Ghosts of the Library, presented by AT&T

Here the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum will present something that other presidential libraries have mysteriously not chosen to explain. We will explain what a presidential library is!

You gather in a Pre-Show holding area where you see a video hosted by the Director of the ALPLM, Richard Norton Smith. Mr. Smith welcomes you and takes you on a very brief video tour of the Library before sending you on into the theater for the rest of the presentation. The doors now open and you enter the Holavision® Theater for "Ghosts of the Library."


Ghosts of the Library is a dramatic and magical special effects presentation that uses Holavision® to capture the exciting sense of discovery that scholars and curators feel as they approach a great research collection. Holavision® is a proprietary BRC Imagination Arts-owned technology that allows the storyteller to appear to control smoke and vapors around him, causing the vapors to condense and form images that seem to interact with, and even respond to the actor. In addition, Holavision® permits the magical "fade away" or disappearance of the on-stage actor, with astonishing impact to audiences of all ages. Holavision® will even allow the live actor to dissolve slowly into thin air.

An audience seating area provides a view (through a large high-security window) into the "Library." A combination of a live host and state-of-the-art special effects explain the activities, the detective work, and the discoveries waiting to be made in a great presidential archive.

Your host is a young historian/curator who welcomes you to the library and begins to explain the work of a presidential collection. One item he shows you is Mrs. Lincoln's music box. He plays it for you. But then he shuts the lid and snaps off the music and poses the taboo question: "So what? Why study all this old stuff? Why even save it? Who cares?"

The host begins to answer his own question by describing the collection and the discoveries waiting to be made here. The collection is filled with more than words. In this room are the actual objects that Lincoln and others touched and used. In a mysterious way, these original objects connect us to the people and events of history and make them real. It is almost as if we can momentarily see their world, as though they were here, as though they were about to speak to us, perhaps revealing something previously unknown.

As he speaks, mysterious things start to happen. Amazing Holavision® special effects cause the ghosts of Civil War soldiers to rise from the objects he shows us. The ghosts of Lincoln and his contemporaries momentarily appear and disappear, their transparent images drifting through the "Library." A quill rises from a library table and begins to write in the air, in Lincoln's handwriting.

The host explains that we save original objects from history because they help tell us who we are as a country and as a people. History also whispers a hint of who we will become.

Now, there is one last surprise...