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 Often dressed in out of date clothing, they sometimes dart ahead of the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.
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.
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 phenomenons 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), Hauntings loosely patterned on the Dudleytown ghost village in Connecticut and Bachelor’s Grove cemetery in Midlothian, Illinois