redness, and NAD Plus cream to lock in hydration overnight. These three products, three minutes a day. Dermatologist tested with over 650,000 happy customers and a 90-day money-back guarantee. Recently, I've been using their NAD Plus cream, which has been so nice to put on at night. I really love it. It's not super heavy, which I love, but it still feels very moisturizing. It doesn't have a lot of scent, which I'm really sensitive to, which is why it works great in my routine. For a limited time, GU is having a crazy deal for our listeners. Their Heal and Seal Trio is already up to 50% off right now,
0:45 Kaelyn Moore? but our listeners can now get an additional 20% off plus free shipping with code HSP at J I Y U skin dot com. That's J I Y U skin dot com and use code HSP for an additional 20% off. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Before we dive into this week's episode, I just wanted to give a thanks to everyone who listened to last week's episode and reached out to me. In that episode, the one that we covered on The Case of Mackenzie Sharilla, also featured in Netflix's The Crash Documentary, I asked you guys if anyone had experience with POTS, and I heard from a lot of the community. I just wanted to share a comment that listener Jamie left.
1:29 Kaelyn Moore? Jamie wrote, "This girl did not pass out from POTS. I've had this condition for almost three years now, and it was really offensive to see these people use a miserable, life-changing disability as an excuse. In addition, POTS stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, meaning the position of the person is upright. High heart rate symptoms, POTS symptoms are experienced when standing up and are directly caused by this position. If Mackenzie really was diagnosed with this, they would know that." Once again, thanks to everyone who reached out. I get a lot of interesting contacts from the community, and I always like reading through comments that you guys send me, and so I just wanted to call out one of those this week. This week's episode, though, I have truly an interesting one for you all. A case that I was following in real time when it was happening.
2:12 Kaelyn Moore? It's a story of how one person sat down at their computer and typed a message into a void, not thinking they would get any response, and ended up starting a movement that took down one of the worst troubled teen schools I've ever heard about. It's a wild story, and I'm excited to share it with you today. All right, let's get into it. In November of 2010, a post popped up on Reddit that now lives in infamy. It was posted in the subreddit rself by a user, Jesus Is My Hero, who has since deleted their account. And the title just read, quote, "Even skimming this post once will blow your mind. Most probably think that it's made up, but you would be dead wrong."
2:54 Kaelyn Moore? Jesus went on to explain that he was sent to a place known as the Elon School in 1998, when he was just 16 years old. He said the school was still open to this very day, and there were still kids as young as 13 years old going there. But it was not at all what it seemed. In fact, the post says, "It was basically state-sanctioned torture." Now, the school was advertised as a place where, quote, "troubled students could be sent by their parents to receive an education and behavioral support. A way to gently straighten out your child so they could thrive in society, essentially." But this Reddit post said that was not the case. Here's some of what they wrote. They said that the, quote, "school accepted anyone and then held them as long as they possibly could,
3:39 Kaelyn Moore? depending on the age of the child. If you were sent at 14 years old, as many were, you may have been looking at three to four years locked inside. This is because the Elon School collects $50,000 a year per child, either from the child's state, school, or parents. And of course, money was the only motivation of the staff and directors. These were the people in charge of your, quote, "progress in the program." At Elon School, we were forced to participate in staff-organized fight clubs, none of which were fair. All were designed to humiliate one child who would be put up against at least three others. So even the children who followed the rules were forced to fight in the name of "good."
4:22 Kaelyn Moore? Children who tried to rebel or be free-thinking were thrown in an isolation room where they had to stay for months at a time. They had to sleep at night on a dirty mattress on the floor of the isolation room. The mattress was brought to them at midnight, and they were woken up at around 7:00 a.m. All outgoing messages are included in the text.
