"In 1785, several children in the township of Blair, Maryland accused Elly 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" "Elly kedward again." "Curse of the Blair witch" "you look a little blurry." "Let me zoom out on you." " Ok?" " Ok." " More." " Got it?" "Okay, I got you." " This is my home." " Ok." "Wich I am leaving the comforts of for the weekend to explore the Blair witch." "Well, Heather was probably one of the two or three best students that I've had the pleasure of teaching." "She was committed she was energetic she was very creative." "She was someone who I think remind me of myself really a lot at her age." "She was looking to develop and find her voice." "Plus, she was interested in documentaries which my own background is in documentaries." "I met Heather in high school." "I met her when I moved to Montgomery county Maryland." "She was one of the first people thet I actully met." "Just met her in passing in the hallway and then we were in a play together." "And, uh, that's how we really became acquainted." "She was this tiny little thing that first go in and, of course, mom was there and the baby's been brought up for the first time." "I stick my arms out to go pick her up, and" "" careful, carefull, you'll break her"." "I said " I didn't break the others how am I going to break this one?"" "So, uh, I picked her up and held her and" "I guess for an hour or so before I gave her back to mama." "She had submitted a proposal to me to do a short documentary on the legend of Blair witch." "It was something I had never heard of before to tell you truth." " we're doing a documentary." " Yeah." " about the Blair witch." " Oh." " oh, have you heard of the Blair witch?" " That's and old, old, old story" " as I remember." " He wa a legend that had developed in this area over the course of couple of centuries." "Whenever a particular bad sequence of events happened in this community there seemed to be a tendency to blame it on Blair witch who apparently was a woman who had been cast out during the colonial era as a witch." "It seem like a great opportunity to interview people who had been passing down this legend for a couple of centuries." "Could you just run it for a couple of feet for me" " so that we can check that it's ok." " Sure." "Joshua was more glitz." "He thought it would be cool to be in the film business." "He was not willing I don't think to do the kind of work that was really necessary to develop a voice." "I think Heather and Josh were really sort of polar opposites in a lot of ways, but clearly they liked each other." "I didn't know Heather very well I think." "I guess I really only met her once and that's when she was talking about the Blair witch documentart and going into the woods and wanting Josh to be a part of that." "They collaborated on several projects together." "I mentioned to her a couple of times that I was concerned that his some of the negative aspects of-of his really lack of-of commitment and energy would perhaps be negative for her, but it turns out that they did like working together." "It didn't really go over too well cuz I remember we fought about it before he left." "And I mean, I feel really badly about that now cuz, I mean we argued horribly but I just had this I just had this feeling." "I didn't want him to go off with him." "It was just something about her that rubbed me the wrong way it was just instinct, I guess" "I didn't want him to go off for the whole weekend so what's up?" "Are you happy with the way the documentary is going?" "Yes I am." " Yeah." " Yeah?" "And I'm very pleasantly surprised by our little Mikey" " our little Mikey?" " Little Mikey when he was a little kid he was a pain in the, uh, you know he was a pain." "He was, uh he was really, uh, always pushing my parents' buttons um, sort of the devil with the halo on his head we had the golden rule of on cursing in the house and of course, he'd have to walk by and slip out the little ones" "nothing bad, but he was always sort of, you know, on the side and, you know, they'd catch it and then you'd catch it so he was always that kind of character" "I met him a couple of times actually" "Josh used to go with Mike to go drinking and stuff and um, but I wouldn't say I knew him really well the last night I saw him he was excited he was really happy with himself he came into the house" "he was all packed and ready to go for the next day and we sat down." "We had a cup of coffee together and we talked about the whole the whole thing he really didn't know too much about it." "That's what they were going to find out but it was something he really felt that he loved doing you know, doing the sound equipment stuff, and you know, I just told him to go out and be happy" "make yourself somthing." " I could help you, but I'd rather stay here and record - ok" " packs are on." " Let's rock - we're ready to go" " we gotta go up to the shack?" "The shanty?" " Yeah wow" " yeah, that can help the..." " Oh, my God" "the search of the three missing Montgomery college students continues in Frederick county