This article contains mentions of sexual assault, violence, and death.
When trying to answer the question of what was the saddest episode of Little House on the Prairie, there are a lot of options that pop up. The show had a lot of dark and sad episodes that sometimes seemed out of place in a show that was normally as wholesome as the tales of the Ingalls family. Little House on the Prairie premiered in 1974, an American historical drama series based on the children's novels written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The books were based on her childhood in the American Midwest in the late 1800s. However, for a TV show based on children's novels, Little House never feared going dark.
The main story was about a good, pure family led by Charles Ingalls (I Was A Teenage Werewolf's Michael Landon), someone who raised his family to be God-fearing and well-meaning. However, through the nine seasons, the show veered into the realm of darkness more than once. There were murderers, rapists, children's deaths, and addiction issues all on display, and no one was safe from these dark themes. The Ingalls' kids themselves were abducted. A fire accidentally caused by one of the show's heroes killed an infant. There was even a moment when a pregnant teenager was murdered in front of her father. The saddest episodes of Little House on the Prairie were as dark as coal.
10 Chicago
Season 8, Episode 8
Charles rushes off to Chicago to visit with his old friend Mr. Edwards following the mysterious death of his eldest son, John. At first, the death is attributed to a terrible accident caused when John was hit by a wagon on a rainy night. But further investigation reveals that may not be the case. The entire episode looked nothing like Little House on the Prairie. Instead, it plays out like a noir crime drama.
Charles and Edwards play the role of detectives, exploring the dark and rainy city and interviewing various shady characters. Over time, the duo soon learns John Jr. may have been murdered with the accident being staged to cover up the crime. Like the best Noir stories. John Jr. was a newspaper reporter investigating business corruption and was about to go public with his findings when he died. Thankfully, a young street urchin identified the man who killed John and helped bring him to justice.
9 Gold Country
Season 3, Episodes 21-22
Tough times have fallen upon the residents of Walnut Grove when heavy rain destroys all the crops. Money is tight and people are leaving town to find work. The Ingalls and the Edwards family travel to California in an attempt to strike gold. The families set up shop in a type of tent city next to a river where the men spend the day panning for gold.
Violence surrounds the camp at every turn. The father of a neighboring family is shot dead while a desperate man digs up the grave of an elderly woman after learning she was buried with gold. The most tragic thing about the episode is seeing Charles and Mr. Edwards motivated by greed and the urge to strike it rich. This makes it a very dark episode, as Laura visits a man who explains how this happens to everyone who searches for gold, and it isn't until Charles and Mr. Edwards realize their families make them rich inside that they leave their gold dreams behind and return home.
8 A Matter Of Faith
Season 2, Episode 15
Caroline stays home alone to bake pies for a church function while Charles and the girls go away for the weekend. While baking, Caroline begins to feel unwell. She suffers from dizzy spells and begins to hallucinate. Eventually, Caroline discovers the cause of her illness is a cut on her leg that has become infected. She reads the Bible for comfort and finally realizes she will have to open the wound herself or risk death.
She heats a knife on the stove and (thankfully) the scene cuts away as Caroline is about to drain the infection. When Charles finds her she is near death, but it appears her amateur surgery skills saved her life. It isn't as dark since Caroline at least lives in this episode, whereas the saddest episodes of Little House on the Prairie often see a tragedy befall someone.
7 A Faraway Cry
Season 8, Episode 20
This sad episode of Little House on the Prairie takes the action out of Walnut Grove and to a mining camp. Caroline receives a letter from an old friend who finds herself sick and pregnant, so she travels to an influenza-ridden mining camp with Dr. Baker. This remains one of the saddest episodes of Little House on the Prairie, as the woman dies and her own husband barely sheds a tear. The woman asks Caroline to make sure her baby finds a good home.
Since the woman's husband wanted nothing to do with the child, Caroline decided to uphold her friend's wishes and gives the child to a loving couple. This is one of several episodes of Little House on the Prairie that dealt with preeclampsia and other pregnancy-related illnesses that existed in the 1800s. With the abuse the pregnant woman suffered at the hands of her husband, it was extremely dark and Caroline was smart to get that baby out of there. It had a very dark end, as another couple lost their baby at the same time and Caroline convinced Dr. Baker to give them this baby and let them think it was their own.
6 The Return Of Mr. Edwards
Season 6, Episode 8
This is the first time viewers see Mr. Edwards since Victor French left to star in his own sitcom three years earlier. The episode begins in the big woods where Mr. Edwards is now the foreman of a logging company. Not five minutes go by before a falling tree falls atop the returning character and nearly kills him. Charles and Laura travel to the Edwards' home to visit their wounded friend. The accident has left him unable to walk, and he spends all his time alone in his room.