4:39 Kaelyn Moore? Letters to parents were screened, many of us having to write many different drafts until they were accepted. All phone calls to our parents were monitored. We were allowed about 15 minutes a week, and the person who monitored the call would have their hand hovering over the hangup button as a constant reminder of our reality. We were not allowed to write or receive letters until we earned the right, and this could take eight months or more. When someone found out where I was and wrote me, my unopened letters were ripped up in front of me as motivation to move up in the program. I feel like I'm beginning to write too much, and I do not want to overwhelm anyone who made it this far, because most of the bullet points honestly require further explanation
5:22 Kaelyn Moore? to give the full impact of what Elon truly was. The most important thing that anyone can do is be aware of this place and make sure that nobody you know ever gets sent there for any reason. If you are a parent, then do not send your child there. If you know someone who is there now, then beg the parents to do more research. The amount of suicides and tragic deaths of former Elon students is a reason enough to take this post seriously. Please. The post also explained that the "school" part of this school was essentially nothing. Kids would do school from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM, and most of their teachers were not actual teachers, they were just other students who had graduated from the school, but they ended
6:06 Kaelyn Moore? their post with this powerful message. Quote, "This place only still exists because so many people believe that it doesn't, or that it can't. I believe that the internet is our number one tool for exposing these horrid blind spots for what they are. Help me Reddit." Now, I'm not sure what the poster was expecting to happen when they sat down at their laptop and wrote this anonymous post. Elon School had been around since 1970, thousands of kids had been sent there, and some commenters on the post were really skeptical at first. Like, if this was really going on, wouldn't they have heard something about it by this point? How could this possibly be legal?
6:48 Kaelyn Moore? Well, what this poster maybe didn't know is that journalists had been trying to expose Elon School for decades, but to no avail. No matter what they published, parents still sent their teenagers to this place, throwing them into the belly of the beast and watching as they emerged just shells of themselves. No, none of the journalists were able to do what this Reddit post was about to. Now, I think people these days are a bit more familiar with the quote troubled teen industry than ever before. Paris Hilton made a documentary about her time at one of these schools, and the Netflix show Wayward was a fictionalized version based on a true story.
7:29 Kaelyn Moore? I personally hate the phrase troubled teen because what does troubled even mean? Students sent to these programs have everything from criminal records to undiagnosed ADHD. The industry has become a way to profit off of minors that don't neatly and quietly fit into society. But there is a long and sordid history to these places. Now, the Alon School, which this poster wrote about, specifically was located in Maine. It sat on 33 acres of woods on the shore of Upper Range Pond in a town called Poland, about 30 miles north of Portland. The main building had been a hunting lodge once, and ironically, being a respite for men while they were tracking and killing local wildlife, might have been
8:14 Kaelyn Moore? the least morbid thing about this place. In 1970, a man named Joe Ricci bought the building. And to understand how Alon came to be, you have to understand who Joe Ricci was. Because it's his lifeblood that was pumped into the school. In 1963, Joe Ricci was 18 years old, growing up in a working class town outside of New York City, and he had been using heroin for years. That spring, he and some friends got caught robbing a US Postal Service mail truck. The judge gave Joe a choice. He could spend up to seven years in prison, or he could go to rehab. And that's how he wound up at a place in Connecticut called Daytop Village. Daytop was something new at the time. It was a therapeutic
8:59 Kaelyn Moore? community for drug addicts. It was the first generation of a movement that thought addicts could only be saved by being broken first. Daytop was actually modeled on a Santa Monica program called Synanon, which had started in 1958, and was, to put it mildly, a cult.
9:18 Kaelyn Moore? Had this thing that they called, quote, "the game." I think we talked about it, actually, when Amanda Montell and I did the Reddit episode about cult stories. But just a quick reminder, for the game, you would sit in a circle with other addicts, and the group would essentially verbally attack you. They would find your weakest point, childhood trauma, or body image, anything, and they would just hammer into it for hours, sometimes for days. I mean, imagine someone finding out something you're horribly sensitive about, like the death of a loved one, and then a group of people screaming at you that it was your fault. That was the game. The theory was that if they tore you all the way down,
9:58 Kaelyn Moore? you would stop using drugs or alcohol because there would be nothing left of the old you to feed the addiction. Studies later found that about 10 to 15% of people who went through this program actually did get sober. But those people might have also eventually gotten sober on their own. There's no way to tell, because the rest of the people that went through this program actually got worse. Some came out completely unable to function. But the ones who did get sober at Synanon tended to become evangelists about the program. And Joe Ricci was one of those people who came out sober. He left Daytop a very firm believer of the way that it worked. And in 1971, the federal government got into the same business.
