127. Katrina Trask and the Ghosts of Yaddo
AMY: Hi, everyone, welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my co-host Kim Askew…
KIM: Hey, everyone! Today’s episode will touch on the renowned Yaddo Artists’ Colony and the bittersweet story of the woman who envisioned this sylvan retreat on 400 acres in Saratoga Springs, New York.
AMY: Yes, since its inception in 1926 huge names in American literature have spent time as artists in residence at Yaddo, including important women writers like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Patricia Highsmith, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker. The poet Lola Ridge, whom we discussed in a previous episode, was invited to stay and work at Yaddo on two separate occasions.
KIM: It remains, today, a prestigious retreat for writers, visual and performance artists, composers and filmmakers. At any given time throughout the year you’ll find about 26-30 artists in residence staying at the gorgeous Gilded Age mansion. Well, actually you won’t find them because their privacy while at Yaddo is sacrosanct.
AMY: Yes, the only public access to Yaddo is via the estate’s beautifully manicured grounds. The property features fountains, rose gardens and marble statues. It’s all maintained by volunteers.
KIM: It looks so gorgeous. The house itself features stained glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany and an all-white room called “the tower room” that looks like the inside of a cathedral. That’s the room where Truman Capote wrote his first novel. Amy, we need to go check out these gardens — this is another addition to the literary vacation bucket list that we have going!
AMY: I know I really wanna go. It's funny. Mike's aunt lives in Saratoga Springs, so she goes to the Yaddo gardens all the time. And Kim, she extended an invitation. Anytime we wanted to, we could go stay at her house and, uh, hit up the Yaddo grounds.
KIM: We have to take her up on that, for sure.
AMY: Um, although I should warn you the grounds and the mansion at Yaddo are purported to be haunted. There are a lot of anecdotes about spectral sightings.
KIM: Ooh, that actually makes me wanna go more
AMY: I know, right. Legend has it that long before Yaddo existed, Edgar Allen Poe got the inspiration for “The Raven” while staying at a fishing camp located on the property. And when you hear the story of the woman who founded Yaddo, you might get some unexpected shivers up your spine.
KIM: Okay, so let’s hear it: Who was this woman and why did she want to establish this community for artists?
AMY: Her name was Katrina Trask. She was the wife of financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask, and while he was making his fortune investing in railroads and electric companies, she dabbled in writing — she was a poet and playwright and she liked to host literary salons. So this couple, Katrina and Spencer, moved to the 400-acre estate right after the death of their first son – he died of meningitis just before his fifth birthday. Originally, the property had a run-down Queen Anne-style mansion on the property. The Trasks’ surviving child, Christina, suggested her parents name the place Yaddo because “it sounds like shadow but it’s not going to be a shadow.” (Clearly the whole family was looking forward to an escape from their gloomy, grief-stricken days and hoping this would be a place for emotional healing.) For six years the family had idyllic days at Yaddo. A second son was born in 1884. But by 1888, tragedy struck again. The Trasks’ two children, including little Christina, ended up dying from diptheria. The couple had one more child, a daughter, the following year, but she died, too, a few days after her birth.
KIM: Oh my God. This is so tragic. Oh, this is awful.
AMY: Yeah, I can’t even imagine. But to make matters worse, about a year later in 1891, the mansion at Yaddo burned completely to the ground! This happened while Spencer, Katrina’s husband, was seriously ill with pneumonia at their Brooklyn home. He recovered from that illness and they were determined to rebuild, which they did. They built a 55-room mansion, featuring a Tiffany mosaic over the hearth with the image of a phoenix and an inscription in Latin which translates to “Unconquered by flame, I, Yaddo, am reborn for peace.”
KIM: Wow, they seem really amazing. So in their new home, the Trasks continued to host literary salons and artist friends, but with no heirs to speak of they continually wondered what would become of their estate when they were gone. To whom would they bequeath the property and their fortune? The idea to create an artists’ retreat was originally Katrina’s idea, right?
AMY: Yes, and you could say it may have been a spiritual (or even ghostly?) nudge that led to the idea. One day she and her husband were walking through the woods on the grounds when she said she “felt an unseen hand laid upon me, an unheard voice calling to me.” She could suddenly visualize men and women wandering the gardens, sitting under trees — creating. In that instant she knew: “This is what we’re doing with the house. We’ll make it an artists’ colony.” Both Katrina and Spencer were big supporters of the arts — they saw creative minds as vital contributors to society and as sort of the antidote to the troubles brought about by capitalism, and, who knows, maybe there was a little bit of guilt there, you know? They had so much money. Spread the wealth kind of thing. Katrina felt strongly that artists needed to be able to have a quiet place to focus on their art in a peaceful environment without needing to worry about money.
KIM: That’s for sure. But I love that she took something that, for her, must have been associated with a lot of heartbreak, and she ended up transforming it into such an inspirational place from which great art (new life, basically, in a sense) could spring.
