The Burkittsville Question

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the burkittsville question
or, could any of it be true?

I saw The Blair Witch Project on the evening of July 30, the day it opened everywhere, at a packed theater in Hagerstown. I drove home on back roads with the dome light on. I am thirty-eight years old.

That was two months ago and I still haven't settled it in my own mind. Not whether the movie is scary (it is, terribly, and mostly because of what you don't see) but the bigger question underneath it: is there a real legend? Is there a Blair Witch story that people in Frederick County told each other long before three film students walked into the woods with a camera? I live about twenty minutes from Burkittsville. I work the evening reference desk at a public library. If anyone was ever going to look into this properly, it might as well be me.

This page is where I'm keeping track. I've tried to be honest in both directions.

// what I know for certain

The three people in the film are actors, and they're fine. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams used their own first names, which is part of why it feels so real. They've been in the papers all summer.
The movie was made by two filmmakers, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, and it first played at the Sundance festival in January.
From what I've read, the actors really did most of the filming themselves, on a black-and-white film camera and a little video camcorder, and they were sent through the woods for about a week with directions left for them along the way. They didn't always know what was coming. That explains a lot about their faces.
Burkittsville is a real town. Small, quiet, a couple hundred people, in the valley below South Mountain.

// what I'm still weighing

The movie comes wrapped in a whole history: a woman banished from the village of Blair in the 1700s, missing children, a hermit in the 1940s. The official web site and the special on the Sci-Fi Channel laid it all out with dates and old engravings and very serious people being interviewed. I've written up the whole story in my own words, along with what I could and couldn't find in the library, on a separate page:

>> the legend, year by year, with my notes
// the ledger

makes me wonder

makes me doubt

• Every part of Maryland has old stories. My grandmother had three about South Mountain alone.

• Plenty of real Maryland legends never made it into a book. Most of what my grandmother knew was never written down anywhere.

• Things get left out of county histories. Poor people, women living alone, anyone the town wanted to forget.

• The woods out there are genuinely dark, even in daylight. You stand at the edge of them and you understand how a story starts.

• I have not found one mention of Elly Kedward in anything published before this year.

• There's no Black Hills Forest on any Maryland map in our collection.

• Nobody I've asked who grew up near Burkittsville heard of a Blair Witch before this spring.

• The story is almost too tidy. Real legends are messier. They contradict themselves. This one has a timeline.

// the drive out

On Sunday, August 15, I drove over the mountain to Burkittsville with my sister Dolores, who thinks this whole project is ridiculous and came along anyway. It's a pretty little place: one main road, old brick and stone houses, fields all around. Up the road is Gathland State Park with the big stone arch for the Civil War newspapermen, which I'd seen as a kid and forgotten.

We weren't the only visitors. We passed two cars of college kids with camcorders and one family taking a picture next to the town sign. A man working in his yard waved at us in a way that I would describe as patient. I felt a little ashamed, to be honest, and we didn't stay long. People live there. They didn't ask for any of this.

Dolores's verdict, on the drive home: "It's a nice town and you need a hobby." That's the only thing on this page I'll put in quotation marks.

// where I've landed (for now)

old legend  [###-------]  made for the film

My honest opinion as of this week: the Blair Witch herself, with her name and her dates, was written for the movie. The people who made it are clever and they did their homework on how legends sound. But I keep that one little ### on the left side of the meter, and here's why. The movie works on people because the shape of the story is very old: a woman pushed out of town, children lost in the woods, something waiting past the edge of the trees. Those stories are real. Every county has them. The filmmakers didn't invent the fear. They just gave it a name and an address.

If you have any source from before 1998, an old newspaper item, a family story, a school report, anything that mentions a witch near Burkittsville, please write to me. I will check it and post it here, whichever way it points.

// letters

From Gary in Pennsylvania: My uncle says his grandfather talked about a witch in the hills near Frederick. No name, no dates. Probably nothing, but I thought of your page.
Thank you, Gary. I've got it written down. That's exactly the kind of thing that makes this interesting, and exactly the kind of thing I can't check.

From Renee, a college student in Baltimore: We watched the Sci-Fi special in my dorm and half the floor believed it. You should put up a page just for them.
This is that page, Renee. Send them over.

From "a Frederick native": Please ask your readers to leave the town sign alone.
Readers: please leave the town sign alone.

you are visitor

since August 3, 1999 (more than I expected)

Write to me: [email protected]
Lorraine Beachley, Hagerstown, Maryland

Last updated Sunday, September 19, 1999
The Blair Witch Project belongs to its filmmakers and to Artisan Entertainment. This is just one viewer's notebook.