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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TRANSCRIPT
Today, I want to tell you a story about a person who sat down at their computer to write a post on reddit, and ended up taking down one of the most violent and horrific troubled teen schools as a result.
In November of 2010, a post popped up on reddit that now lives in infamy.
It was posted in the subreddit r/Self by a user Gzasmyhero, who has since deleted their account. And the title just read:
“Even skimming this post once will blow your mind, most probably think thats its made up but you would be dead wrong”
Gzas went on to explain that he was sent to a place known as The Elan school in 1998 when he was just 16 years old. He said the school was still open, 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 “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, in fact, not the case. Here’s some of what they wrote;
The "school" accepted anyone and then held them as long as they possibly could depending on the age of the child. If you were sent at 14 years old, as many were, you may have been looking at 3-4 years locked inside. This is because The Elan 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 "progress" in the program.
At Elan 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 3 others. So even the children who "followed the rules" were forced to fight: in the name of "good".
Children who tried to rebel or be free-thinking were thrown into 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 around 7am.
All outgoing 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 hang-up 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 8 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 am 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 to give the full impact of what Elan truly was.
The most important thing that anyone can do is to 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 Elan students is reason enough to take this post seriously.
Please”
The post also explained that the “school” part of the school was essentially nothing. Kids would do school from 7pm-11pm, and most of their teachers were not actual teachers, they were just other people who had graduated from the school.
But they ended their post with a powerful message:
“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 #1 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. Elan 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 we have heard something about it by this point? How could this possibly be legal?
Well, what this poster maybe didn’t know is that journalists had been trying to expose Elan 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 themself.
None of the journalists were able to do what this reddit post was about to.
Now, I think people these days are a little bit more familiar with the “troubled teen industry” than ever before. Paris Hilton had a documentary about her time at one of these schools, and the Netflix show Wayward was a fictionalized version based on a true story. I personally kind of hate the phrase Troubled Teen school, 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 fit neatly and quietly into society. But there’s a long and sordid history to these places….
The Élan School specifically was located in Maine. It sat on thirty-three acres of woods on the shore of a lake called Upper Range Pond, in a town called Poland about thirty 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 the least morbid thing about this place.
In 1970, a man named Joe Ricci bought the building. And to understand how Élan 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 eighteen years old, growing up in a working-class town outside New York City, and he'd been using heroin for years. That spring, he and some friends got caught robbing a U.S. 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. That’s how he wound up at a place in Connecticut called Daytop Village.
Daytop was something new at the time a "therapeutic 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 modeled on a Santa Monica program called Synanon, which had started in 1958 and was, to put it mildly, a cult.
Synanon had this thing they called "the Game." I believe we talked about it briefly when Amanda Montell and I did the reddit episode about cult stories, but a quick reminder. You would sit in a circle with other addicts, and the group would, essentially verbally attack you. They'd find your weakest point childhood trauma, body image, anything and they'd just hammer 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, you'd stop using drugs or alcohol because there'd be nothing left of the old you to feed the addiction.
Studies later found that about ten to fifteen percent of people who went through it actually got sober. But those people may have just gotten sober on their own, The rest actually got worse. Some came out unable to function. But the ones who did get sober they tended to be evangelists about the program.
Joe Ricci was one of the people who came out sober.
He left Daytop a believer. And in 1971, the federal government got into the same business. They gave a grant to a Florida program called The Seed, which took Synanon's methods and applied them to teenagers. Even teenagers who hadn't actually used drugs just kids whose parents suspected them.
And I mean, I’m sorry but that’s 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 investigated. The committee found that The Seed used methods "similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans." Then they let it keep going. The Seed got rebranded as Straight Inc., which Nancy Reagan would later declare her favorite anti-drug program. Straight closed in 1993 but it spawned a whole generation of successors that are still open today.
This is the messed up world that Élan was born into.
So In 1970, Joe Ricci a rehab evangelist with no formal education or clinical training partnered with a Boston psychiatrist named Dr. Gerald Davidson, And an investor named David Goldberg, who put up the money. The three of them opened Élan in Poland, Maine.
It started as a treatment program for adult drug addicts. But Within a few years, they pivoted. Because they saw that there was 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, undiagnosed ADHD, you name it.
So Élan rebranded as a “therapeutic boarding school” for adolescents kids with addiction issues, kids with behavioral problems, kids whose parents felt like they had run out of options.
The price, at peak, was $54,960 a year. For two-year programs, sometimes longer.
On the outside, it was just A boarding school in the beautiful Maine woods.
But on the inside, it was the type of horrors that still haunt thousands of former students to this day
If you were a teenager being sent to Élan, you usually didn't get told you were going. You'd go to bed in your own room one night, and you'd wake up at three 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, don’t share this with your 12 year old sons.