AMY: Yeah, totally. So more tragedy, though, in her future: Nine years after working toward their vision for Yaddo, the artists’ colony, Spencer Trask was killed in a train accident. About a decade after that, Katrina married his longtime business partner George Foster Peabody (they had been lifelong friends), but Katrina passed away from heart disease about a year after that marriage. Peabody wanted to make sure to continue carrying out her vision. And so he did, with the help of Yaddo’s first executive director, a woman named Elizabeth Ames, who for the next 45 years would have a huge impact on American letters because she’s the one who basically helped decide which artists to extend invitations to.
KIM: And that list is pretty incredible. In addition to the names we’ve already mentioned in this episode, there were people like Aaron Copeland, Dorothy Parker, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, David Foster Wallace, Laurie Anderson and Jonathan Franzen. They all spent time at Yaddo. According to the foundation’s website, “Collectively, Yaddo artists have won 81 Pulitzer Prizes, 31 MacArthur Fellowships, 69 National Book Awards and a Nobel Prize.” Wow.
AMY: It’s like a genius factory, right? I found so many great stories about Yaddo from a book edited by Micki McGee called Yaddo: Making American Culture. It’s almost like a coffee table book. It’s got tons of amazing pictures in it. I suggest you check out if you’re interested in taking a deeper dive. And those ghost stories we mentioned at the top of the show? I’m sure you want to know more about that, right?
KIM: Oh yeah, for sure.
AMY: Okay, so there are many anecdotes of people seeing ghostly figures in the main house and around the property. For starters, paintings of the Trasks on the wall still, and a lot of their possessions (knick-knacks, things like that) are still in the mansion, which sort of adds to the mystique. You used to be able to take ghost tours of the gardens, so I guess there’s enough lore there to make up a docent-led tour, at the very least. Apparently one area of the gardens where people seem to think they’ve sensed spirits are around four marble statues called The Four Seasons, which have been on the property for more than 100 years. (People feel as though they represent these four deceased children.) There is a story of one woman who used to work in the gardens who would apparently feel a tug on her jacket when she was there. There are also anecdotes in which people have claimed to see apparitions in the house (including the author Allan Gurganus who was staying there in residency at one point. I’m just going to read what he wrote about the ghosts he thinks he saw: “I sensed a change of atmosphere. It felt as if two windows or one door had just blown open. The shift in air pressure registered along my hands, against my face. I glanced up from the bed alcove, scanning windows as the sun commenced its setting. Between my own dark corner and the late light a figure stood. Five feet tall, it looked smoothed and faceless…. I could see right into it, but only as far as into some frosted-pane translucence.” He later claimed to have a dream in which featuring an elderly woman he swore was Katrina Trask.
KIM: Ooh. Okay. So whether there’s really paranormal activity here or not, who knows, but I can imagine there would be a feeling, a sense about the place, given the wooded atmosphere, the silence afforded the working artists and all the history that’s transpired here. I actually get chills just thinking about it.
AMY: Yeah, because it’s like “quiet hours” for most of the day to allow people to write. So just picture, like not a lot of talking you can hear the wind rustling, you can hear the birds and the trees. Yeah. It's definitely setting the mood for something spooky. And for all you Gilded Age fans, you might be interested to read a fictionalized memoir of Katrina Trask. There’s one called The Lady of Yaddo: The Gilded Age Memoir of Katrina Trask by Lynn Esmay. I have not read this, but I did come across it in my research and it looks like it could be good.
KIM: You said earlier that Katrina was, herself, a writer. Do we know what she wrote?
AMY: Yes, so I looked this up. She had several collections of poetry published, and then she wrote a novel, a historical drama and an anti-war play which was performed by several women’s groups during the build-up to WWI. If you go to poetryhunter.com or allpoetry.com you can read some of the poetry that she wrote. So I’ll go ahead and read one poem she wrote called “Sorrow” because it sort of reminds me of these apparitions that people claim they’ve seen at Yaddo and also it’s sort of a reminder of the heartache Katrina had in her life. She wrote:
O thorn-crowned Sorrow, pitiless and stern,
I sit alone with broken heart, my head
Low bowed, keeping long vigil with my dead.
My soul, unutterably sad, doth yearn
Beyond relief in tears—they only burn
My aching eyelids to fall back unshed
Upon the throbbing brain like molten lead,
Making it frenzied. Shall I ever learn
To face you fearlessly, as by my door
You stand with haunting eyes and death-damp hair,
Through the night-watches, whispering solemnly,
“Behold, I am thy guest forevermore.”
It chills my soul to know that you are there.
Great God, have mercy on my misery!
KIM: [singing to the theme of “Hotel California”] “You can check out any time you like… but you can never leave!”
AMY:: Yeah, yeah. But Kim, you know, when you start singing, I think that’s our cue to sign off.
KIM: Definitely. That sounded really good in my head, but it never sounds the same when I hear it.
AMY: You will NOT be invited to Yaddo for any sort of musical genius.
KIM: No, no. You could see that I put my heart into it, though. Like, you know, my headphones on and I’m really, like, my eyes are closed Anyway.
That’s all for today’s episode. Be sure to join us again next week when we’ll be talking about another lost lady.
AMY: Bye, everyone! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.