10:41 Kaelyn Moore? They gave a grant to a Florida program called The Seed, which took Synanon's methods and then applied them to teenagers specifically. And these were even teenagers that hadn't actually used drugs. They were just kids whose parents suspected that they might have used drugs. And I mean, I'm sorry, but that is so many teenagers. If the bar is just teens whose parents thought they used drugs, I feel like 75% of my friend group would have been sent to The Seed. By 1974, Congress had gotten word that the program was really, really intense. So they did an investigation. And the committee found that The Seed used methods, quote, "similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans."
11:23 Kaelyn Moore? And then they let this program keep going after that. The seed got rebranded as Straight Incorporated, which Nancy Reagan would later declare her favorite anti-drug program. And this closed in 1993, but it did spawn a whole new generation of successors that are still open today. And this is the very messed up world that a lawn school was born into. So in 1970, Joe Ricci, a rehab evangelist with no formal education and no clinical training, partnered with a Boston psychiatrist named Dr. Gerald Davidson and an investor named David Goldberg, who put up all the money for this. And the three of them together opened a lawn in Poland, Maine.
12:06 Kaelyn Moore? And this did start as a treatment program for adults with drug addiction issues. But within a few years, they pivoted because they saw that there was only a small pool of heroin addicts that were willing to try out the program. But there were a lot of rich families that had teenagers who they thought were using drugs or who had behavioral issues. Or, like I mentioned earlier, undiagnosed ADHD, autism, you name it. So a lawn rebranded as a, quote, therapeutic boarding school for adolescents. Kids with addiction issues, kids with behavioral issues, kids whose parents felt like they had run out of options.
12:46 Kaelyn Moore? And the price at its peak was $54,960 a year for a two-year program, sometimes longer, depending. And on the outside, this looked like a boarding school in the beautiful woods of Maine. But on the inside, it was the type of horror show that still haunts thousands of former students to this day.
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14:12 Kaelyn Moore? If you were a teenager being sent to Al-An, you usually didn't get told you were going. You would go to bed in your own room one night, and then you would wake up at 3:00 in the morning to two strangers standing over you. They were called "transporters", sometimes called "gooners". I know, I know, that word means something totally different these days. Do not share this episode with your 12-year-old son. But the gooners' whole job was to wake up other people's children, restrain them if they had to, and get them into a van by any means necessary, and then drive them up to Maine. Your parents knew that this was going to happen. They were the ones who had hired these strangers to throw you in the van. You would then be processed at the school the next day, and that's really when the horrors would start. They would take your clothes.
14:56 Kaelyn Moore? They made you shower in front of staff, not always staff of the same gender either. They took whatever was in your pockets, your bag, your wallet, and they gave you a uniform. By the end of the first day, you didn't have a single thing that was yours anymore. Then you walked into your house. And at Al-An, house meant a unit of about 55 other kids who lived together, and that's when you got your first look of daily life there. Now, the first thing you would notice is That almost no one looks like staff. It was often hard to find the adult in the room. The students ran everything. The students at a lawn were divided into a hierarchy. At the bottom was a position they called shot down. This role had no privileges. They just scrubbed floors all day.
15:41 Kaelyn Moore? And above that was a series of crews like service, kitchen, communications, business, office. At the top were the expeditors, and that was the security team. Expeditors were in charge of watching the other students. They patrolled in zones. They counted everyone every 10 minutes all day, every day. And also every night while you were sleeping. An expediter would come into your dorm room with a flashlight and lift the sheets off of you. And they did this every 10 minutes throughout the night. The reason was so that you couldn't hide clothes in your bed and escape. Every word that you wrote was read before it left the school. Every phone call you had was monitored.
16:22 Kaelyn Moore? You had four minutes to shower and you had to ask permission to talk to other students. You couldn't look out of a window. You couldn't write anything down without permission. You couldn't wear dark clothes because that's what kids who tried to escape would wear. So the school took all of the dark clothes that you owned. About 200 infractions were booked against students every day. And booked meant that another student had wrote down what you'd done. Like if you had talked out loud or if you had looked at the wrong person or maybe smiled at the wrong moment. And that person turned it into the staff. After that, a dealing crew would convene and you would stand in front of three older students who would yell at you in a kind of ritual unison about everything you had done wrong.
