Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of women and their "illegitimate" children passed through the Home, a place run by the Bon Secours nuns.

The women were able to continue their normal lives after paying a penance of indentured servitude. And they didn't always take their children with them. The dead children were piled in a septic tank, and they didn't have gravestones or coffins, the Washington Post noted.

The Home was shut and torn down. In its place, there's now a housing development and a children's playground.

"The bones are still there," said Catherine Corless, a local historian. "The children who died in the Home, this was them. When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely. Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of rape."

Many of the children died because of malnutrition and neglect. But measles, TB, pneumonia, convulsions and gastroenteritis also affected them. The deaths were high for infants.

"If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I'm still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank]," Corless said. "Couldn't they have afforded baby coffins?"

Home Babies, as the children were called, were segregated and treated differently than other children. A local said that by "school age" they were gone. They were "either adopted or dead."

The nuns even used the Home Babies as part of punishment.

"If you acted up in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies," Corless said.

One of Corless' regrets is playing a cruel joke on a Home Baby by giving her a tiny stone in a candy wrapper.

"I thought it was funny at the time. ... Years after, I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them."

That's why she started looking for answers and investigating the Home.