Tuesday is Halloween, and for the past several weeks, locals and Saratoga Springs visitors have been going on ghost tours to get into the spooky spirit.
“There are an awful lot of things here in Saratoga that cannot be explained, if nothing else, and I will share those with you tonight," said Joe Haedrich.
Joe Haedrich is President of Fun in Saratoga Tours, and author of “Haunted Saratoga: The Stories Behind Saratoga’s Most Infamous Spirits.” Among a handful of area tours, Haedrich’s favorite is the spine-chilling ghost tour of the Spa City’s most mysterious locations.
Haedrich continued, “I’ve been doing it now close to 15 years, and as I— I’ve gotten to know many of these ghosts in Saratoga, well maybe not personally, but I’ve gotten to know their stories, which I am going to share with you tonight."
Haedrich’s interest in the supernatural came when a mentor of his, Saratoga Springs High School teacher Dave Pitkin, died and left Haedrich his life’s work; mountains of research into the region’s spooky underbelly.
One of the first stops on the tour is The Arcade Building at 378 Broadway, which, as Haedrich describes, has borne witness to many disasters. The building burned down a number of times, claiming numerous lives in the process.
“Two people died in each other's arms, and their cat died alongside of people are always more upset," said Haedrich. "So there was a lady downstairs who had a massage therapy practice. And she kept feeling something rubbing against her leg, and she couldn't shake it. So she ended up moving to another office here in Saratoga, the problem went away. So now a chiropractor moves downstairs. And I was talking to Deb and I asked her if she had any strange experiences with that cat and she said, 'You know, every once in a while the doors inside my office would move a little bit this way, a little bit that way. And now that you mentioned it, it must have been that cat.'”
Another morbid part of local lore surrounds the Trask family, who founded the Yaddo Gardens.
"Katrina Trask caught the COVID type plague that was going around at the time, called Diptheria," said Haedrich. "And she didn't think she was going to make it, she was in her room. And so they brought all of her children up to kiss her goodbye. They kissed her goodbye, she slipped into a coma. She was in that coma for about three or four days. Finally, she woke up and all her children were dead. They had all died from kissing their mother goodbye."
After the tragic death of her husband, Katrina held out on remarrying her late husband’s business partner George Peabody.
“He asked her every year for 10 years to marry him." Haedrich continued, "and she says no. Finally in the 10th year, she said and I told you she was a very spiritual person. She said she saw a light appear in her room, and it got brighter and brighter and brighter. And then it went out. And she knew at that point that Spencer's spirit had left this earth, so she agreed to marry George Peabody. And they got married. And she died six months later.”
One of the last stories of the tour surrounds what Haedrich labels “the Skidmore murder.”
“In 1950, there was a group of four young ladies that was in one of these dormitories up here. And they were playing with a Ouija board. You all know what a Ouija board is that board with that little device that goes around and you put your hand on it. And it's got right he's got letters around the edge and it started to spell out, 'He killed me and hid me in the closet.' So, these young ladies were totally freaked out. They took the Ouija board and that little device, they folded it up and they threw it back in the closet and they never touched it again.”
The story goes that one of those students asked the police chief if there had, in fact, been a murder on Skidmore College’s old Broadway campus, who did some digging and discovered that there had been a murder.
“And it turns out that, yes, the dormitory that they found this young lady dead in it's the same dormitory, where these girls lived, the same dormitory where they were playing with the Ouija board. But they also found out that the closet that this woman was found dead is the same closet where they found the Ouija board.”
No spirits contacted by WAMC responded to requests for comment.
