BURKITT’S WOODS
Location: Burkitt’s Woods is located in the Blair Woods Forest Preserve, north of Burkittsville, Maryland, 40 miles west of Baltimore.
Description: Covering more than 80 square miles of semi-charted wilderness, Burkitt’s Woods consists of hilly terrain of Maryland pine and oak bordering Tappy East Creek. The only structure in these rolling hills is the ruined foundation of the old Rustin Parr house.
Ghostly Manifestations:
The legend of the Blair Witch is essentially a combination of the biography of
Elly Kedward and the story of Burkittsville, Maryland. Since Kedward was
convicted of a series of atrocities in 1786, several strange things have been
seen and recorded in the vicinity of Burkitt’s Woods and further exasperated
by major incidents that roughly occur every fifty years.
Since Burkittsville was founded on the old
site of the abandoned ghost town of Blair, hunters exploring the woods and
fishermen on the Tappy East Creek have reported seeing a strange woman prowling
the woods. She is often described as a very wizened figure slightly hunched over
who lurks just out of distance of those who see her. Sometimes, she stands
behind the trees and spooks anyone who notices her or just stands and stares out
over the creek as if in a trance. Several witnesses ignore her thinking she’s
just a strange old woman, but when they look back, she has vanished. Some
accounts say she floats through the woods about three to five feet above the
ground. Those who haven’t seen her just report on the indiscernible feeling of
dread from being in the woods as if being watched by someone.
Drivers and truckers passing through the rim
have seen other things such as the sprits of children playing in the woods at
night. Often dressed in out of date clothing, they sometimes dart ahead of the
headlights of individuals driving through the woods in the evening hours. One
reported police report tells of a truck driver who had to break to avoid hitting
a young girl who darted across the road. He hit his brakes, slid to a stop and
then hopped out and looked for the girl. He called the local police to report
the incident so he wouldn’t get in trouble, but no trace of a girl was found
of a child running loose that night.
In the winter of 1989, a driver passing through Burkittsville alone was driving alone through the woods when he casually looked to his passenger side door and saw a young boy sitting there looking at him. Briefly rattled by the image, he too hit the brake and skidded to a stop just before the entrance into the Forest Preserve as he looked again. The seatbelt was drawn and latched, but the seat was empty.
Up until 2008, numerous entrepreneurs tried to profit off the ghosts, but none of them were quite so dedicated or obsessed with the legend as Jeff Patterson of nearby Jericho Mills. Living out of a former broom factory bordering Tappy East Creek and the Blair Woods Forest Reserve, Patterson not only sold genuine sticks and mounds of dirt from the area but held camping tours of the grounds and aggressively interviewed individuals who claimed to have experiences.
"The Blair Witch is the most genuine and best historically verified apparition in the history of paranormal research." He declares emphatically. "She has been encountered by more witnesses than the Bell Witch of Tennessee and documented more Gold City's Miner Forty-Niner."
Although Patterson's fascination for the Blair Witch often borders on obsession, he's possibly the foremost authority on her existence. He has more than eighty-two hours of footage he believes is her shadowy wispy ghost wandering through the area. Taken with trail cameras and motion-activated equipment, the majority of the footage in his collection is of a smoky human-like image wandering through the trees at a distance. Convinced he's not dealing with hunters, fishermen, campers and bears stumbling around on their hind legs, he can be seen heading several times to the photography department at the University of Maryland to have his footage analyzed, cleaned up or modified.
"Although the local historical society rebukes this," Patterson continues. "Elly has been sighted at least 250 times since her death in 1786, and she almost always appears as a shadow although some reports describe her as taking human forms and vanishing into no where. In fact, after the Revolutionary War, this patch of woods was known as the Dark Woods because people trafficking by carriage through her were terrified of the shadows floating over the woods in front of them. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers often shot at shadows in this area they thought were Union soldiers. They'd hear their voices called, feel something grab them from out of no where and riders every so often felt something jump on their horse with them and wrap its arms and legs around them. Before any of that, the local Choctaw Indians avoided these woods because of evil spirits.