17:07 Kaelyn Moore? And then you would be assigned your punishment. For some infractions, the punishment was this thing they would do called a general meeting. A general meeting started with someone yelling, "House in the dining room." Then everyone would drop what they were doing and run into a single room. They would put this broomstick on the floor as a line. And the kid being punished would stand on one side of the line and everyone else would be on the other. Then a staff. Staff member would yell, "Get your feelings off." And then everyone would rush forward in five or six at a time and scream into this student's face. Anything, insults, profanity, whatever they could think of.
17:47 Kaelyn Moore? They would sometimes spit on this person and they would keep going until everyone in that house had a turn. Sometimes this lasted an hour, sometimes it would happen twice in one day. And you had no choice but to participate on either side. This was not just a spectator sport. In the 1970s, a student named Michael Wiggins was put through one of these general meetings once. And the leader told him to admit that he was a coward and a chicken. Now, he didn't want to do that, so he did say no, but apparently that was the wrong answer. Because the leader then picked up a paddle and beat Michael with it until he was bleeding. And then, Michael was forced to put on a chicken suit. He said as he was wearing this suit, there was blood pouring down his legs.
18:32 Kaelyn Moore? And it was humiliating and incredibly painful. But that was what was expected at these meetings. And general meetings weren't even the most embarrassing or violent part of a lawn. No, that was something known as the ring. The ring was essentially a boxing match. Whoever was being punished would put on boxing gloves and face a guard. The other students would form a circle around them and inside of that circle, another student would step in to fight. Each round, the person being punished would have to fight a new student. So it was impossible to win. No one had enough energy to beat every single student at the school. And the ring kept going until the kid being punished gave up.
19:15 Kaelyn Moore? And usually by that point, they were just beaten into a bloody pulp and physically could not continue. If the student being punished couldn't stand anymore, other students would hold them up so they could keep being punched. Now, there was also this one punishment called the corner. And the corner was a chair that faced a wall and you would just have to sit in it all day. You couldn't talk, you couldn't read, you couldn't listen to music. And another student sat next to you to make sure you didn't move. Now, one former student told a main newspaper in 2002 that he watched a girl stay in the corner for 57 days. Another former student described being someone in the corner for so long that their leg muscles started atrophying. A staff had to walk the kid around the room a couple
20:00 Kaelyn Moore? times a day so he wouldn't lose the ability to walk. Now, in 1980, an NBC News reporter named Robert Rogers did a segment on Elon. Word had been spreading around about the horrors of the school, and it was time someone did something about it. Joe Ricci sat down on camera for an interview, and he admitted on tape to corporal punishment being used at Elon. He explained that students administered it to each other, but here's the thing. When it's teenagers that have been labeled as troubled that are being abused, no one really cares. That interview was in 1980, and when our Reddit poster sat down to write his testimony in 2010, Elon was still open. But more people started flooding that Reddit thread with
20:45 Kaelyn Moore? their own horrible stories of being inside of the school, of being in a general meeting, of being in the ring, of having to sit in that chair. And some of the things they wrote were even more shocking than what I've told you just now. Like one poster who wrote, quote, "One girl I was close with died horribly when she ran away. When the director of my house told us of her death, she pointed to me and went off on how I would never be as good as this girl. I was worthless. I was 16. She was so much prettier, charismatic, etc. than I. Why her and not me? I am a waste of bed space, etc., etc." Now, I believe that this friend that this poster was speaking about was Dawn Burnbaum, who was a 17-year-old
21:28 Kaelyn Moore? girl that decided on March 22, 1993, that she was going to run away from the program. Dawn's body tragically was found a few days later in a snowbank in Pennsylvania. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled, and then her body was dumped in Pennsylvania not long after she had tried to escape. Male DNA that was found at the scene tied the crime to James Cruz Jr., who was an Ohio trucking company driver who was later arrested for the crime. But the school didn't close after Dawn's death, and it didn't close after the interview in 1980 either. If it had, then a 15-year-old student wouldn't have died just two years after that interview. Phil Williams was from Auburn, Maine.
