Alexander Diaz

Transcript

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24th of March 2017 Mark Cline Interview

This is Mark CLine and I’m giving these boys permission to give any of the verb Im saying tonight

Q1: When did you start getting interested in the paranormal?

A: Oh uh it’s been an interest of mine in anything odd or unusual ever since I was a child i’ve been these days called the barn of the blue ridge because i’ve had such an interest in the odd and the unusual because i create a lot of it. A lot of it for me is illusion you know I do uh I started off with learning how to do magic tricks and illusions and then took it to a more of a darker level just for more of the entertainment part of it like the weejee board, never got seriously involved in it but it did fascinate me and anything like that associated with magic or the paranormal.

Q2: The area, your enchanted castle, was built in some manor house of some kind?

A: The actual studio was built upon in natural bridge but I had another business called the haunted monster museum and that was built in an old manor up in the property of natural bridge and worked to deal with them in the early 2000s to work to create with them this haunted monster museum. It was owned by a sea captain at one point, and it was a seaman’s prayer written on a mantle piece on the wall, they claimed it was haunted but i worked on it into odd hours in the night and never saw anything out of the unusual. Some people are more susceptible to things, like with my ghost tour, i think a lot of it is the power of suggestion when it gets dark and u know ur gonna do a ghost tour and ur excited about it and ur more open to see things and i’m an entertainer so it’s my job to put it in peoples head just like a magician would do, that’s what these people are paying for, have i ever seen anything? No. Have i had an experience? yes. But being an illusionist i’m always looking for logical explanations. In fact this is what I always tell people in my tour. Always look for the logical explanations first and then if you can absolutely find nothing else that adds up then it might be something supernatural.

Q3: When did you start doing the ghost tours?

A: This will be my 21st season, since 1996

Q4: Was there anything that spurred you to do that?

A: back then ghost tours were relatively new, there weren’t a lot of them, but there were starting to really take off and I heard of a few of them and i went to go see the one in williamsburg and i learned different things from that tour especially what not to do, i’m an entertainer I don’t need guides, i wanted entertainers, guides can be found anywhere, so I wanted entertainers from my tour so that’s what I based my tour on. Other ghosts tours were starting to pop up so I was kind of learning the ropes and inviting it as a new thing as we went along and I found out that to make it interesting and viable you have to throw in a lot of humor. Humor, you don’t take it too seriously don’t try to convince people that they are ghosts, let them decide it for themselves. Ive mixed in history, illusions. Mines a well rounded package,m but at the end of my tour, i sort of put the question in people’s heads, is there something out there, there could be something out there and let’s hope we never find a definitive answer because man’s nature is to be curious and if we had the answer to this then it would be like finding out how the magic trick was done. Plus if we ever did find out if there was real things like ghosts, religion as we know it would change. Life after death, everything would be totally thrown out the windowed and changed. The vatican would flip upside down.

Q5: You said earlier that u had ur own experience, would u care to share anything about that?

