Today on the Grape Talks, Spirits of Fernold, a conversation with Nick Graves.

The Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center has a very dark past.

Pass-shaded with sinister and unethical experimentation on developmentally disabled children.

From eugenics, defeating children, cereals laced with radioactive isotopes.

Life inside this facility was not one of rehabilitation or care that it should have been.

Today, the campus is abandoned, a quiet and lonely reminder of a time that many would rather forget.

But to the dark shadows of the past still linger in the halls of countless buildings that slowly rot away on this seemingly cursed plot of land.

Today we learn about Fernald spirits as we talk with paranormal investigator Nick Graves.

Yeah, it started up very, very early on.

It was one of the first ones in the United States.

It was originally built in Boston and then was moved to Waltham,

which is where it resides now.

It's completely abandoned, you know, just the things that they'd been over the years and stuff really caused their name to not be so good, even though they try to make positive changes later on.

But they would essentially lock up anybody that had disabilities.

And these could literally range from just coming from, you know, a poor family,

not having anybody really that wants you to take care of you or whatever,

to, you know, being blind or deaf or, you know, having mental disabilities and things of that nature.

Everybody would just,

that had these undesirable traits they would consider it, would block them up into this

place, which this place is really, at fault, I feel, for a lot of things that kind of came about

in our history, they actually helped

to pass a bill very early on that essentially they kind of went along the ideals of like eugenics

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