Original subtitles

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 ? - Okey , 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 he. 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 developin' 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, rustin 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 rustin 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