What Haunts Us

What Haunts Us is about a Charleston South Carolina private school that harbored knowingly a sexual abuser. Eddie Fidcher sexually abused boys at Porter Gaud for 40 years. They knew about it and did nothing. In 1982 he wasn't fired but was allowed to resign. He then taught at College Prep and abused more boys. Finally Guerry Glover and his dad filed a suit against Porter Gaud. The Headmaster, the Major "Maj", who knew, and who was also a pedafile shot himself. Eddie Fischer was given 20 years. Porter Gaud was fined $105 million. Guerry Glover is the hero of this story the moral of which is that it is horrible to sexually abuse children who are haunted sometimes to become suicidal. But it is as bad to ignore sexual abuse and not report it.

The previous positive reviews have expressed it very well.

Nothing new here- decades after a serial pederast assaulted multiple victims they look back on what now looks to be odd behavior by those surrounding the case. Decades ago we lived in a much more naive ,( or much less suspicious )depending on how you look at it, world than we do today. Like the Joe Paterno case, the "retrospectascope" makes everyone who was in the same city as the perp look guilty, especially if they have good insurance.

Any a baby boomer will tell you that back in the day intergenerational friendships didn't raise eyebrows , and a man walking down the beach surrounded by children didn't raise questions . So drawing a cartoon of a man walking with kids with foreboding music overlay comes off as a comic book horror look instead of actual evidence.

The problem I have with the piece is that they don't look at it thru the lease of the time , and most of the people they interview weren't there . They are women who have dolled themselves up in their "preppy best" for their 15 minutes of fame. One is an older lady who has nothing but hearsay. Another supposedly had a friend or boyfriend that allegedly confessed to her "Eddie Fisher touches me and says it's good because it will help me when I get with girls". WHAT ? ?? I was a teen before these guys, and none of us would ever have bought into such a ridiculous rational for someone to "touch " us., and if we had, we certainly never in a million years would have told a girl about it, one who would think we were an incurable idiot for not immediately leaving the second we heard it. These were regular kids, not special needs.

It reminds me of the Dr. McDonald case where he got convicted of killing his family he said hippies had done it , and his "kill the pigs acid is groovy" contention was so laughable that he ended up behind bars. Most of the on camera people are peripheral women who were not there, or a guy who had major litigation going, and once money gets into the mix it becomes difficult to discover what actually went down.

The admin and school district have been accused of not reacting appropriately, although at that time people knew less, and were much less proactive about stopping people from re offending, because they didn't know the recidivism rates yet . Fortunately, the creep that perpetuated all this is behind bars, but instead of hearing evidence we get what sounds like hearsay accounts , or victim impact statements written by lawyers.

It would have been interesting to hear from some of the actual victims , alleged victims who defended Fisher if there were any, or defense attorneys on the other side. The jury hopefully got to hear everything, and the viewer should get exposure to the same.

As the title suggests, this documentary will most definitely haunt you. It will expose you to forms of evil and treachery that you thought only existed in the movies. While Eddie Fischer, the culprit of these sexual crimes, is the primary focus of the documentary, there is an arguably even greater perpetrator at work below the surface. However, the story and subject of this documentary is handled with deserved respect and care by Paige Goldberg Tolmach, an alumni of Porter-Gaud, where these malicious acts occurred. Had this been piloted by anyone else, the quest for answers and the passion for exposing the truth to the rest of the world could have been easily omitted and left to the wayside. The interviews with the victims, accompanied by some artistically animated visuals, all help to paint this tragic picture for the masses to take in and learn from it. But beyond the feelings of sadness this documentary evokes, it also gives us hope for the survivors of these acts and appreciation for those who tried putting an end to them. Nonetheless, while this documentary is a must watch for almost any viewer of appropriate age, I strongly advise warning anyone considering watching What Haunts Us that has been a victim of sexual abuse to brace themselves for what they are about to see.

Good doc about the abuses at a school but misleading in the tagline. The suicides are glossed over and barely mentioned.