tonight as dozens of volunteers and state officials join local forces in what has now become a full-scale search of the black hills area local officials, combined with over 100 search volunteers," "have failed to come up with any signs of the three missing filmmakers" "Montgomery college film students Heather donahue" "Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard were reportedly shooting a school project about a local myth called the Blair witch at this time their whereabouts are still unknow" "Josh feels it's necessary to look at the map now even though I know where we're going, and we're going straight up there if you'd know where we're going we wouldn't be hiking like" " we're in the middle of the woods." " Some of it is off-trail hiking" "I have harbored some guilt cuz, as I looked back over the proposal later" "I realized that I had neglected to notice that" "Heather had suggested going into the woods for a couple of days, working on the film we started to wonder the next day" "and my parents started panicking and for weeks after that it was just numb" "I don't really remember feeling too much other that numbness when I saw her mother that's" "that was probably the first time I really felt it and I started to cry" "the only piece of evidence found by police was Joshua Leonard's car parked on black rock road we checked the car over completley never found any clues with the vehicle we checked with witnesses that may have seen the film students" "and never could we could never locate 'em the black hills search of three missing filmmakers has been called off ten days and thousands of man-hours have been unable to produce any clues to the cause of the mysterious disappearances" "family and friends of the Montgomery college graduates are holding on to the hope that someone or something will provide some answers well, when the story turned into a really big story" "I went to the sheriff's office and I tried to talk with him and he's really been no help" "I mean, it's." "Uh" "I joined the search party, and" "I called when we didn't find anything on the search party and I told him I though we should still keep looking cuz I know there are clues out there" "I still go out and I still look and I know there's somthing out there he's talked to me a few times, but I... he just doesn't he doesn't want to hear anything I have to say." " December 12, 1994" " Dear sheriff cravens" "I have tried repeatedly to reach you on the phone but you have not returned any of my calls you and I both know the history of burkittsville and the events that have earned our town its peculiar reputation past events have proven that something evil resides" "in the black hills that surround us the same black hills that those three young people hiked into a few month ago and never came back from" "I urge you to look to the past fot the answers you seek sincerely, dottie fulcher they won't tell me anything that why there's this feeling that I have that they know more than they're willing to talk about" "I think that they don't want to admit that they saw her and that's she's there you know, Elly is not very far from any of us at any time and she chooses her time to appear" "and um they just don't want to acknowledge that the origin" "my name is luken Johnson and I'm a witch mystic occurrences" "witchcraft is basically a science you have a delineation between paganism or polytheistic religions more than one God and witchcraft, which is a scientific study of energies and materials but the power of air, I bless and consecrate thee" "from the goddess to the God soon would it be wiccanism is a new religion what you got to understand here, man, is we lost most of the records for what would be considered witchcraft throughout the latter part of the 1700 to 1800s" "and a lot beforehad with burning times as we refer to it bring out Elizabeth selwin" "these are when people were tortured and killed.." "The Salem witch hunts a simple case of bad bread.." "The grain in the bread.." "Cuz hallucinogenics you get a bunch of kids hallucinating that someone is making fun of them or torturing them, then, of course parents are going to react in a protective manner before you know it, people are dying by hundreds because" "so-and-so did somthing evil witch burn ." "Burn most of the time it wasn't anything to do with evil these were people that were trying to help through either natural lore, herbalism any kind of medicine that may not have been standard practice burn the witch" "but by the revolutionary war these trials, which were quite common at the time had somewhat faded out and witchcraft had" "was a thing of the past except in the rural areas and there we had a lot of superstition among the populations and people still practiced witchcraft two example come to my mind" "one being a 1786 case of the Blair witch of Maryland the other one being the bell witch of Adams, Tennessee, in 1817 now, while both of these cases are interesting academically" "I find the Blair witch of Maryland the most colorful" "I mean what's your take on the Blair