Alexander Diaz

Draft 1

Reading Excerpt

411-01 Field Work

Echos of the Past

“I am an entertainer. These people pay for a show and that is what I, as an entertainer, needs to do” These words by Mark Cline gave a clear focus on what our project needs to be about. Mark Cline told us that the main focus of what he does is to entertain people, and this brought focus to our goals. We decided that the goal was not to convince people of whether ghosts exist or not, it was to bring them into a place of questioning and knowledge. Our main project was shifted from just listing out what a site may be and who died there to entertaining the person who visits such a place. People want to go on this website to be entertained, to have this shiver of fear creep up their spine as they read about the ghostly occurrences that have happened or continue to happen to this day. Mark Cline being our primary source was the first step towards opening the doors to the specific details of stories we have heard in our secondary source, My Neighbors Ghost, by Katie Letcher. Katie Letcher’s book does a great job in giving the details and the backgrounds to different ghost stories around Lexington. But Mark Cline put the icing on the cake by giving us details about what happened in these locations and if they still go on until this day. Mark Cline, in a way, was the reinforcement to Katies book, the real life source that experiences these ghost tales every day. But now that we have our locations and stories down, we must figure out a way in which to write about these locations that will entertain the reader. We do not wish to just inform but make them feel like something really is there. We want the reader to have a memorable experience. We must appeal to their sense, their emotions, their consciousness that makes them doubt reality from fiction. This will be the difficult part in our project. Writing in such a way that we can connect with the reader and their senses. As Mark Cline said, we must create the illusion that something is there when it is not, and even harder, do it through text. Every detail of the location must be accurate as if we were right there describing the scenery next to them. The next challenge in our project would be location identification. RHS has markers all over the city depicting different characters and their biographies online. The challenge we will have is getting markers up that will tell the reader what exactly they are looking at. This is a problem because, for one, we do not know if business owners or land owners will like us putting markers up that says a place is haunted. Even if we did have the markers up how would a person know where to go to find the description of the place? Would QR codes work? Or just a simple link to the site due? So our main challenges will be putting the reader into the element and entertaining them, seeking the approval of markers in each location and having a direct line to the site that has all the information on it.