Supernatural Saratoga by Mason Winfield

Author:Mason Winfield [Winfield, Mason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Social Science, Folklore & Mythology, Photography, Subjects & Themes, Historical
ISBN: 9781614235231
Google: fhV_CQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2009-09-30T00:31:32+00:00

Today, most of Yaddo’s glorious gardens and grounds are open to the public year-round. If you arrive after September but before mid-May, you shouldn’t expect to see the statues uncovered, the roses blooming or the fountains beaming, but at those “off” times of year it could be, like Lily Dale, even more sublime. For all those in the world who capture orbs and EVPs at haunted buildings—surely many who take pictures here catch something. Photographer Michael Noonan was one of them. His beloved late dog Tudd took one of those hard stares into the dusky air, and Michael snapped a shot in that direction. When it was developed, a curious, indistinct form appeared, one that had been invisible to the human eye at the time.

Ink has been spilled and words have circulated over the source of the name Yaddo. One common explanation is that young Christina Trask came in from her play talking about this or that “Yaddo.” While this has been interpreted as a four-year-old’s way of saying “shadow,” other speculation abounds. Imaginary friends and inaudible dialogues are so common among young children, particularly at haunted sites, that one’s feelers perk up at the suggestion. Her acquaintance-about-the-grounds’ name was “like shadow,” she said. But “shadow” wouldn’t do, since whatever it was was “bright and not dark.” There’s some talk that, unbeknownst to any of them at the time, there was an Old English word that would have sounded quite like “yaddo,” one that meant “to shimmer,” as light would upon the surface of the ponds. Maybe this accounts for the phantom children’s laughter that some people I know have reported hearing as twilight settles on Yaddo.

Speaking of the Trask children reminds one that wealth and success protect no one from tragedy—none of the four lived into their teens. The causes of their deaths were not mysterious. It was an age in which child mortality was lamentably high, and few epidemics were controllable. Two Trask children were permitted to give a last kiss to their mother, who was presumably dying of diphtheria. Instead, it was they who were gone within days. Still, this hasn’t stopped talk of some ominous bogie at the grounds, possibly some kind of child-killing karma, that wouldn’t stop until it ran its course. It would be interesting to know what the sounds of the word Yaddo meant in the native tongues, or who or what the doomed Christina met in the trees that spoke to her in a dead language.

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