A: Yea, uh a friend of mine that i build attractions for and wi9th down at virginia beach travel around to see other attractions, we went to gettysburg one winter, i had a meeting with some people about doing a dinosaur park with some people and while we were there around mid february, might be about 18 years ago now. He owns the nightmare mansion down in virginia beach, so we are used to the unusual and the haunting and fooling and scaring people and making people believe certain things. We are sort of on guard all the time against this kind of thing. We got a room out there in a place called the farnsworth house and this house was on baltimore street. A very historical old house, and we were the only ones there. The guy that owned the place said it was haunted. THey held seances down in the basement. But they were staged just like i used to do. To make a long story longer, my partner, i’m sorry my business partner is in the other bed laying down and i’m there before the sun rises i’m starting to hear a voice and i wake up to a voice of a child., Now nobody else is in this place, and i’m thinking maybe a kid wodnered in here but i’m thinking nobody else is here and this voice is right in front of me and it’s completely dark and he’s looking for his mommy, and i’m not sure if its  boy or a girl but i think it’s a boy and he’s calling out mommy, and i’m reaching out trying to touch a child and i don’t really touch anybody so i’m thinking oh my god i’m hearing it right in front of me but i just woke up so maybe i’m in that land of half asleep half dreaming half awake, abut then i hear it a second time very vividly. This is no dream so i’m reaching out trying to grab this kid. and i’m yelling jim jim did u hear that but i didn’t hear it after that. I only heard it twice. Logic is kicking in and i’m thinking okay these people told us this place was haunted and these ghost tours are starting to take off and people want to hear things maybe they have something under the bed a recorder or something. Less is more u don’t overdue it. THat’s how i do seances so I’m thinking you know I definitely heard a voice but i’m going back to my logic saying well maybe they had something rigged, that’s the best explanation i can come up with. i didn’t think they would do it, they may have not done it, but they could have and that might have been what i heard. I’m doing my ghost tour about a year or two later, and i tell these people i stayed there and they tell me oh yea you know a little boy got run over by a carriage in front of the place and i go oh really? So they’re telling me this and about a year later some other people from gettysburg come by and i tell them i stayed at that house and they say oh a little boy got run over by a wagon in the 1800s. Wagon carriage whatever, i’m starting to think, maybe there was a voice of a child that lingered because when i think about the supernatural or ghosts, i’m thinking about the energy that’s left behind not necessarily a ghost of the person, i’m thinking about the energy because there’s energy all around us because energy cannot be made or destroyed, you know this right? from physics right? so energy is there and energy has, we can’t even begin to understand the powers there. My mother called me yesterday and told me that my next door neighbor that i used to play with when i was a little boy fifty something years ago had died. He was a year younger than me. And i went really? I said for the past two or three days i’ve been thinking about him for no reason. No reason for me to think about this boy, and i’m thinking about what we sang and what we did. THis happens real often with me, its usually with celebrities, i think about different people and one time i was thinking about bill monroe, the famous bluegrass singer, the godfather of bluegrass, I walked over to a picture that he autographed and threw it on my desk and looked at it then put it back. A few hours later i found out he died. My logic behind this is that your brain is nothing but a big mass of matter that is electrically charged by neurons, that travels and sends signals everywhere. Thoughts can go beyond our brain and then maybe some direct current comes back. Everything is about vibration, everything. So there maybe some logic behind why people see ghosts or why they hear ghosts. Or why they were just thinking about people. It’s a strong feelings, like a smell, grandad died twenty years ago but i smell his pipe tobacco in the next room. The brain can trigger sometimes these smells and we from lack of better explanation, we identify these smells as ghosts.

Q6: So what you’re saying is instead of a ghost we are identifying or our brain is making a connection with whatever is out there

A; THat’s what i believe. has it ever been proven? They are doing research on it all the time. THe modern seance where people would connect to the dead starting in hydesville new york  back in 1952. Two young girls called the fox sisters were able to impress their parents by communicating with someone that died. There was a wrap on the table, one wrap for yes and two wraps for no. They would ask the spirit questions. The entire town came to see these girls speak to the dead. It wasn’t the devil worshipers who came, it was the christians. BEcause they believed in life after death. This was all of a sudden a modern way to connect with our loved ones. What they didn’t know was that these girls had a talent for cracking their toe knuckles under the table. they could manipulate people. The power of suggestion. Because people wanted to speak to their loved ones and believe. I started doing some of these seances, And i do these recreations of what u see back in the 1800s. After these girls other medians started coming out and it became a huge thing. Abraham lincoln hand seances in the white house. These people were making thousands of dollars over the years getting extremely rich over the years taking advantages of people’s weaknesses. When i was doing these scenes i would recreate the experience the way that they did it back in the 1800s and people would come to my seances and think that there was a ghost in the room. Before they would come in my parlor I would say Now i’m going to recreate this but once we go into the parlor i’m going to act like it’s all happening because this is what ur paying for so once we go in this is happening. So i go in there and i shut the door and people still believed that there were these things that I was actually conjuring these spirits. It was slight of hand, darkness,, the power of suggestion and even though i gave a disclaimer they believed. But it was easy to do all of this. Houdini tried to debunk and did debunk fake mediums. His mother had passed away and he was trying to connect to his mom and he went to these medians and exposed them and he did that until he died.

Q7: You’ve never had any weird experience with the paranormal? Weegie boards or anything like that?

A: Well i mean the bible forbids going to mediums and the witches and using dark magic. It’s good for a man to believe in stuff. In a higher power, something bigger than himself. We’ve always done that ever since a caveman walked out and heard thunder and lightning.

QQ: Well it’s our way with coping with death, convincing ourselves that there’s something more than nothing past death.

A: Well I think it’s more metaphorical way, like is heaven above us? I like to think of myself above pettiness, above wrongdoing, above hate, so that puts me in a place above that but it’s not a physical place but i’m still above these lower things. It’s all interpretation i guess.

Q8: The locations in lexington, have u heard anything about any of the locations about the southern inn or lawyers row or macado’s.