witch at this point?" " Do you think she exists?" " I don't know" "this is burkittsville, formerly Blair it is a small, quiet Maryland town much like a small quiet town anywhere" "I'm bill Barnes I'm the executive director to the historical society here in burkittsville" "I've been that for quite a few years and am know as the town historian and I've tried to keep up with our history and make it be alive to the people that come behind me burkittsville was actually founded on another old town by the name of Blair" "and it was founded here in 1734 to protect the Western approaches to Baltimore from attack by the Indians and so forth but it died out because of a witch" "her name was Elly kedwards and she took a bunch of the children .." "Kidnapped them and carried them off into the woods and they never found them again and the people became very afraid and they pulled up and left and abandoned the town and it stayed abandoned for 40 years though records from this period of history are scarce" "this registry of the seafaring vessel the reliant shows that a woman name Elly kedward the woman history has labeled as the Blair witch did in fact sail from Ireland to Baltimore in the summer of 1769 the Blair witch story begins like" "all other witch stories with an old haggard lady and in this particular case she was a catholic living in a predominantly protestant community the story goes that she had bled a few children and by the pinpricks probably cuz of some sort of illness that she detected" "or something to that effect the children went back and reported it to their parents this is, of course at that time an early sign of witchcraft she was tried summarily convicted and banished the winter she was banished was supposedly the worst ever" "and no one knows what happened to her she was left by herself out in the woods what they did was they blindfolded her took her out into the woods and this was in the middle of the winter tied her to a tree and left her" "where she soon succumbed to the elements the following year the young lady who was her first accuser and most of the other children who were her accusers and children of the village vanished throughout the course of the winter by the end of the winter over half the town's children has disappeared" "immediately the townspeople blame these disappearances on Elly the witch the people simply vacated the area.." "They left they abandoned the community and they never spoke about the incident again as he related to me he had lived in a small town 40 Miles to the north the place had been abandoned he told me as it had come under a curse" "the well-built homes that still stood there were boarded up and empty with no sign as to why their denizens had chosen to leave so abruptly this man had heard that the town had been cursed by a witch and he claimed he had seen a cemetery full of the gravestones of children" "but whether that is true or not I could not say in 1809, a rare book about the occurrences surrounding the Blair witch legend was discovered entitle the Blair witch cult this Tome is supposedly a collection of firsthand accounts that illustrate the effects" "of the infamous Blair witch and the book is filled with bloodletting all kinds of bloody Gore witchcraft, paganism basically it's a pack of lies don't believe any of it but the people of the time did believe in it" "the awful hag wrenched the boy's head from his writhing body and defiled the church with his warm blood it was then that I noticed a dog's teat had sprouted from her leg she controlled the animals in the forest even the trees" "seeming to do her bidding when she walked she didn't touch the ground and her followers made a horrible mulch of the countless dead littering the streets the Blair witch cult by anonymous, 1809 it was about the Blair witch and it was pretty true" "pretty factual book about what really happened here but the Maryland historical society wanted it back and they took it over almost over.." "My dead body but I couldn't keep it cuz it did belong to them thirty-eight years later a chance encounter resurrected the abandoned township of Blair they were building a railroad through here and the gentleman building the railroad was out ridin' his horse and got lost" "stumbled up on an old road and it led into what was Blair at the time he had a friend named burkitt and Mr. burkitt was a developer and he talked him into coming here and developing' this area and he named it burkittsville" "the town was actually formed about 1824 and right about a year after that the crops had come in wheat was mostly what the farmers grew there and the crops were in and they decided to have a picnic down on the local creek" "tappy east creek has been possessed by a demon since ilene's horrible death a fortnight passed the creek has been polluted by a foul oil and an abundance of strange totem" "Mary Johnson, 1825." "There was an incident that occurred involving a young child bt the name of ilene treakle this little girl was playing in a very shallow stream of water and she drowned" "that creek