22:11 Kaelyn Moore? He was 15 years old in December of 1982. His sister Pam was 12 at the time. In their childhood, their father had attacked their mom viciously with a pipe. That left their father in prison and their mother unresponsive in a nursing home for the rest of her life. Phil and Pam had been wards of the state in Maine for years. They had been moved from foster home to foster home. Phil had run into trouble with the law somewhere along the way. The specifics aren't in the public record, but after that, the state sent him to Alon School to straighten him out. On December 27th, Phil told one of the staff at Alon that he had a headache. Now, this was something that was well-known and documented about Phil. He suffered from migraines.
22:54 Kaelyn Moore? It was also believed that his bouts of aggression were tied to these migraines because they usually coincided with one another. But even though these migraines were in part the reason for the aggression that landed Phil in Alon, on December 27th, when he told staff that he was getting one, they didn't believe him. And Alon had a way of dealing with kids who claimed to be in pain. The staff thought that this was manipulation. So as a punishment for complaining, they ordered Phil into the ring. Other students at Alon that day saw what happened next, and this is what they described. "Phil was put in the boxing ring, surrounded by the rest of the house, and made to fight. New opponents stepped in every round.
23:39 Kaelyn Moore? The fighting went on and on and on, and at some point, Phil collapsed. Students watched as he turned blue and started convulsing on the floor. Eventually, staff carried him away, and he was pronounced dead the next day." The school told his family that it was a sudden aneurysm that caused this. They said that there was nothing anyone could have done, and there was no investigation any further into this. There was no autopsy beyond what was needed to- Write down the words probable brain aneurysm on the death certificate, and then the school arranged for his funeral. Phil was buried in an unmarked grave, and none of his friends were allowed to attend. Elon didn't allow students to go to each other's funerals as a rule. But there was one exception to this.
24:23 Kaelyn Moore? There was a young woman who was sent to Elon from Florida, who had been Phil's unofficial girlfriend at the school. Now, Elon had banned any kind of relationship between students, but she and Phil had managed to be something to each other anyways. And Elon did let her go to the funeral. She would try to tell the staff at the school, three decades later, what she had seen the day before Phil died. She corroborated the witness accounts of the ring. She cried through the entire interview that she gave. And then, two weeks before Maine State Police could take her formal statement on the record, she died suddenly. She was never able to give her testimony. Phil's sister Pam was 12 when she was at his funeral. She was in foster care, living separately from her brother,
25:08 Kaelyn Moore? and she was told that her brother had died of a freak medical event. She said that at her brother's funeral, she tried to crawl into his grave to stay with him, and she remembered having to be forcefully removed from the cemetery. But Pam never questioned the story that the school had told her about her brother's death. She didn't know what was actually happening inside those walls, so she had no reason to. And honestly, most people didn't know about what was going on at Elon, or they did know and just didn't care, because over the years, there would be countless attempts to publicize the horrors of that school, and none were taken seriously.
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26:31 Kaelyn Moore? To learn more about Prenuvo and get $300 off your whole body MRI, go to prenuvo.com/hsp and use code HSP. That's P-R-E-N-U-V-O dot com slash HSP. Terms and conditions apply. In the summer of 1975, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services pulled 11 children out of Alon accusing the school of physical and mental abuse. Joe Ricci called it slander and a political hoax. The state of Maine did its own investigation and found nothing. Three of the 11 children ended up back at Alon within the year, and after that, the school stayed open. Corrections Magazine published an exposé in March of 1979 titled,
27:15 Kaelyn Moore? "Alon: Does Its Bizarre Regimen Transform Troubled Youths or Abuse Them?" That same year, a congressional Subcommittee on Human Resources had a hearing called Oversight on Scared Straits, and Alon was discussed by name, but the school stayed open after that. In 1983, a documentary called Children of Darkness aired on PBS. Filmmakers had been allowed inside Alon, and they captured footage that the school was not expecting them to get, including two boys living in a dumpster outside of the facility with another boy posed as their guard. If the boys in the dumpster tried to escape, the narrator explained, the guard would be put inside instead.
27:55 Kaelyn Moore? There was also a boy that was filmed in a pink bunny suit with shackles around his ankles. He had apparently tried to run away. Even after this aired, the school stayed open. Then, in 2000, the magazine Details published a long piece by a journalist named Kevin Gray, calling Alon, quote, "among the most controversial of the nation's residential therapeutic communities." It described the abuses and practices in detail, and the school still stayed open. Then in 2001, Joe Ricci died of lung cancer, and his widow- Sharon Terry took over. In 2007, the journalist Maya Zalavitz published a feature in Mother Jones called "The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love Teen Industry."
