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.

    The first location we had decided on for our project was lawyers row. Lawyers row is host tomany things but what it is really known for is the story of the black ghost dog that roams its premises certain nights looking for his long lost master. The story goes something like this: lawyer’s row was a house section for the students who studied law at W&L. One student in particular would come home after class and bring out his violin which he played mostly everyday. The smooth strumming of his violin eventually attracted the attention of a little black dog that would sit next to him on his appartment steps and listen to him play the violin. The dog and the student became very close and whenever the student came out the dog would be waiting there for him, eager to follow his new found master. After some years with this dog, the student eventually graduated, leaving the little dog behind. Day after day the dog came back waiting for his master who never returned back to lawyers row. Due to the elements, or maybe even a broken heart, the little black dog died. Ever since then, reports have been contributed by people who have passed lawyers row of a little black dog running around the premise or even the feeling of a dog brushing past their legs. Although there has been a rumor that this dog no longer haunts lawyers row. Mark Clyne explained that this dog might have passed over into the afterlife after a violin instructor played his violin in the same spot the student did in 2001. He said that the dog has not recently been seen after this man, in a way, reenacted his old masters habit, giving the dog some peace of mind. Either way, the story still lives and the tale gives a new light to lawyers row for all to see.

The next tale we wished to tell was one that struck a little too close to home and definitely gave chills to anyone who knows the stories of this place. Of course what I am talking about is the infamous room 401 located inside the old barracks of VMI on the top floor where new recruits stay their first year. This has a dark past because it is located right below the old honor court room. This room is where the honor court would give a cadet who has breached their laws a decision: leave the institute in shame or preserve one’s honor and take our own life. They did not say this of course, instead they merely brought the cadet up into the room. They left a chair, some rope and a knife in the room. Knock on the door and you can leave, or get rolled as they called it, or take your own life either by hanging yourself or stabbing yourself in the gut and bleeding out. The institute is famous for its honor system and its past dealings with honor. But all who live in room 401 say that maybe some people who killed themselves never left. There have been reports of scratching on the walls and dark figures with red glowing eyes appearing at night at the foot of beds, all making people thoroughly freaked out and driving some to even leave in fear for their lives. We interviewed the current inhabitants of this room to get a little insight on how it felt to live in such a place. The story we were given sent chills down our back. They told us that living in that room was a constant state of being watched. It was like something lingered there, analyzing their every move, frustrated at their mere presence. One girl told us that the entire room woke up one night at the same time, around 3 o’clock, which was weird to them. When one of the girls looked at her phone there had been a text message sent saying “GET OUT” which she had not written. Since then, the girls of this room have been counting the days until they can rid themselves of this room.

For our last ghost story, that we will use in our project, we picked the story of the Lee house. The Lee house has much history behind it and is located on the far side of W&L right beside the sorority houses. There have been many tales that have been told there of weird things happening in that house. Some people have told that they have seen Lee himself walking the premise. Others have told stories of fire picks sliding across the floor when they were dog sitting one night. But the story we want to focus on is one of the most well known stories, known by students and locals alike. This story is the tale of Lees’ horse, named Traveller. The tale goes that Lees’ horse Traveller will sometimes come home to his stable, under the Lee house, and kick on the stable doors if it is not left open for him.

The purpose of this project is pretty simple. The entire reason for doing this project is really to open up doors for locals and tourists alike in order for them to come to Lexington and see or read of some locations that may be hidden from plain view. The locations we have chosen are somewhat hidden away from main street making it hard to know they are there when main street itself is so popular. Lawyers row is set off to the side  some buildings of main street, and is poorly maintained. If one were to pass it you would think that it is just another run down building in Lexington. The Lee house, being a little more famous, is still someone’s house that they live in. Be able to visit and take a tour is somewhat hard and being in the shadow of W&L makes it almost invisible to the public eye. Room 401 is obviously restricted to the public because it is inside the barracks at VMI so no one can really enter the room and experience the tales unless they live in it themselves. This makes the room very exclusive and only known to the students that live their and the ghost tales that spread around the school. All of these locations are fairly unknown to newcomers and are not well known amongst the many people that pass through Lexington every day. Our plan, in doing ghost stories, is not just to create another site with tales of ghosts and horror. It is to use these stories of ghosts as a segway into informing the people of the many hidden locations around Lexington that one can visit. These stories not only allow the location to have a certain air about them, but it would lso give the background on the location and the history of why this location is famous on its own, without the ghost story to add some flare to it.

Our plan on doing this is to basically piggy back on the RHS website design and mimic what they do in terms of locations and biographies. The Rockbridge Historical Society has created a wonderful experience called Righteous and Rascals where you can literally go on their site and look at the different biographies of numerous characters that have passed through Lexington at some point while finding their plaques laid out on the ground across the city. This allows people to simply find a plaque, or go hunting around for them, bring up their site and learn about the many interesting people that have come through the city from criminals, to artists, to native american chiefs. Our project wanted to follow in suite with this and create the same experience but instead focus on the history of the location and the ghost story behind it. The project will be set upon a wordpress site and the way it is set up now, people can scroll through it like a blog and see the three locations we did, and see the reason for doing what we do. Each location not only has a picture of the site, so that the person visiting knows they are at the right locations, but also has a paragraph of the background of the location and the ghost story that haunts that place. What we want to do with this project is, like said before, is bring to light the different locations that are somewhat hidden away from the public eye, but the other objective we agreed upon is that we also want to entertain the audience with our stories. To me rememberable we must evoke the emotion and the illusion each of these locations can easily bring. We will do this through the writing on the wordpress site to really immerse the visitors of these sites into the story. We want them to believe not in the ghost but in the illusion of the ghost. This will allow our locations to be memorable and be greater known to the outside world. This is because tales of ghosts are still very relevant in today’s society. Mark Clyne said that there was once upwards to over eighty shows on ghosts alone. Even today we have modern shows of ghost hunters going to different locations with their modern equipment looking for the unseen. And let us not get started on the numerous ghost movies there are out there right now. It is an appealing perspective to our project that I think would attract a lot of eyes onto these very interesting locations.