The gooners' whole job was to wake up other people's children, restrain them if they had to, get them into a van by any means necessary, and drive them to Maine. Your parents knew this was going to happen. They were the ones who hired the strangers to throw you in the van.
You'd be processed at the school the next day. And that’s really when the horrors would start. They took your clothes. 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. They gave you a uniform. By the end of the first day, you didn't have anything that was yours anymore.
Then you walked into your house and at Élan, "house" meant a unit of about fifty-five other kids who lived together and you got your first look at daily life there.
The first thing you'd notice was that almost nobody looked like staff. It was often hard to find the adult in the room. The students were running everything.
The students at Élan were divided into a hierarchy. At the bottom was a position called Shotdown this role had no privileges, they just scrubbed floors all day. Above that was a series of crews Service, Kitchen, Communications, Business Office. At the top was Expediters, which was the security team.
Expediters watched the other students. They patrolled in zones. They counted everyone every ten minutes all day, every day. And every night, while you were sleeping, an expediter would come into your dorm with a flashlight and lift the sheets off you. They did this every ten minutes through the night. The reason was so you couldn't hide clothes in your bed in case you tried to run.
Every word you wrote was read before it left the school. Every phone call was monitored. You had four minutes to shower. You had to ask permission to talk to other students. You couldn't look out a window. You couldn't write anything down without permission. You couldn't wear dark clothes that's what kids who tried to escape had worn so the school took your dark clothes too.
About two hundred infractions were "booked" against students every day. Booked meant another student wrote down what you'd done talked too loud, looked at the wrong person, smiled at the wrong moment and turned it in. Then a "dealing crew" would convene. You'd stand in front of three older students who'd yell at you in a kind of ritual unison about everything you'd done wrong. Then you'd be assigned a punishment.
For some infractions, the punishment was a General Meeting.
A General Meeting started with someone yelling "House in the dining room!" Everyone fifty-five kids, sometimes a hundred and fifty if it was a three-house meeting would drop what they were doing and run to a single room. They'd put a broomstick on the floor as a line. The kid being punished would stand on one side of the line. Everyone else would be on the other.
A staff member would yell, "Get your feelings off!"
Then everyone would rush forward, five or six at a time, and scream into the kid's face. Insults. Profanity. Whatever they could think of. They’d spit on the person. They'd keep going until everyone in the house had had a turn. It could last an hour. Sometimes it happened twice in a day.
And you had no choice but to participate. This was not just a spectator sport. In the 70’s, a student named Michael Wiggins was put through a General Meeting once. “Admit you’re a coward and a chicken” the leader told him. He didn’t want to though, so he said no. That was the wrong answer
The leader then picked up a paddle and beat Michael with it until he was bleeding, then, Michael was forced to put on a chicken suit. He said as he was wearing the suit there was blood pouring down his legs. It was humiliating and painful.
And General meetings weren’t even the most embarrassing or violent part of Elan. Now, that was the Ring.
The Ring was essentially a boxing match. Whoever was being punished would put on sixteen-ounce boxing gloves and a face guard. The other students would form a circle around them. Inside the circle, another student would step in to fight. Each round, the victim would have to fight a new student, so it was impossible to win. No one had enough energy to beat every teen at the school. The Ring kept going until the kid being punished gave up, and usually by that time they were beaten into a bloody pulp.
If the kid being punished couldn't stand anymore, other students would hold them up so they could keep being punched.
There was also a punishment called the corner
The Corner was a chair. Facing a wall. You sat in it all day. You couldn't talk. You couldn't read. You couldn't listen to music. Another student sat next to you to make sure you didn't move.
One former student told a Maine newspaper in 2002 that he'd watched a girl stay in the Corner for fifty-seven days. Another former student described someone in the Corner so long their leg muscles started atrophying staff had to walk the kid around the room a few times a day so he wouldn't lose the ability to walk.
In 1980, an NBC News reporter named Robert Rogers did a segment on Élan. Word was spreading around about the horrors of the school, and it was time someone did something about it. Joe Ricci sat down for an on-camera interview. He admitted, on tape, to corporal punishment being used at Elan. He explained that students administered it to each other.
But here’s the thing when it’s teens that have been labeled as “troubled” being abused. No one really cared. That interview was in 1980. And when Our Reddit poster sat down to write his testimony in 2011, Elan was still open.
More people started flooding the Reddit thread with their own horrible stories of being inside of the school. Some of them were shocking, like one poster who wrote
“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.”
I believe the friend she was speaking about was Dawn Birnbaum. A 17 year old girl that decided on March 22nd, 1993, she was going to run away from the program.
Dawn’s body 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 less than 12 hours after she had died. Male DNA found at the scene tied the crime to James Cruz jr, an Ohio trucking company driver who was later arrested for the crime.
