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[ Woman Narrating ] In 1785, several children...

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

in the township of Blair, Maryland,

accused Elly Kedward of witchcraft.

She was found guilty and banished 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.

[ Man ] You look a little blurry. Let me zoom out on you.

Okay. Okay ?

More. Okay, I got you. Got it ?

This is my home, 'Kay.

Oh-- which I am leaving the comforts of for the weekend...

to explore the Blair witch.

Well, Heather was probably...

one of the two or three best students...

that I've had the pleasure of teaching.

She was committed. She was energetic. She was very creative.

She was someone who, I think,

reminded me of myself really a lot at her age.

She was looking to develop and find her voice.

Plus, she was interested in documentaries,

which my own background is in documentaries.

I met Heather in high school.

I met her when I moved...

to Montgomery County, Maryland.

She was one of the first people that I actually met.

Just met her in passing in the hallway.

And then we were in a play together.

And, uh, that's how we really became acquainted.

She was this tiny little thing that--

First go in and, of course, Mom was there...

and the baby's been brought up for the first time.

I stick my arms out to go pick her up, and--

"Careful, careful, you'll break her !"

I said, "I didn't break the others. How am I going to break this one ?"

So, uh, I picked her up and held her and--

I guess for an hour or so before I gave her back to Mama.

She had submitted a proposal to me...

to do a short documentary on...

the legend of Blair Witch.

It was something I had never heard of before, to tell you the truth--

[ Heather ] We're doing a documentary... Yeah.

about the Blair witch. Oh !

Oh, have you heard of the Blair witch ? That's an old, old, old story.

As I remember-- [ DeCoto ] Here was a legend...

that had developed in this area over the course of couple of centuries.

Whenever a particular bad sequence of events happened in this community,

there seemed to be a tendency to blame it on Blair Witch,

who apparently was a woman who had been cast out...

during the colonial era as a witch.

It seemed like a great opportunity to interview people...

who had been passing down this legend for a couple of centuries.

[ Heather ] Could you just run it for a couple of feet for me,

so that we can check that it's okay ? Sure.

Joshua was more glitz.

He thought it would be cool to be in the film business.

He was not willing, I don't think,

to do the kind of work that was really necessary...

to develop a voice.

I think Heather and Josh were really sort of polar opposites in a lot of ways,

but clearly, they liked each other.

I didn't know Heather very well. I think--

I guess I really only met her once.

And that's when she was talking about...

the Blair Witch documentary and going into the woods...

and wanting Josh to be a part of that.

[ DeCoto ] They collaborated on several projects together.

I mentioned to her a couple of times that I was concerned...

that his-- some of the negative aspects of-of his--

um--

really lack of-of commitment and energy would...

perhaps be negative for her, but...

it turns out that they did like working together.

It didn't really go over too well, because I remember we fought about it...

before he left.

And I mean, I feel really badly about that now,

because, I mean, we argued horribly.

But I just had this-- I just had this feeling.

I didn't want him to go off with her. It was just something about...

her that rubbed me the wrong way.

It was just instinct, I guess.

I didn't want him to go off for the whole weekend.

So what's up ? Are you happy with the way the documentary is going ?

Yes, I am. Yeah. Yeah ?

And I'm very pleasantly surprised by our little Mikey.

"Our little Mikey" ? [ Laughs ] Little Mikey.

When he was a little kid he was a pain in the, uh, you know.

He was a pain. He was, uh-- He was really, uh,

always pushing my parents' buttons.

Um, sort of the devil with the halo on his head.

We had the Golden Rule of no cursing in the house,

and, of course, he'd have to walk by and slip out the little ones.

Nothing bad, but he was always sort of, you know, on the side.

And, you know, they'd catch it and then you'd catch it.

So he was always that kind of character.

I-I met him a couple of times, actually.

Josh used to go with Mike to go drinking and stuff and--

Um, but I wouldn't say I knew him really well.

The last night I saw him he was excited.

He was really happy with himself. He came into the house.

He was all packed and ready to go for the next day.

And we sat down. We had a cup of coffee together...

and-and we talked about the whole-- the whole thing.

He really didn't know too, too much about it. That's what they were going to find out.

But it was something he really felt that he loved doing--

you know, doing the sound equipment stuff, and--

You know, I just told him to go out and be happy.

Make yourself something.

[ Mike ] I could help you, but I'd rather stay here and record. Okay.

