Young first came to the United States in the 1920s to visit friends, traveling to Connecticut to meet Mary Colum (Molly) and her husband, Irish poet Padraic Colum. Celtic studies scholar William Whittingham Lyman Jr. left the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 and Young was hired to fill the post in 1924. She immigrated to the United States in 1925; according to Kevin Starr she "had been briefly detained at Ellis Island as a probable mental case when the authorities learned that she believed in the existence of fairies, elves, and pixies." At the time, people suspected to have a mental illness were denied admission to the U.S.