was real shallow it was only probably six to eight inches deep a child could just wade across or crawl across there really it was so shallow well supposedly according to the story there was 12 witnesses who observed" "a ghostly white hand come up out of the water and drag the child under the water that's all they could see." "Nobody ever saw a face or body all they remember seeing was the arm and the hand and before they could get to her she had went and pulled her down she went under the rocks and the mud and everything was calm again" "but I have a problem with this story how is it that 11 people happend to be in the right place at the same time to simultaneously see this chostly hand come up and drag this child under the water?" "The river is searched now unfortunately you're talking about knee-deep water it's only two or three feet at the maximum her body should have easily been found." "It's never found" "I think that in the case of the ilene treakle story is that there's another explanation that perhaps it was something like parental neglect someone wasn't watching the child amd the child drowned for the first time in recorded history" "a death is blamed on the Blair witch the news of it spreads as far as Baltimore sparking this reaction dear sir:" "I find myself force to write this letter upon the atrocity I found within your pages this Sunday past" "I've never seen such callousness shown towards the death of ayoung child especially one who taken from this world in such a terrible manner as to your humorous view of the beliefs of the parents that she was murdered by a ghost" "I remind you that there have been many reports of such terrible specters witnessed in the nearby townships whether or not these wild tales are true is incidental the fact remains that a young girl has tragically drowned and her memory should not be tarnished" "by such wild and torrid speculation over the manner of her death sincerly, Eugene robertson the river according to what we've been told through written records then turns oily and has a bunch of stick figures floating into it for the next week" "no one can use the river for any kind of water for food or drinking or anything like that." "It's totally unusable after that the people wouldn't even go near the creek they wouldn't fish in it they didn't swim in it." "They didn't do anything in it." "Cuz it just scared them completely to death and they blamed that on the Blair witch may, 15, 1829:" "Delivered twin calves this morning" "I'm moving the entire herd to the fallow pasture cuz three cattle died from drinking creek water" "I'm using the pond instead" "Lloyd wellens farming journal" "and the town again kind of returned to normal one more time" "they went into the woods prepared to find death what they found was a desecration of humanity at the site which trappers have referred to as 'coffin rock' on top of the rock formation" "there was a lady lived there in town when I was a boy she was 50 years old when I knew her and she told me when she was a little girl she had been walking in the woods one day" "and this lady appeared to her and she wasn't walking, she was floating in the air, really and took her by the hand and led her to an old house back in the woods and took her down in the basement" "and left her there and said she'd ba back and she left and the little girl sat there she said, for several hours and finally she got scared she was able to crawl through a window and ran back to town" "but in the meantime the town had started to search for her they sent out a search party to look for her in the woods but it's plausible here that this little girl was only telling a story of the Blair witch as she had heard it from, maybe," "her parents, her siblings or her friends but what is strange about this case was that the first search party that had gone out to look for the little girl had vanished when the entire search party failed to return" "another search party was dispatched to find them what they found was a massacre and that search party come up on coffin hill or coffin rock and found those men the first search party had been killed laid out on a flat rock in the woods" "they had been disemboweled and on their faces hands and feet were carved these strange pagan symbols and they were heavily cut in by the ropes so they were alive when they were tied up and somebody had disemboweled every one of them" "and cut some letters and stuff in their foreheads very good.." "It wasn't crude you could read what was there it was all symbolic-type stuff and it scared them very bad like most it would anybody" "I couldn't have stood there very long their bodies were in a severe state of decomposition so the search party goes back to get help and when they return the bodies have vanished without a trace but they could still smell death in the air" "which where men die or women die that you can always smell that and there was no sign of them there now, you notice there has been an interval of about 60 years in between these events and if we move forward to 1940" "which is about 