But the school didn’t close after that, and it didn’t close after the interview in 1980. And if it had, then a 15 year old student wouldn’t have died just two years later.
Phil Williams was from Auburn, Maine. He was fifteen years old in December of 1982. His sister Pam was twelve.
Their father had attacked their mom viciously with a pipe in their childhood. This 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 of Maine for years. They'd 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 the state sent him to Élan to straighten out.
On December 27th, Phil told one of the staff at Élan that he had a headache. This was something that was well known and documented about Phil, he suffered from migraines. 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 that phil was at Elan, on december 27th when he told staff he was getting one, they didn’t believe him.
Élan had a way of dealing with kids who claimed to be in pain. They thought it was manipulation. Faking. So as punishment for "complaining," they ordered Phil into the Ring.
Other students at Élan that day saw what happened next. In 2016 when Maine State Police finally interviewed those witnesses, three decades after Phil's death 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 each round. The fighting went on. At some point, he collapsed. He turned blue. He started convulsing on the floor. Staff carried him away.
He died the next day.
The school told the family it was a sudden aneurysm. They said there was nothing anyone could've done. There was no investigation. There was no autopsy beyond what was needed to write down the words "probable brain aneurysm." The school made the arrangements.
Phil was buried in an unmarked grave
Élan did not allow students to attend each other's funerals as a rule. But they made one exception. There was a girl a young woman, really, sent to Élan from Florida who had been Phil's unofficial girlfriend at the school. Élan had, of course, banned any kind of relationship between students. But she and Phil had managed to be something to each other anyway. Élan 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 he died. She'd corroborate the witness accounts of the Ring. She'd cry through the whole interview. 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 twelve at the funeral. She was in foster care, living separately from her brother, and she was told her brother had died of a freak medical event. She said at the funeral, she tried to crawl into Phils grave to stay with him. 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 about what was actually happening at the school, so she had no reason to.
Honestly, most people didn’t know about what was going on at the school. Or they did and they didn’t care. Because over the years, there would be countless attempts to publicize the horrors of Elan, and none were taken seriously.
In the summer of 1975, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services pulled eleven children out of Élan, 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 eleven children ended up back at Élan within the year.
The school stayed open.
Corrections Magazine published an exposé in March of 1979, titled "Elan: Does Its Bizarre Regimen Transform Troubled Youths, or Abuse Them?" That same year, a Congressional subcommittee on Human Resources held a hearing called "Oversight on Scared Straight," and Élan was discussed by name.
But the school stayed open.
In 1983, a documentary called Children of Darkness aired on PBS. Filmmakers had been allowed inside Élan, and they'd captured footage Élan didn't expect them to capture including two boys living in a dumpster outside the facility, with another boy posted as their guard. If the boys in the dumpster tried to escape, the narrator explains, the guard would be put inside instead. There was also a boy filmed in a pink bunny suit with shackles around his ankles. He had tried to run.
Still, the school stayed open.
In 2000, the magazine Details published a long piece by a journalist named Kevin Gray, calling Élan "among the most controversial of the nation's residential therapeutic communities." It described the practices in detail.
The school stayed open.
In 2001, Joe Ricci died of lung cancer. His widow, Sharon Terry, took over.
In 2007, the journalist Maia Szalavitz published a feature in Mother Jones called "The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love Teen Industry." That same year, the New York State Education Department, which had been paying tuition for some of its kids to attend Élan, sent the school a letter. The state alleged that students at Élan were being physically restrained by other students and being deprived of sleep. The state threatened to stop paying. Élan's lawyer responded.
The school stayed open.
There's a reason it kept staying open. It's a tale as old as time. Money, at the expense of children. Élan had a Director of Governmental Relations a 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 Downs. He twice ran for governor. Élan was not a school the state of Maine particularly wanted to close. So Maine didn't.
But there's another reason too one that doesn't get talked about as much. For thirty years, every story about Élan came through somebody else. Through a journalist's reporting. Through a state investigator's report. Through a court witness's testimony in somebody else's trial. The survivors themselves the actual children who'd actually been there almost never got to tell their own stories, on their own terms, to the people who actually needed to hear them.
That started to change, slowly, in the mid-2000s.
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 Babitz from Chicago, who had been sent to Élan as a ward of the state of Illinois back in the seventies. A woman named Sharon McCarthy in Illinois who said she'd been sexually assaulted on a school outing while she was at Élan in 1984. Matt Hoffman in Virginia, who'd been at Élan from '74 to '76. A New York writer who went by Kernochan.
Around 2008, McCarthy started a Facebook group called the Elan Survivors Group. By 2010, it had a few hundred members. The group then built a website. They started writing blog posts. They posted in obscure forums where almost nobody read them. For two or three years, they organized in plain sight, and almost nothing came of it.
