Alexander Diaz

ERH-411

Source Synthesis

Count: 408

For this source synthesis, I have used two sites that give different perspectives on the telling of ghost stories. The first site gives multiple examples of stories that come from all around rockbridge county. The site is called the Ghosts of Rockbridge and was made by W&L college students for a media project not too long ago. This projected needed detailed facts to go along with their stories and not just first hand explanations. Through deep historical findings and interviews with people, this site soon became my top choice with its reliance on dates and numbers to support an overall shaky story. As we know, ghost stories are just that, they are stories. It is hard to back up something you cannot see nor explain. But this site keeps it believable using both abstract and concrete ideas. Another cool feature about this site is its separation between the categories of ghost stories. Some stories are called ghost stories because they are researched and have many factual elements to it. Another category poses the question of if ghosts even exists. They use a large pool of responses with different genders, religions, birth months, etc. Then it is all laid out in tables and graphs explaining what people believe and if the belief in ghosts is actual plausible. Finally they even have podcasts of some interviews or stories they have done. Overall a very good source for concrete stories and analytical projections. Our next source is basically a blog post telling a few ghost stories in lexington. Now I picked this one because it gave a completely different perspective to the source before. This source was straight story telling, no facts or numbers. It was just an eerie story of ghosts popping up along people’s drives or walks. I think this is important because the whole point of this project is for believability. Facts are great but they sometimes take away from the story. What this blog does well is give the story straight out, with every creepy detail along the way. A combination of both of these sources can lead to a great vision for our end product, which is our own section of the RHS where we tell the background of these ghostly places. Now as an attraction it needs to do just that, attract. But it also needs to be factually sound for it to survive on a historical society’s website.