28:38 Kaelyn Moore? And that same year, the New York State Education Department, which had been paying tuition for some of its kids to attend Al-An, sent the school a letter. The state alleged that students at Al-An were being physically restrained by other students and being deprived of sleep. The state threatened to stop paying the school. And Al-An's lawyer responded, and after that, the school still stayed open. There's reasons, though, that the school kept staying open and didn't close. And it's a tale as old as time: money at the expense of children. Al-An had a Director of Governmental Relations, this man named Bill Diamond, who happened to be a Maine state politician. Joe Ricci, while he was alive, owned the largest harness racing track in Maine, Scarborough
29:22 Kaelyn Moore? Downs, and twice, he ran for governor. Al-An was just not a school that the state of Maine particularly wanted to close, so they didn't close it. But there was another reason, too, one that's not really talked about as much. For 30 years, every story about Al-An came through someone else. It was through a journalist's reporting, or through a state investigator's report. Sometimes it was through a court witness's testimony in someone else's trial. The survivors themselves, the actual students who had been there, almost never got to tell their own stories on their own terms to the people who actually needed to hear them. But that started to change slowly in the mid-2000s.
30:07 Kaelyn Moore? With the introduction of the Internet, people were able to connect who previously weren't able to. A small group of former students started finding each other online. Mark Babbitts, from Chicago, who had been sent to Al-An as a ward of the state of Illinois back in the 70s; a woman named Sharon McCarthy in Illinois, who said that she had been sexually assaulted on a school outing while she was at Al-An in 1984; there was Matt Hoffman in Virginia, who had been at Al-An from 1974 to 1976; and there was a New York writer who went by Kornachen. Around 2008, McCarthy started a Facebook group called the Al-An Survivors Group. By 2010, it had a few hundred members. The group then built a website. They started writing blog posts.
30:49 Kaelyn Moore? They posted in obscure forums where almost no one read them. For two or three years, they organized in plain sight and almost nothing came of it. But then, in November of 2010, that post showed up on Reddit. And it threw gasoline on the grassroots online movement that the others were starting. And now, the stories being told about Al-An were being told in raw, first-person, unedited form on a platform where you could just keep scrolling and hear more. After that first post, other former Al-An students started showing up in the replies. And then more, and even more after that. And by the end of the first week, the thread had hundreds of comments.
31:31 Kaelyn Moore? Some of them were from people who had been trying to talk about Al-An since the 80s. They had written letters, they had called reporters, they had posted in those obscure forums in the early 2000s that nobody read. And now, suddenly, they were all in one place. All of these people were comparing notes, naming the same staff members, describing the same rings, the same corner, those same general meetings. And a lot of them used the same phrase that I kept seeing over and over again as I was going through this thread. But they would all say, quote, "I thought I was the only one." The pre-existing core organizers that I talked about earlier, Babbitts, McCarthy, Hoffman, and Kornachin, they all saw what was happening and they threw their weight behind it.
32:13 Kaelyn Moore? The Al-An Survivors Group on Facebook went from a few hundred members to several hundred more in a matter of months. Mark Babbitts drove out to the abandoned Parson Field campus, which was the maximum security wing that Al-An had stopped using in the 80s, and he photographed the basement. In there, he found a cell, like a literal locked cell, with a coat hook on the wall and a deadbolt installed from the inside, designed to keep the occupant from escaping. He took this picture of graffiti that was scrawled on the wall of an isolation room on the top floor, and it read, quote, "Alon don't like people to have families, so they send them to group homes and keep them here for three years." A woman named Mary O'Brien posted drawings that she had made of her experiences inside of Alon,
32:58 Kaelyn Moore? pictures of the general meetings and the ring, and these started spreading all around the network. And the website that the survivors had built, Alon School's Record of Atrocities, started climbing in the Google rankings. By early 2011, if you were a parent Googling "Alon School" because you wanted to send your kid there, the first thing you saw wasn't the school's marketing brochure anymore. It was survivor testimony. For 41 years, Alon had controlled what parents saw. They held on to the facade that this was a therapeutic school, and they worked really hard to make sure that these real stories from insiders did not get out. But the internet finally democratized this storytelling, and Reddit provided a place for all of the stories to be told at once on one big thread.