And then, in November of 2010, that post showed up on Reddit. And it threw gasoline on the grassroots, online movement the others were starting.
For decades, Élan stories had been told by professionals journalists summarizing them into articles, investigators reducing them to bullet points, lawyers carving them up for trial. Now they were being told in raw, first-person, unedited form, on a platform where you could just keep scrolling and hear another one.
After Gzasmyhero's post, other former Élan students started showing up in the replies. Then more. Then more. By the end of the first week, the thread had hundreds of comments. Some of them were from people who had been trying to talk about Élan since the eighties. They'd written letters and called reporters. They'd posted in those obscure forums in the early 2000s that nobody read. Now, suddenly, they were all in one place comparing notes, naming the same staff members, describing the same Rings, the same Corner, the same General Meetings.
A lot of them used the same phrase, independent of each other: "I thought I was the only one."
The pre-existing core organizers Babitz, McCarthy, Hoffman, Kernochan saw what was happening and threw their weight behind it. The Elan Survivors Group on Facebook went from a few hundred members to several hundred more in a matter of months. Mark Babitz drove out to the abandoned Parsonsfield campus, the maximum-security wing Élan had stopped using in the eighties, and photographed the basement. He found a cell a literal, locked cell with a coat hook on the wall and a deadbolt installed on the inside, designed to keep the occupant from escaping. He photographed graffiti scrawled on the wall of an isolation room on the top floor. It read: "Elan dont like peaple to have familys so they send them to group homes and keep them her for three years."
A woman named Mary O'Brien posted drawings she'd made of her experiences inside Élan pictures of the General Meetings, the Ring. They spread through the network.
The website the survivors had built Elan School's Record of Atrocities started climbing Google rankings. By early 2011, if you were a parent looking up "Elan School" because you were considering sending your kid there, the first thing you saw wasn't the school's marketing brochure anymore. It was survivor testimony.
For forty-one years, Élan had controlled what parents saw. They held onto the facade that it was a therapeutic school, and they worked hard to make sure the real stories from inside didn’t get out.
But the internet finally democratized the storytelling, and Reddit provided a place for all of the stories to be told at once, on one big thread. The more voices that were added to that thread, the more viral it went, the higher it climbed on the google rankings, and within a few months, parents were pulling their children from the school.
On March 23, 2011 less than five months after Gzasmyhero's post went live Sharon Terry, the current director of Elan, sat down to write a letter.
The letter went to the Lewiston Sun Journal, the local newspaper that had been covering Élan for forty years.
It announced that the school would close on April 1.
In t his letter, she didn't admit to anything. Actually, she denied everything. The letter described the survivor campaign as "harsh and false attacks" spread over the internet with "the avowed purpose of forcing the school to close."
And specifically, It named an accuser.
Sharon Terry's letter pointed directly at the Reddit user Gzasmyhero a person she had never met, whose real name she did not know and identified them as the person whose testimony Élan 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 just announced that the school was closing because enrollment had declined so much.
There was no celebration in any state office in Augusta. There was no statement from the governor. There was no criminal charge against any operator. There was no acknowledgment of Phil Williams. There was no acknowledgment of Dawn Marie Birnbaum. There was no formal acknowledgment that anything bad had happened at all.
The school just closed.
Then the buildings sat there. Empty. For thirteen years.
Until 2024, when it started burning down.
On November 17, 2024, a building on the old Élan campus caught fire. It burned to the ground.
On March 1, 2025, another fire burned another building down.
On March 7, 2025, six days later, a third fire burned another building to the ground. The Maine State Fire Marshal's Office announced that all three were intentionally set by teen boys.
And maybe there’s something just a little poetic about a new generation of teen boys burning down a school that destroyed the teenagers of their parents generation.
But it marked a final chapter of the school.
Pam Newell, whose brother, Phil, died inside of the school, was also partially able to close that chapter of her life. She learned what truly happened to phil after survivor Mark Babitz told her what happened in 2016. That year, she was also able to raise enough money to finally get her brother a headstone.
This closure is a suture on an otherwise open and unhealing wound, though.
That same year, Mark tried to put together a fifty million dollar civil suit, something to pay the victims back for what had been stolen from them. 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, a copy of Phil William’s death certificate.
The attorney generals office found that there was “insufficient evidence” and the case was closed.
The troubled teen industry is still around, and it’s still claiming lives. Sometimes it looks like a boarding school, other times it looks like a wilderness camp. In One of my earliest episodes of Heart Starts Pounding I interviewed a young woman who had been in the troubled teen industry for almost four years, I highly recommend you listen to her story in her own words in that episode, my jaw was on the floor the whole time we spoke.
The internet can be a force for good, but there is a long, long ways to go. If you are interested in helping, you can look into programs like Breaking Code Silence for more resources. And hopefully, more victims can feel empowered to come forward.