60 years we find another interesting situation happens in this very same area there are an unusually high number of children laid to rest here most of whom passed in the 1940s yet no one in the town seens to recall anything unusual about this time" "to us anyway yet legend tells a different story one whose evidence is all around us etched in stone" "subtitle by:" "Farhad 767 linkinpark_767_bonjovi@yahoo." "Com" " as I rememver Mr. parr was an old hermit." " Right and he lived up on the Mountain he had a place up there it'd been there a long, long time sort of in the winter, I guess the fall or the winter 1940 some of the young kids started to disappear" "nobody knew anything about why they were disappearing finally one day old Mr. parr come down into the market and said:" "I'm finally finished and what did he mean by that?" "Well I guess nobody knew at first but the police finally went up on the Mountain and they search his house and they found the bodies of 7 kids from the area and those were the seven kids that were missing" "and then they brought them out of the woods one at a time." "It just was a terrible thing it just tore the community up each of them had again been disemboweled there was again reported strange markings of carvings on their hands on their foreheads ritualistic carvings, if you well well, rusting parr admitted to this crime" "and in the court he said that the reason he killed the children is that he was doing what this old lady ghost had told him to do now it's possible that this man was trying to fit himself into the mythos of the Blair witch" "but that's conjecture one child, Kyle Brody would escape from parr's clutches he was able to give testimony and it was his words that decided the fate of the burkittsville killer order order and ladies and gentlemen I once again quote Kyle Brody" "he told me to stand in the corner and face the wall" "I could hear Emily screaming he was cutting her" "I looked." "He was cutting a symbol on her face sometimes he would come up to me do you hear her?" "Do you hear the woman's voice?" "I would cry after a few days, he killed her he cut her open and after he took everything out of her, he left with her and I never saw her again when he came back he told me not to be sad" "that he'd bring someone else back soon they burned rusting parr's house to the ground that night he was hanged four months later on November 22, 1941" "I had a tape one time of a TV .." "Of a newsreel showing him where he was murdered he was killed for murdering those seven boys why did you do it Mr. parr?" " I hear voices in my head." " What kind of voices?" " A woman's." " Whose voice, Mr. parr?" " No idea who it was." " Was it Satan?" "Was it Blair witch?" " Could've been." " How did you kill the children Mr. parr?" " With knives." " Were you alone in the killing?" " Yes how did you get the children into the woods?" " Promised them things." " What kind of things?" " Candy" " did you kill other children that we don't know about?" " No." " Over here Mr. parr." "Mr. parr why those seven children?" "That's what the voices told me the writings on the wall in your house what do they mean?" "What were the writings on the wall, Mr. parr" " did you write those?" "Did you write on the walls?" " No who wrote on the walls Mr. parr you've been sentenced to death do you feel this is fair?" "Yes." "Mr. parr do you think God has forgiven you?" "Yes have you asked the priest for absolution?" "Yes members of your family been to see you?" "No." "Mr. parr Mr. parr" " what?" " Nothing I don't know why you have to have very conversation on video" " tape some ambience." " We're making a documentary not about us getting lost we're making a documentary about a witch" "I have a camera doesn't hurt cuz we'll look back on this and laugh heartly." "Believe me" "so we're working over there and all of a sudden" "I hear kind of a commotion from the other side of the foundation and I hear, like, rocks banging together and we kind of ran around the side and apparently what happened was that Pete was removing a stone" "and a section of the wall just caved in nobody was hurt this was only this section of the wall by this was only about four or five feet off the ground and so I checked and nobody was injured and I told them clear this out a little bit" "and about 20 minutes later Pete comes running up and he's got this dirty old like a backpack in his hand by the way they had located those it appeared the stones had been there for many many years and had not been disturbed" "so it makes you wonser how someone had removed those stones forensically in other words stone by stone carefully not disturbing them and then putting them back in the same exact order that they were originally in the ground make you wonder why they were hiding them there" "certaintly not for someone to find them cuz they would stay there for years and years more if they hadn't have done that anthropology dig what I recognized real quickly were a couple of 16-millimeter film cans and there was also what looked like some videotape