An investigation has started into the discovery of 32 anonymous graves at a Florida reform school after claims that orphans and tearaways were flogged and tortured to death by guards there.

Former residents of the Florida School for Boys in Marianna believe that the shallow graves, which date to the 1950s and 1960s, contain the crushed skulls and broken bones of fellow inmates, confirming that staff meted out brutal punishment to boys as young as 8 for such “crimes” as singing or eating an extra pancake for breakfast.

Former inmates say that they were dragged screaming to a whitewashed building in the grounds known as the White House, chained to a bed encrusted with the blood and flesh of previous victims and thrashed so violently with a metal and leather strap that bloodied underwear was left embedded in their raw buttocks.

“Just even the slightest frown on your face or the slightest word out of context could cause you to be sent down to the White House and be viciously beaten to the point that you would become unconscious and bleed profusely,” said Bryant Middleton, 63.

Dick Colon, 65, recalls looking through the steamed-up window of a tumble-drier in the school laundry and seeing a black boy inside, churning round and round. He has been haunted by it for the past five decades.

“That particular kid was never seen again,” said Mr Colon, who was sent to the juvenile offenders’ institution in the 1950s.

He added: “I feel guilty. I felt as though I could have walked over there and opened the door and tried to give him some help. But then what the hell was going to happen to me if I did?”

The investigation, ordered by Charlie Crist, the Governor of Florida, is expected to lead to the remains being exhumed. Most of the staff during the period in question are now elderly or dead, but “justice always cries out for a conclusion”, said Governor Crist.

“If there’s an opportunity to find out exactly what happened there, to be able to verify if there were these kinds of horrible atrocities . . . we have a duty to do so,” he said.

The reform school opened in 1900 and thousands of young offenders have passed through its doors in the past 108 years. Many of those who ended up there did so simply because they had run away from home, some to escape domestic abuse.

Roger Kiser was sent there in 1958, at the age of 12, for trying to escape from an orphanage where he had lived since he was 2. He underwent a whipping in the White House that left him mutilated.

“The men grabbed me and held me to the floor. I was yelling to God to save me, begging for someone — anyone — to help. There was blood all over everything,” he recalls. Only afterwards was he told the reason why he had been beaten.

In recent years Mr Kiser, 62, and three others tracked each other down through the internet and formed a group called the White House Boys to bring their childhood horrors to the attention of the public and hold the state accountable.

“I will never forget for as long as I will live that vicious beating that was done to me without even knowing why. I will never forget the monster I saw in the mirror that day. I will never forget what adults are capable of doing to a child,” he said. “I will never forget that the State of Florida was behind what happened to me and to many, many other boys.”

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