Beyond Blair Witch: The Haunting of America from the Carlisle Witch to the Real Ghosts of Burkittsville

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"It's just so real!"

When The Blair Witch Project's principal actors appeared following the film's debut at Sundance, audiences gasped — then cheered. Not because the three young actors had managed to clean up so well after an eight-day shoot — without showers or regular meals — in the backwoods of Maryland, but because they were alive at all!

The Blair Witch Project, the "mockumentary" that was shot for a mere $25,000 (or $33,000, or $60,000, depending on which publication and expense sheet you read) and then went on to make nearly $1.6 million in its first weekend, makes much of its fictional "reality."

Real actors contributed their names to the three fictional filmmakers.

Those herky-jerky onscreen images, which remind at least one viewer per showing of a childhood tendency toward motion sickness, were shot by three amateurs.

And Burkittsville, Maryland, much to the current consternation of its residents, is a real community.

It's in Burkittsville that the fact and fantasy that mingled so successfully in The Blair Witch Project are most clearly separated once again. Just days after the film's release, the town council of Burkittsville voted to increase police presence in the tiny community, especially at the old graveyard where parts of The Blair Witch Project were shot (without the usual irksome location issues — items such as permission from the town or the community's churches). A sudden influx of fans, all looking for the "historical" sites depicted in the film, overwhelmed residents and police officers, who found themselves confronted by frustrated people flatly refusing to believe that Blair Witch was nothing morethan the imagining of Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick. One young woman publicly accused the town of "covering up the true events" to "avoid bad publicity"; her traveling companion, a self-declared neo-pagan, suggested that it was time for the community to "come clean," as Salem had, and, instead of "denying their history," that the residents of Burkittsville should "embrace their Wiccan past and erect a proper memorial to Elly Kedward."

An exit survey outside the Bridge Theater revealed that seven of every ten viewers believed the legend of the Blair Witch. Five of every ten believed that the Blair Witch — or at least Elly Kedward — was a documented historical figure.Were directors Sánchez and Myrick such cinematic geniuses that they could hoodwink thousands?

No. Not at all. As the two freely admit, they were as startled as anyone else when absolute strangers began publicly attesting to the film's validity. Claims that the Blair Witch was a real person left Sánchez and Myrick shaking their heads, delighted that their prerelease activities had generated the much-needed buzz to propel the film into general release but baffled by the vehemence brought to both sides of the argument. As they told anyone willing to listen, they were simply playing to a public already primed by nearly three hundred years of campfire tales that left listeners quivering in their sleeping bags to accept this story.

Elly Kedward, their amalgamation of the central figures of so many of America's wicked witch legends, drew on a uniquely New World set of tales that, though repeated orally all over the eastern United States for three centuries, had yet to be showcased for the mass media. What Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and others had previously done for vampires, Sánchez and Myrick had now done for colonial witches.

Their tale galvanized all the previously free-floating images, themes, and motifs one might expect of this genre into a single story, a story they then proceeded to present in a totally new format — film — using techniques that, though unnerving, proved a perfect partnership for their images. That Haxan Films could expand the "reality" of the environment they'd created into the "supporting documents" and "evidence" on The Blair Witch Project's companion Web site, that the Web site was evidently always meant to be considered an integral part of the viewing experience (in fact, much of the film remains slightly incomprehensible without the Web site), only serves to illustrate the genre's stability as a distinct, recognizable literary entity. Regardless of the medium, the essential story is so much a part of our group awareness that, even in totally unexpected surroundings, it continues to draw us in, to whisper those never-quite-forgotten campfire legends in our ear.

We believe.

We believe because the most powerful frames of this film, though a totally modern creation, draw on our oldest fears — the things that went bump in the nights of our childhoods. We've been hearing bits of the Blair Witch legend all our lives! The incredible resonance the film created with its audience stems from a uniquely American version of what Jung called the "collective unconscious," a set of symbols, fears, even dreams, peopled by archetypes — what Hollywood calls stereotypes. By deliberately tweaking those memories and bringing them to the fore, Sánchez and Myrick could leave us sitting in pitch-black theaters and know that every person in those seats was filling the darkened screen with the same terrors.

It's the haunting familiarity, the commonality of those terrors, the shared experience of America's occult legends, that allowed viewers to whisper, "I know I've seen that before!" to one another as the stickmen twirled in the breeze. This despite the fact that this evocative figure is more modern than the Nike swoosh!

Considering the instinctive recognition of the wicked witch imagery and themes evidenced by Blair Witch Project audiences, you might expect to find massive tomes of reference material floating about in local libraries. You won't. Like the urban legends that circulated in spoken form for decades before anyone thought to gather them into comprehensive written collections, most of America's witch tales remain oral accounts.

The stories that follow, many presented for the first time in written form, track down the memory fragments and splinters of story that The Blair Witch Project used to such powerful effect. It is time to reintroduce those eldritch tales that continue to tickle our imaginations and identify the historical and folkloric archetypes that have been recast in the Blair Witch mythos, causing thousands to believe that Elly Kedward might still reach out to drag unsuspecting students into the Maryland woods.

Here are the tales that inspired the most common comment outside the theaters showing The Blair Witch Project: "But I know I've heard of something like that happening somewhere! Remember when . . ."