cartridges in there" "this had nothing at all to do with colonial period stuff of course and so, I called the sheriff footage was found allegedly that was filmed by the three students" "I contacted the local color lab we got it developed and I reviewed the film and all I found was the students themselves some scary noises in the woods at night and a few examples of that but no concrete evidence on what happened to the students" "listen hello?" "Hello?" "It's all around us this backpack was found in sterile soil which is like the bottom of the site it's just you know from there to the middle of the earth is just dirt the original house at the site had burned down" "and so there was a layer of ash that was like sitting in the interior of the house like the basement so this knapsack had been in sterile soil with no evidence around it of disturbance over the top of it was an undisturbed layer of ash" "and the whole thing was boxed in by basically a colonial-era wall that was undisturbed it was even a forensic expert could not have put that thing into the site without disturbing the charcoal, the wall or the sterile soil" "it was as if it materialized and of course that not the language of science so I can't I just don't know what to say about this, really at the time that the footage was found it was scary" "it was very very eerie and it's not something that I'd really want to look at to tell you the truth I've kind of avoided it" "I really don't feel too comfortable with seeing the last few days of my brother's life on video" "I really just don't feel too comfortable with that it's very eerie well, when they found this videotape or film or recordings of whatever it was immediately the Blair witch business emerged and people became superstitous and they said, well mabe this is connected to the Blair witch" "well, I though it was kind of fishy myself" "I looked at th whole thing as possibly a hoax or whatever but it was still strange after reviewing the film I still thought it was a hoax well, there's always that possibility, but, uh" "I think I mentioned earlier" "I think it would be remote that it's a hoax cuz of the way the tapes were hidden, and" "the fact that it just to view the tapes they are very realistic and they do the tape is from a time period the students would have been able to have taped it oh God God" " hurry up." " I'm coming my boots aren't laced oh my God what the fuck is that?" "What the fuck is that?" "The case of the black hills disappearances has once again been closed the investigation was reopened last October after film reels and videocassettes supposedly belonging to the three missing film students were found by a Maryland university anthropology class" "Frederick county police officials declared today that the found footage was inconclusive and that all possible leads on the case have been exhausted" "Heather donahu, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams disappeared in 1994 while shooting a documentary film project in the black hills area near burkittsville the three student filmmakers are still missing burkittsville has only got myself and one deputy we did the best we could" "we called in the county authorities early and we contacted the FBI later for more in-depth searching and I hate to publicly criticize someone in law enforcement" "I was in law enforcement for 32 years" "I just saw that there were thing, maybe that could have been done that weren't done" "I did a very good job well, it seems like that the this something happens about every 50 or 60 years to make the Blair witch theory continue on and I think that's probably what the cameramen are doin'" "they were hopin' to carry it on in some way and maybe they did they may have disappeared who knows for sure?" "But it's just strange that it always happens almost in a 50-year pattern that she somehow surfaces or something surfaces that lead to her" "I think they knew the legend but I don't think they knew the whole history" "I don't think they felt any fear but I don't think they felt any kind of respect" "I think to them it was just another project it was a way to get a grade and, uh, I think they met her and I think she met them when she was ready to and I think they're gone" "I am so, so sorry for everything that has happened" "because, in spite of what Mike says now, it is my fault because it was my project" "everything had to be my way and this is where we've ended up and it's all cuz of me that we're here now hungry and cold" "and hunted" "I think it's unexplained" "I think it remains unexplained what happened to them in my law enforcement career I've seen people that have actually decided to disappear on their own and reestablish a new identity there was no reason in this case to do that" "and there's no indication that they did there's never been any evidence found to show that they're that they fell upon foul play that they're no longer living" "so it's something in between or certainly, in the very least something very suspicious" "subtitle by:" "Farhad 767 linkinpark_767_bonjovi@yahoo." "Com"