Let’s start with the lucky part. I spent last August at the legendary writers’ retreat Yaddo, a 55-room stone mansion perched on a hill in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo is notorious enough in the publishing world to teeter on cliché. For starters, it’s haunted. Should you arrive somehow failing to have absorbed the stories about the Trask family, which once lived there—Spencer Trask, a financier, purchased the house in the late 19th century; his wife, Katrina Trask, then contracted diphtheria and gave it to their children when she kissed them goodbye; and a mysterious fire burned down the original structure—a trove of spooky evidence clues you in. There are plenty of cordoned-off rooms, piled high with old portraits of little girls with spiders crawling over their unblinking eyes. The…
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Harper's Bazaar (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2024