NOTE: The following history is courtesy of www.blairwitch.com and www.g2h2.com so please visit their
sites for a definitive presentation of The Blair Witch Project.
On October 21, 1994, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams hiked into Maryland's Black Hills Forest to shoot a documentary film on a local legend . . . The Blair Witch. They were never heard from again. One year later, their film footage was found and forms the basis of "The Blair Witch Project." The film documents the students' harrowing five-day ordeal and captures all of the terrifying events that led up to their unexplained disappearance.
The pieces of the mystery to the Blair Witch date as far back as the Revolutionary War between the U.S. and England. Then, every forty to sixty years give or take, the mystery resurfaces again. In 1785, several children in the township of Blair, Maryland accused an
Irish-born woman named Ellie Kedward of witchcraft. She was found
guilty and banished in the middle of winter. It was assumed she died
from exposure. The following year, all of her accusers and half the
town's children had vanished. Fearing a curse, the entire township
fled as soon as the weather broke and vowed never to utter the name Ellie Kedward again.
For forty years, the town of Blair was quite literally a ghost town. In the mid-1800s, the property was brought to the attention of a man by the name of Burkitt. He bought the property from the government and renovated the abandoned buildings. He rechristened the town after himself. Burkittsville still stands in Maryland today. It is a fine upstanding Christian town that is only now beginning to realize the blessings and curses of being turned practically overnight into a tourist trap.
Around 1830, there was an incident involving a young child named Eileen Traecle. This small child was wading in a very shallow stream. Allegedly, before the eyes of at least a dozen eyewitnesses, a ghostly white hand reached up from underneath the water and pulled Eileen Traecle into it. The water was reportedly less than a foot deep, yet young Traecle's body was never found. Sceptics question how so many people could have seen this, and no one was able to save her. They look to parental neglect as an answer, also pointing out that seven witnesses were friends or relatives of the child's mother,
and they believe the witnesses were trying to protect her. Regardless
of this, the story of Eileen Traecle is the first incident in recorded
history where a death was blamed on the Blair Witch.
For weeks afterward, several wooden stick figures mysteriously appeared in the creekbed, and the river water itself became oily and contaminated for several months. In 1886, a small girl got lost. Several days had gone by and her parents had become alarmed. A search party was organized to go out looking for her. While the search party was gone, the little girl returned alone. She claimed she had been walking in the woods and met a woman who was not so much walking as floating inches off the ground. The woman took the girl by the hand and led her to a house in the woods, where she left the girl in the basement, claiming she would return. The little girl sat in the basement for a long time awaiting the woman's return, but then
she got scared and ran away. Eventually she made her way back to
the town. However, after the little girl returned alone, the search
party that had gone out after her had not returned with her.
So a second search party was organized to find them. Their search ended at Coffin Rock, near the river where Eileen Traecle had met her death less than fifty years before. The second search party claimed they found the first search party stripped of all their clothes and belongings, and their bodies were tied to Coffin Rock. Their intestines had been removed and their reproductive organs had been mutiliated. On their chests, hands, feet, and foreheads, strange cryptic symbols had been painstakingly carved into their skin. They rushed back into town for reinforcements, but upon a return to Coffin Rock, the bodies had disappeared. There was evidence of blood and ropes on the rock, and the smell of death hung in the air, but the bodies were never found.
Near the end of World War II, an old hermit named Rustin Parr, who had been brought up by an abusive father, had taken to spending his life alone in the solitude of what was then and now known as the Black Hills Woods. He kept to himself and the townspeople only saw him occasionally when he came into town for supplies. In 1947, seven children, one by one, disappeared. The police were stumped. There were no dependable witnesses and there were no leads. Then one day, Rustin Parr came into town from the woods and announced to anyone who cared to listen, saying "I am finally finished." When asked what he was referring to, he would only repeat himself. The local authorities
asked him to show them what he meant.
He brought them back to an old shack where he lived in the woods. In the basement they found evidence of several horrible acts of torture and homicide. Outside the shack and a small distance away they found seven graves marked with piles of stones. When the graves were dug up, the children's bodies were recovered. Their bodies had been treated in much the same way as the accounts of the victums at Coffin Rock. Symbols had been cut into their faces, chests, hands and feet. They had been disembowled. Rustin Parr was convicted of the seven homicides, and admitted to them, saying the voice of an old woman told him to do these horrible deeds. After the seventh death, the old woman's voice told him he was finally free. He was sentenced to death by hanging, and his house was burned to the ground. He died with a disturbing smile on his face. He knew what he had done was wrong, but he was finally free . . . He was no longer under the curse of the Blair Witch.
In 1994, three graduate students went into the Black Hills forest seeking the truth behind the Blair Witch legend. They were last scene in the town of Burkittsville asking locals about this legend. They then drove up Black Hills road and walked into the woods
to spend the weekend. They were never seen again. A year later, local
historians had been renovating a century old building, for use for the
local museum. While excavating the foundation, they uncovered several
filmcans and videotapes in a backpack. These tapes contained the
last actions of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams.
The movie called "The Blair Witch Project" is an edited presentation of the nineteen hours of footage discovered in a way that indicated the equiptment had been left there, untouched, for over one hundred years. This film, is a disturbing and shocking account of the last days of these three young aspiring film makers, as they tried to come to terms with things that they did not understand. Was it witchcraft? Was it a prank gone horribly awry? Was it something that can be explained scientifically or is there a dark undercurrent of supernatural evil? This film will take you on a voyage not only through the last dark days of these people's lives, but into the inner pits of your own soul. What is most disturbing is that the tale may not be over. The first search party of 1885 consisted of seven men. The victims of Russ Parr numbered seven boys. If Heather, Joshua and Michael are the three victims of the Blair Witch for our generation, she may still be looking for four more individuals.