"Long before those three kids made like Amelia Earhart and vanished, locals have described a lot of strange things in the woods like kids running through the trees and vanishing, screams from out of no where and weird noises like trees falling and crashing noises as if something very large was coming through the area. Hunters have come across hundreds of these totems, circles or triangles of sticks and twigs bound very tightly by vines, but no one knows who's making them. The theory is that they were all made hundreds of years ago by the local Indians, but I talked to one guy who went out on Tappy East Creek for a few days of camping and fishing, and he suddenly found one stuck in the trees over his tent where he never seen it before."
"Last Summer..." Patterson adds. "I tracked down a guy who reported he'd been terrified by a presence that had attacked him. He'd been camping off Tappy East near Cauldron Rock and sometime in the night, he described a force that invaded his tent and pounded his head several times in to the ground underneath. He was so rattled that he deserted his campsite and raced to his car, driving non-stop to get out of the area until he reached Hanover, Pennsylvania. His relatives searched for him for... I think they said about a week until they found him. He never went camping again, but several of his possessions came through me and were sold off as souvenirs. Only thing I kept was his camera, and somehow, someway he got an image of the thing that attacked him..."
On a roll of thirty-six exposures, Jeff has
images of a fairly innocuous camping trip. A shot of the sun setting over the
lake, a tent perfectly pitched, a proud fisherman with his catch and several
other shots, but the last of the twenty-two images shows what looks like a dark ethereal
humanoid spying from a distance. The entirety of the image is in focus except
for just this figure. When the photo lab at the University of Maryland
digitally-altered it to bring it into focus, the form turns into a thin willowy
woman with long dark hair and a skull where her face should be.
History: Blair was founded around 1785, but its history and notoriety really
begins when Elly Kedward, an Irish immigrant arrived in 1786. Convicted of
abducting and bleeding several children to death, she was considered guilty of
witchcraft and tied to a tree in the middle of the woods to die of exposure.
According to legend, she swore revenge on all her accusers. The curse soon took
effect as the Blair population decreased with numerous suspicious deaths and
several other residents moving away. Today, the official explanation was a
cholera outbreak that infected the settlement.
The city of Burkittsville was founded on the same site and even used several of the same buildings. The legend of the Blair Witch was completely forgotten or ignored until 1941 when serial killer Rustin Parr attributed his murder toll to “a wild woman in the woods.” His murders and claims brought new attention to the legend as a local ghost story as believers started perusing old newspapers for old sightings and supernatural incidents such as the mysterious disappearance of a girl in Tappy East Creek. It took the disappearance of three college kids that brought the phenomenon to national notoriety and the attention of millions of would-be ghost-hunters. Today, the Burkittsville Police constantly have to chase visitors out of the park after curfew.
In 2008, the local town council had a judge pass a ruling against illegal profiteering with the Burkitt's Woods name or Blair Witch reference, closing down just over fifty Blair Witch websites, including Patterson's. However, by this time, much of the popularity had already died down, and what had been almost three hundred kids in one week with cameras in the preserve had dwindled down to less than ten in over a month. Nevertheless, every so often, the local police still issue fines to anyone in the woods without licenses to fish or camp in the area.
Identity: Allegedly Elly Kedward, but the camera footage left behind by the college students indicates a phenomenon much more exotic than a surviving spirit. The ten hours of footage, largely the activity and foul-colored language of the students as they wander the woods, actually has less than five minutes of something supernatural happening on tape. It supposedly shows the students in the old Rustin Parr house which actually burned down in 1941; the ruins of the foundation is where the footage was unearthed from under three feet of undisturbed earth. This suggests that there could be two phenomenon occurring here: traditional hauntings complicated by pockets of time opening and closing. It suggests that the teens became trapped in the house as it came to the present or as they entered the past. Their footage has been dated as having been buried in their canisters in the 1840s when the house was built. As incredible and as preposterous as this sounds, it is almost supported by the fact that surveyors cannot match the landscape in the footage with the current landscape and that a nearby housing development is missing in certain frames where it is supposed to be seen easily from a distance.
Comments: The Blair Witch Project (1999/2000), Hauntings loosely patterned on the Dudley Town ghost village in Connecticut, Mount Misery Woods in Huntingdon, New York and Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in Midlothian, Illinois.