The Saukville Examiner - Part 1 of 3 - Conception

Today, we will take the first of a series of in-depth looks at a very unique prop of mine that appears in the attic scene of Greywood Manor - The Saukville Examiner. This fictitious newspaper, made entirely by myself using Adobe In-Design, is the connective storyline between the three families of the attraction - the Greywoods, the Baywells, and the Rukas.

A still from the Greywood Manor 2010 video.

Saukville, by the way, is the town where this haunt resides.

We can find the purpose of this prop by taking a quick glance at the Back-Story I posted a few weeks ago...

"So what became of the mansion? For more than forty years, Greywood Manor sat vacant.  Then, in 1949, the Baywell family moved in. Just a few months later, they moved out.  It is said that on Halloween night of 49’, the Baywell family encountered extraordinary ghostly activity that frightened them away. Rumor has it that on Halloween Night of 49’, the ghostly Christmas decorations reappeared, along with signs of Elizabeth’s presence. Had the Baywell family stirred up the spirits by making Greywood Manor their home? Neighbors of the Baywells say that they must have left early on November first. They left all of their possessions behind. No one knows where they vanished off to. It is rumored that they moved down to the state of Mississippi, wanting to have gotten as far away from Wisconsin as possible. But others, perhaps the more sinister, believe they never left. A newspaper ran a story on the report soon after. An investigator left a copy in Greywood Manor’s attic, so the next family to move in would know what they were going to be up against." 

As you can see, this fake newspaper gives the sense of the haunted history of the mansion. The paper itself is dated Sunday, October 01, 1950. In summary, the leading story - "Greywood Mansion Haunted?" - looks upon the Baywell family's disappearance that occured in the year 1949. After almost a full year of investigating, the SSS, or Spirit Society of Saukville (a fake paranormal investigation group), has finally pieced together the mysteries of the mansion's past.

Even though only one half of the front page of the newspaper was viewable this past year sitting on a table next to a photo of Elizabeth Greywood, there is more to the paper! Since I created this newspaper as a project for my Computer Design class I took this past year, I added a full other three pages that are full of both original and period-specific newspaper articles.

In my next post, entitled Design, I will display full high-quality images so you can read all the stories present within the newspaper. I'll also take you a bit behind the creation of these stories and the layout of the newspaper in general. In the final post, Part 3, about The Saukville Examiner, I will talk about what I had to go through to actually get the newspaper printed, and the logistics of displaying it this past Halloween.