Hey beautiful souls, it’s Lilpirahna …
By the time I got out, I knew one thing for sure… if we didn’t tell the truth about Hephzibah House, the same walls that trapped us would swallow more girls whole. For years, this place had hidden behind a church steeple and a good reputation. But the cracks started to show, and once they did, the world couldn’t unsee them.
The First Ripples
At first, survivor stories only lived as whispers, quiet phone calls between former residents, emails passed like secrets, the occasional blog post that got ignored by people who didn’t want to believe “a Christian home” could do something wrong.
Sites like hephzibah-girls.blogspot.com started to fill with testimonies, scanned news clippings, and memories that made my stomach turn because I knew they were real. Survivors found each other in online groups and realized our experiences matched, down to the same punishments, the same rooms, the same people.
Local Eyes Start to Turn
In the early 1990s, the custody battles I told you about in Episode 2 brought Hephzibah into local headlines for the first time. But after that, the coverage went quiet again. Years later, a few small-town reporters started digging deeper… and every time they printed a quote from one of us, it chipped away at that shiny image the leadership had worked so hard to keep.
It wasn’t enough yet, but it was something.
Taking It to the Streets
By the 2010s, girls weren’t just talking online, they started showing up. Survivors and allies stood outside the gates in Warsaw with signs: “We Believe Survivors”, “Shut Down Hephzibah House”, “No More Girls.” but that still wasn’t enough for girls like me who were trapped inside
CNN Breaks the Silence
Then came 2011. Anderson Cooper 360 aired “Ungodly Discipline,” a segment about abuse in religious boarding schools — and Hephzibah House was right there in the spotlight. I’ll never forget watching it and hearing the name of the place where I’d been locked away.
You can still read the transcript here or watch it here. For the first time, our stories were on national TV, our faces and words reaching people who’d never even heard of Warsaw, Indiana.
Building the Archive
From there, Unsilenced stepped in, creating a living archive: program documents, old staff lists, policy manuals, court records, and hundreds of survivor testimonies.
If someone wanted to learn the truth about Hephzibah House, they no longer had to take our word for it, they could see the receipts.
The Pressure Mounts
Between local coverage, survivor blogs, protests, and national media, the pressure grew. WNDU’s 2020 investigation (read it here) aired interviews with former residents describing the abuse in detail. TikToks started going viral. The story was no longer containable.
March 29, 2020: Closure
Then came the day I didn’t think I’d see: InkFreeNews reported that Hephzibah House had “ceased operations.”
Their official spin was that they were “transitioning” the property for a new purpose, but for us, it meant no more girls would be locked inside. No more “protein drink” punishments. No more Blue Room paddlings. No more humiliations disguised as “godly discipline.”
Why I Keep Talking
Shutting the doors didn’t erase what happened. There are rumors of it reopenning. It didn’t bring accountability for the people who ran it, and it didn’t change the Indiana laws that let religious-run residential programs operate without real oversight.
That’s why I keep writing these chapters. That’s why we still show up at protests and share our stories online. Hephzibah House is gone, but the system that allowed it to exist still breathes , and it’s not done until that system is gone too.