It's a sad sight for the audience to see the once lovable Mr. Edwards reduced to an angry man who has given up on life and is contemplating suicide. Charles and Laura do everything they can to help their friend snap out of his depression, and it is only when Charles realizes that Mr. Edwards plans to take his own life that he fakes an injury to snap Edwards out of the moment. When he helps save Charles, Mr. Edwards seemed to move back to the man most viewers grew to love.
5 Rage
Season 9, Episode 4
A struggling farmer named Thomas Stark (Robert Loggia) slowly loses his grip on reality after being denied a loan. He goes bankrupt and completely snaps. Thomas kills his wife and daughter - and all of this takes place within the first act of the episode with more violence on the way. After Thomas goes on the run, he ends up in the Wilder home, where he thinks Laura and Jenny are his wife and daughter. He holds them at gunpoint and threatens to kill them again.
It is a terrible predicament and one that Little House on the Prairie has used more than once. A broken parent ends up coming into the Ingalls family's lives and ends up dragging them into his pit of despair. This also isn't the first time that Laura was mistaken for a person's lost loved one (her friend Ellen's mother abducted Laura as a child, thinking she was her dead daughter). This was more dangerous, and Laura and Jenny had to figure out how to escape.
4 Home Again
Season 9, Episodes 16-17
While living in the big city, Albert falls in with the wrong crowd and has multiple run-ins with the police. At his wit's end, Charles brings his once straight-laced son back to Walnut Grove in hopes a return to the country will do the boy some good. Eventually, Charles discovers Albert is addicted to morphine and the potent drug is the cause of all the trouble. With the help of his patient father, Albert is able to kick his habit but not before going through a violent detox, complete with hallucinations, seizures, and vomit. This brought the dangerous world of drug addiction to Little House on the Prairie, delivering its harshest life lesson.
3 My Ellen
Season 4, Episode 3
Laura and Mary Ingalls go skinny-dipping in the lake with a friend named Ellen. However, when some boys show up to look, they hide underwater until they are gone. Sadly, while Laura and Mary come up, Ellen never does, drowning under the water. Ellen's mother blames Laura for her daughter's death since she was the one who invited her to go swimming. Feeling guilty about it and missing her friend, Laura decides to visit the woman and bring her flowers. That is where the episode gets really dark.
Depressed and unstable, the woman mistakes Laura for her dead daughter, Ellen. She lures the trusting girl into her basement and locks her inside. Charles frantically searches for his child while the grief-stricken woman prepares a birthday cake she intends to give to Laura who she now thinks of as her dead daughter Ellen. With Laura trapped in the cellar and no one knowing what happened to her, the episode switches between the panic of Laura's family and the breakdown of a mother who lost her daughter.
2 Sylvia
Season 7, Episodes 17-18
A man wearing a mime mask brutally attacks and rapes a 16-year-old girl named Sylvia. After discovering the teen is pregnant, her ashamed father plans for them to leave Walnut Grove to avoid the looks and whispers from the townsfolk. To complicate matters Albert and Sylvia have fallen in love, much to the dismay of their parents. The teens decide to elope, but little do they know Sylvia's attacker is hot on their trail and won't let them go so easily.
When it comes to what was the saddest episode of Little House on the Prairie, this two-part episode remains one of the darkest stories on the show. Having an actual rape and pregnancy was a lot for Little House on the Prairie and these two episodes never pulled punches. From Mrs. Oleson spreading rumors about the young girl, claiming Albert is the father to her own father blaming her for the rape, this really hit hard. It got even darker when they found out who the rapist was and Sylvia didn't survive the final encounter, dying while pregnant in front of Albert and her own father.
1 May We Make Them Proud
Season 6, Episodes 18-19
Perhaps the most shocking episode of the series, "May We Make Them Proud" featured the deaths of long-time cast member Alice Garvey and Mary's baby boy, who both perished in a fire at the school for the blind. Shortly after the fire, the Ingalls' adopted son Albert runs away after it is revealed the cause of the blaze was a pipe that he and a friend were smoking in the basement.
Charles, along with Alice's widowed husband Jonathan, goes searching for the guilt-ridden boy with hopes of convincing him to return home. The death of Mary's baby and the moment Albert's life took a dark turn makes these two of the saddest episodes of Little House on the Prairie, guaranteed to make a person cry.