Six years ago, I wrote a lengthy piece about the infamous Elan School, a boarding school ostensibly meant to correct deviant behavior in "troubled teens" but instead functioned as a totalitarian cult that enabled its staff to legally terrorize and abuse thousands of children for over 40 years.
Elan closed in 2011, and the campus of the institution has sat abandoned ever since, slowly deteriorating away. I visited the campus myself in 2021 and explored the abandoned buildings. It was a surreal experience, to see rooms where I knew some of the most horrific atrocities imaginable had been perpetrated against thousands of children.
I saw rooms where I knew that sanctioned beatings of "wayward youths" had occurred, a room that I knew had been used to hold children in solitary confinement for months - the chair they were forced to sit in still facing the wall. I saw the security office where every link to the outside world was strictly controlled and monitored at a switchboard, and I saw the office where the school's founder and director, a charismatic businessman and self-made millionaire named Joe Ricci, had given interviews to media outlets in which he defended his abusive school's practices as legitimate treatment designed to "cure" the thousands of youths he systematically abused.
A few words about Joe Ricci are in order for those who are unfamiliar with him. He was an undeniable psychopath in every sense of the word; a sadistic, cruel, vindictive narcissist who thrived on inflicting pain and suffering against innocent children. He spent years crafting a charismatic, charming facade to disguise the evil monster that resided within him, and his system of legalized child abuse made him a fortune. He died in 2001 at the age of 54, never once facing accountability for his horrific crimes against innocent kids.
To this day, Joseph Ricci remains one of the most disturbing and vile characters I have ever profiled, and given the kinds of people I have profiled in this website - including rapists, serial killers, child molesters, and gang leaders - that is a VERY tall order.
I explored almost every building on the Elan campus during the two hours I was there. It was, as I said before, a surreal experience. Former survivors of Elan told me that the campus exuded what they described as an evil aura, and when I arrived at Elan I immediately felt it myself. The entire place felt menacing, like the evil that took place there had embedded itself within the very foundations of the buildings that sat there, slowly decaying away. Inside, the buildings seemed as if they had been hastily abandoned. Calendars still sat open to April of 2011, the month the school closed. Phones still sat on office desks. Assignments for individual students still remained on whiteboards and chalkboards within the school. Brochures which touted Elan's "high success rate" were still scattered around offices - brochures which had conned thousands of parents into spending $50,000 a year to send their children into an incarnation of Hell itself.
I left the Elan campus shaken. Of course, I had for years read about the atrocities that had occurred there, but it was another thing to see it for myself, to stand in a room where I knew the most awful things had been done to helpless children while the law and the public turned a blind eye for decades, to stand in a bedroom where I knew a young girl had been forcibly raped by two male students at Joe Ricci's direction as "punishment" for an infraction, to stand in a dining hall where I knew a survivor had spent 45 minutes being beaten to within an inch of his life while being screamed at, mocked, and taunted by hundreds of students at the direction of the sadistic staff who ran the hell that was Elan.
Over the past few months, a series of unsolved arson fires erupted at the abandoned Elan campus. Three buildings - all of which I had explored - were completely burned to the ground.
The building known as Elan 8, where I knew a survivor had spent three years enduring a daily living hell, burned down in November of 2024. And just last week, two more buildings erupted in flames - most infamous among them Elan 3.
Elan 3 was the campus' main building. It was where some of the worst atrocities had occurred - including the death of Phil Williams, a 15-year-old boy who had been beaten to death in a sanctioned boxing match as punishment for "backtalk". It was the most recognizable and moat infamous symbol of Elan School, and in fact is the building featured on the titlecard of my 2019 article on Elan. I had explored it in 2021 and seen for myself the room where Williams died, and where countless other teenagers like him had been subjected to unfathomable abuse under the guise of treatment
And last week that infamous symbol of inhumanity and cruelty - which had stood for 41 years - went up in flames. After over half a century, it too has joined the evil, twisted man who founded it in death.
I don't know what the future holds for what remains of the Elan campus. Even when I visited it before the fires, there wasn't much left.
It's strange to think that those buildings I spent so many years researching, and even explored myself, no longer exist. But the scars they inflicted, of course, remain. And the evil industry they represent is sadly still alive and well.
Even with Elan School long dead, and its corpse now rapidly fading into history, so many schools like Elan still exist, and still inflict untold abuse on countless children. Even today, very few regulations exist on these types of boarding schools for "troubled teens", and this has enabled a sinister industry of legalized child abuse to take hold. I mentioned this six years ago when I first wrote about Elan, and though some progress has been made in passing legislation to regulate these schools since that time, there remains so much work to be done.
The evil that is Elan will not die in the fires that have been consuming its buildings. It lives on not only in the memory of its thousands of victims, but in the countless more institutions that have sprung up in its wake. And it is high time we confront that evil head on and put an end to this horrific, abusive industry that thrives on the torture of children.