33:43 Kaelyn Moore? The more voices that were added to this thread, the more viral it went and the higher it climbed on Google rankings. And within a few months, parents were pulling their children from the school. On March 23rd, 2011, that's less than five months after the original post, Sharon Terry, who was the current director of Alon, sat down to write a letter. The letter went to the Lewiston Sun Journal, the local newspaper that had been covering Alon for 40 years, and it announced that the school was going to be closing on April 1st. In this letter, she didn't admit to anything. Actually, she denied everything. The letter described the survivor campaign as, quote, "harsh and false attacks, spread over the internet with the avowed purpose
34:27 Kaelyn Moore? of forcing the school to close." And specifically, it named an accuser. Sharon Terry's letter pointed directly at the original Reddit user, a person who she had never met, whose real name she did not even know, and she identified them as being the person whose testimony Alon had been unable to survive. For the first time in the school's history, the institution was acknowledging on the record that one survivor's voice had broken something it had spent four decades protecting. She announced that the school was closing because enrollment had declined so much due to people seeing the truth of the school. There was no celebration in any state office in Augusta when this happened.
35:11 Kaelyn Moore? There was no statement from the governor. There was no criminal charge against anyone involved. And there was no acknowledgement of the students who had died there, like Phil Williams or Don Burnbaum. There was no formal acknowledgement that anything bad had happened there at all. The school just silently closed its doors. And the buildings then sat there, empty for 13 years. That is until 2024, when it started burning down. On November 17th, 2024, a building on the old Alon campus caught fire. It burned to the ground. On March 1st, 2025, another fire burned another building down. And on March 7th, 2025, six days later,
35:54 Kaelyn Moore? a third fire burned another building to the ground. The Maine State Fire Marshal's Office announced that all three of these fires were intentionally set by teen boys. And maybe there is something a little poetic about a new generation of teen boys burning down a school that destroyed the teenagers of their parents' generation. But this did mark a final chapter of the school. Cam Newell, whose brother Phil died inside of the school, was also partially able to close that chapter of her life. She eventually did learn what truly happened to Phil after survivor Mark Babbitts told her about it in 2016. That year, she was also able to raise enough money to finally get her brother a headstone. The closure of the school is really a suture
36:38 Kaelyn Moore? on an otherwise open and unhealing wound, though. That same year, Mark Babbitts tried to put together a $50 million civil suit, something to pay the victims back for what had been stolen from them. Sure, the school was closed, but the pain would linger for the rest of the victims' lives. He went to the Maine State Police with witness statements and a copy of Phil Williams' death certificate. And sadly, the Attorney General's Office found that there was, quote, insufficient evidence, and the case was ultimately closed. The troubled teen industry is still around, and it's still claiming lives. Sometimes it looks like a boarding school, but other times it looks like a wilderness camp. In one of my earliest episodes of Heart Starts Pounding, actually, I interviewed a young woman who had been in the troubled teen industry for almost four years. I highly recommend you listen to
37:22 Kaelyn Moore? her story in her own words in that episode. My jaw was on the floor the entire time we were speaking. The internet can be a force for good, but there is a long, long way to go when it comes to this industry. And if you're interested in helping, you can look into programs like Breaking Code Silence for more resources. And hopefully, at the end of all of this, more victims can feel empowered to come forward, because really, that's where the change comes from. Victims being able to tell their stories in their own words, and for us to feel the impact of that. That is all I have for you today. This was a wild episode to get into. Have you guys been affected by the troubled teen industry? You or any of your loved ones ever been sent there? Please let me know in the
38:07 Kaelyn Moore? comments wherever you listen to episodes. I'm always, always, always interested in hearing your stories. You can join me here next week for another episode. And until then, stay curious.
38:22 Kaelyn Moore? Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is June O'Hobbs. Sound design and mix by Red Room Creative. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, and the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? You can submit on the forum on our site, heartstarts pounding dot com.
38:42 Kaelyn Moore? Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heart starts pounding. Well, whatever you do, stay curious.
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