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the legend, year by year
This is the history as the movie's promoters tell it, on their web site and in
the Sci-Fi Channel special, retold in my own words. It is their
story, not mine. In the right-hand column is what I could find to back
it up. I searched our Maryland room, the county histories, two indexes of old
Frederick County newspapers, and every folklore collection we could get on
interlibrary loan.
| when |
the story says |
what I found |
| 1785 |
In the village of Blair, some children accuse a woman named Elly Kedward of witchcraft. She's found guilty and driven out into the woods in the dead of winter, and everyone assumes she died out there. |
No Kedward in any record I could reach. That proves less than you'd think; records from that time are thin, especially for a woman alone. |
| 1786 |
By the next winter her accusers and many of the village children have vanished. The rest of the town packs up and leaves, and they agree never to speak her name. |
Nothing. If half a town's children disappeared, I would expect someone somewhere to have written a letter about it. |
| 1824 |
Burkittsville is founded where Blair used to be. |
Burkittsville is certainly there and certainly old. A town called Blair underneath it, I can't find. |
| 1886 |
A little girl goes missing and a search party goes out. The girl comes home on her own. The searchers don't: they're found at a spot called Coffin Rock, and the way they were found is the stuff of nightmares. |
A whole search party found dead in one place would have made every paper in the state. The indexes have nothing. The fishermen in the movie tell this one very well, though. |
| 1940–41 |
Children go missing over one winter and spring. A hermit named Rustin Parr, who lives alone in the woods, walks into town and confesses to the deaths of seven of them. He says the spirit of an old woman made him do it. He's hanged. There's a detail about how he did it involving a corner of the room, which matters at the very end of the movie. I won't spoil it. |
This is the one that made me work hardest, because 1941 isn't that long ago. People alive today would remember a case like that. I found no Parr trial, no execution, and nobody who remembers one. |
| Oct. 1994 |
Three student filmmakers walk into the Black Hills Forest near Burkittsville to make a documentary about the witch, and don't come out. |
This is the movie itself. The three are actors and they're alive and well, and I'm glad. |
| Oct. 1995 |
Their film and tapes are dug up in the woods a year later. |
See above. |
// the book
The special also talks about a rare old book about a cursed town. I have
requested it through interlibrary loan under every title and spelling I
could think of. The request came back each time with the same polite note:
no library holding found. My colleague Walt, who has been at this desk since
1971, says he has never been asked for it before this summer, and now he's
been asked eleven times.
// so why keep the page up?
Because the absence of a record isn't quite the same as proof, and because I
enjoy the looking. And because every week somebody writes to me with an uncle's
story or a grandmother's warning about the woods, and those stories are old
and real, even when they aren't about Elly Kedward. I've started keeping them
in a folder. Maybe that's the real project.
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This page last updated September 19, 1999
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