A: WHat i did when i planned to do the ghost tour was i went and got that book and based my tour off what connected to each other to make a good tour route. Nothing too out of the way. But i looked at all the stories that were around and found stories that weren’t in the book and then filled in the blanks. Bob taylor actually wrote about the ghosts in lexington, also katie letcher. Both dead. I bought that book and put together the tour. If i did stories on every place that’s haunted it would be overwhelming, an all night tour.  Every old place has a story to tell and every old place is haunted, not by ghosts of dead people but by the experiences and energy that is still there, the experiences, the war, families that left, or died there, the pain the sadness, the intense energies that linger.

QQ: Death lingers in a place like that, the energy lingers. You can feel something like that, the air was heavy and it hung over it.

OUTLINE OF REVISED PLAN: Include names of at least 2 informants, affiliation, why they were chosen, and list of questions/ topics prepared.

Mark Cline and Sue Ann Huger, they were chosen because of their experiences with the sights we have chosen and their particular experience with paranormal activity.

Questions for Mark Cline Above.

Sue Ann will be moreso for her experiences with her restaurant.

Such as: How long has she worked at the Southern Inn?

When was the last rotation of new workers in the SOuthern Inn?

What are the details of the fire that happened here?

What is your belief in the paranormal?

Has there been ny weird experiences here?

Any stories of the past about this place?

• Why did you choose these particular people for formal interviews? Are they an expert, a local citizen? How do they fit into the puzzle of your writing project? We chose these two people because they were both attached to the paranormal in some way. Mark being the leader of the ghost tours in lexington and Sua Ann being the owner of a famously haunted restaurant. Mark is an expert while Sue Ann is just a local citizen. They fit into my puzzle for the overall project because they give primary sources to sites that we plan on putting into our online portfolio attached to the RHS website.
• How did you prepare?  (intentions, communications, list of questions) We prepared by bringing in a list of questions, coming in with the intent of getting solid site locations, and poking around for an idea of if the paranormal was a prominent thing in these people’s lives. We came with an open mind to any answer and were ready to fully dive into the experiences of the Lexington locals.
• Any challenges? THe only challenge we really face is first having people upon up to us about their experiences and getting actual times to fit into their schedules.
• Will you need to follow-up the initial interview with questions by email? Probably not, the interview goes pretty deep and we  will most likely have everything we need to do a background text on our haunted sites.

ANALYSIS: Finally, describe your experience with 1 formal interview informant that you interviewed for 20 min, as well as a short analysis of the interview experience. Consider the following questions to guide you:

• How did the interviewee help further your understanding of your project?  What was new, surprising, disturbing? Think about trends, patterns and issues you’ve read about in secondary source search or class discussions.
• What did you notice about their language, and their community perspective on your topic?  Share a few examples of responses you found especially significant or interesting, and how they will inform your writing project.  

I have to say interviewing with Mark was definitely an experience. The first thing I noticed was the meeting place itself. It was an old barbershop that seemed to not have been used for a while. He said later on that he used the place for seances which explained the creepy vibe I was getting from the place. The man himself was the most interesting part though. He was a man of value, a man who was very steadfast in his own beliefs. He is so implanted in the ghost telling of Lexington yet doesn’t believe in them himself. He kept reiterating how much of an entertainer he was. He valued this trait and explained how he is always in need of people who were entertainers. To me this seems like he values creativity and people who are upbeat, ready to entertain people. We were definitely prepared for the meeting. Our questions made him talk a lot about himself, what he does, and even how he does it. Our tag team was mostly my partner would ask the questions and keep him interacting while I examined the area, his tone of voice, his microexpressions. It was interesting to see how subtle his change from real person to the persona he put on was. It was almost unnoticeable. I think halfway through he caught on what I was doing because he always looked at me from time to time with this sort of almost cokciness in his eyes. He knew he was good at what he does and,  after this meeting, so did I. He helped us out alot with our project. He gave us valuable information on a couple of sites and even brought us to the locations explaining in person the history behind the place, giving little details we might not have found anywhere else. It was a little disturbing visiting the areas because the way he told the story just added to the aura of the place. The creepy vibe was always through the roof.What I realized was that the people who come here looking for these things do not need to be convinced of ghosts, you leave that for them to decide.  What they want is a show, a show they want to believe and not have anyone ruin for them. I realized Lexington held a special aura about it that not a lot of people know about, because it seems like if a ghost is around every corner.

After it was over, did you feel prepared? If not, explain what differed between your plan and actual interview.