Hospital building on the former Ladd School campus in Exeter is the site of many attempted break-ins by intruders.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

EXETER — Somebody whispers. Somebody screams. Nobody is in the room with you, but somebody touches you.

The space you are standing in turns cold. Your cell phone and camera don’t work.

These are some of the experiences people who have snuck into the abandoned buildings at the former Ladd School report at sites devoted to it on the Internet.

Are these messages from the spirits of the children and adults who toiled without hope at the onetime Rhode Island School for the Feeble Minded? Or are the abandoned buildings just old and creepy, and a fertile playground for the imagination?

Whatever it is, the abandoned Ladd School complex, sitting on 331 acres in the woods near the North Kingstown line, is a magnet for curious teenagers and adults who break into the buildings hoping to experience the paranormal.

For Joseph DePina, director of the Job Corps Academy at 162 Main St. that opened on the Ladd School grounds in 2004, the ghost hunters can be a nuisance.

Coming to the grounds and poking through the buildings “is a rite of passage for many of the young people who live around here,” DePina says. Most of them, he says, come from Exeter, the University of Rhode Island in nearby South Kingstown, and other parts of South County.

“I’ve been here five years and I haven’t seen one ghost yet,” he said.

People who visit are often unaware that Job Corps, which helps students get their GED and gives them job training, is also on the grounds. Many of the curious visitors park in the school’s lot and walk over to the buildings, sometimes even asking Job Corps officials where the buildings are.

“They have an amusement park next door, and I have 200 students to look out for,” DePina says.

The first thing he tells his students is, “Stay away from the buildings.” Going next door means they will be thrown out of the program. But that, he says, doesn’t keep the older students from scaring the freshmen with ghost stories.

The Ladd School, later the Ladd Center, opened in 1907 to educate and train people with mental disabilities. Three-quarters of a century later, federal authorities ordered the state to close it after an investigation revealed deplorable conditions. Ladd residents were released to group homes and other community settings. The state abandoned the center in 1994.

The Internet has increased the place’s notoriety, says state police Capt. James Swanberg. State troopers from the Wickford barracks patrol the Ladd grounds night and day among their duties in a town that has no local police force.

Ladd is most active in summer, Swanberg says, although Halloween does draw the faithful.

The Job Corps, the state police and the state, which owns the Ladd School buildings and its property, have joined forces to try keeping ghost seekers from breaking into the abandoned buildings.

“We put up big signs that say stay out,” says Artie Jochmann, deputy chief of facilities maintenance for the state Department of Administration. “It’s not a playground; it’s dangerous inside those buildings. They haven’t been occupied in years.”

The most popular buildings for ghost hunters are the six-story hospital building, known as “the cake” for its cylindrical shape, and the morgue building next door. Visitors have pried open doors and windows and climbed rooftops to get in.

Students in the Job Corps’ welding and carpentry program spent two weeks on a community project in May to weld shut entrances to the hospital, the morgue and surrounding fences. A wall from the breezeway that leads from the hospital to the morgue was torn down and brush removed so the state police could see people trying to get in. But vandals bring tools and ladders.

Alex Perry, 18, of Warwick, a Job Corps student who worked on the welding project, said the Ladd School was a destination for Warwick kids when he was in high school.

“It was something to do on a Friday night,” he said. “So many people would come down here.”

tpina@projo.com