Yes Heather, there is a Blair Witch..

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.

The Black Hills Forest was actually infamous even prior to the settlement of Europeans on what would soon be known as American soil. No native tribal Indians of the area dared to venture into the area. In the 1600s, one Colonel Blair of England asked a local tribesman to help them on an expedition to the area. The native's response was to attempt
sabotage to the expedition. Despite this setback, Blair and his men settled a fort there to help defend Lord Calvert's colony to the east. This fort was named after Colonel Blair, and became the ill-fated town of Blair, Maryland.

Colonel Blair's wife Virginia had joined him on the trip from England. She was known to be shy, delicate and submissive woman who did not share her husband's enthusiasm of the New World. However, after arriving and settling into her new life, Virginia Blair became obsessed with learning about the herbs and spices found there. She became a
very different woman, with confidence and wisdom. After Colonel Blair died of an illness within a year of their arrival, Virginia became a "rare example of a woman wielding power in Colonial America" and was instrumental in the early success of the Puritan town.

In 1785, several children in the township of Blair, Maryland accused an Irish-born woman named Elly Kedward of witchcraft. She was found guilty and banished to the woods 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.

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.

The year of 1828, 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 creek bed, and the river water itself became oily and contaminated for several months.

In 1886, a small girl named Robin Weaver 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 Two, 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 1941, children began disappearing. 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 victims at Coffin Rock. Symbols had been cut into their faces, chests, hands and feet. They had been disembowled. They also discovered an eighth missing child, Kyle Brody, who was traumatized and found standing in the corner of the basement.

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, A Montgomery College professor led his students on an anthropological dig at a condemned house in the woods. While excavating in the basement, 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 what they did not understand. Was it witch craft? 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 victims of Russ Parr numbered seven. 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.

What do you believe in? What makes you afraid?