[ Heather ] Packs are on. We're ready to go. Let's rock.

We gotta go up to the shack ? The shanty ? [ Heather ] Yeah.

Wow. [ Clanging ]

[ Josh ] Yeah, that can help the-- Oh, my God.

The search of the three missing Montgomery College students...

continues in Frederick County tonight,

as dozens of volunteers and state officials join local forces...

in what has now become a full-scale search of the Black Hills area.

Local officials, combined with over 100 search volunteers,

have failed to come up with any signs of the three missing filmmakers.

Montgomery College film students Heather Donahue,

Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard...

were reportedly shooting a school project...

about a local myth called the Blair Witch.

At this time, their whereabouts are still unknown.

[ Heather ] Josh feels it's necessary to look at the map now,

even though I know where we're going, and we're going straight up there.

If you'd known where we're going, we wouldn't be hiking like--

[ Josh ] We're in the middle of the woods-- Some of it is off-trail hiking.

I have harbored some guilt...

because, as I looked back over the proposal later,

I realized that I had neglected to notice that...

Heather had suggested going into the woods...

for a couple of days, working on the film.

We started to wonder the next day,

and my parents started panicking.

And for weeks after that it was just numb.

I don't really remember feeling too much other than numbness.

[ Woman ] When I saw her mother,

that's-- [ Sighs ]

that was probably the first time I really felt it.

And I started to cry.

[ Narrator ] The only piece of evidence found by police...

was Joshua Leonard's car...

parked on Black Rock Road.

Uh, we checked the car over completely. Never found any clues with the vehicle.

We checked with witnesses that may have seen the film students,

and never could-- we could never locate 'em.

The Black Hills search of three missing filmmakers has been called off.

Ten days and thousands of man-hours have been unable to produce...

any clues to the cause of the mysterious disappearances.

Family and friends of the Montgomery College graduates...

are holding on to the hope that someone or something will provide some answers.

Well, when the story turned into a really big story,

I went to the sheriff's office and I tried to talk with him,

and he's really been no help.

I mean, it's, uh--

I-I joined the search party, and...

I called when we didn't find anything on the search party,

and I told him I thought we should still keep lookin'...

because I know there are clues out there.

I still go out and I still look, and I know there's something out there.

He's talked to me a few times, but I-- He just doesn't--

He doesn't want to hear anything I have to say.

[ Woman ] December 12, 1994: [ Fulcher ] "Dear Sheriff Cravens,

"I have tried repeatedly to reach you on the phone,

"but you have not returned any of my calls.

"You and I both know the history of Burkittsville...

"and the events that have earned our town its peculiar reputation.

"Past events have proven that something evil resides...

"in the Black Hills that surround us--

"the same Black Hills that those three young people hiked into a few months ago...

"and never came back from.

"I urge you to look to the past for the answers you seek.

Sincerely, Dottie Fulcher."

They won't tell me anything. That's why there's this...

feeling that I have that they know more than they're willing to talk about.

I think that they don't want to admit that they saw her and that's she's there.

You know, Elly is not very far from any of us at any time,

and she chooses her time to appear.

And... they just don't want to acknowledge that.

My name is Luken Johnson, and I'm a witch.

Witchcraft is basically a science.

You have a delineation between paganism...

or polytheistic religions-- more than one god--

and witchcraft, which is a scientific study of energies and materials.

By the power of air, I bless and consecrate thee.

From the goddess to the god, soon would it be.

Wiccanism is a new religion.

What you got to understand here, man, is...

we lost most of the records for what would be considered witchcraft...

throughout the latter part of the 1700 to 1800s...

and a lot beforehand with the "burning times," as we refer to it.

Bring out Elizabeth Selwin.

[ Johnson ] These are when people were tortured and killed-- the Salem witch hunts.

A simple case of bad bread-- the grain in the bread-- caused "hallucinogenics."

You get a bunch of kids hallucinating that someone is making fun of them...

or torturing them, then, of course, parents are going to react in a protective manner.

Before you know it, people are dying by the hundreds because so-and-so did something evil.

- Witch ! - [ Spits ]

[ Crowd Clamoring ] Burn ! Burn !

[ Johnson ] Most of the time it wasn't anything to do with evil.

These were people that were trying to help through either natural lore, herbalism,

any kind of medicine that may not have been standard practice.

- Burn the witch ! - [ Crowd Clamoring ]

But by the Revolutionary War,

these trials, which were quite common at the time,

had somewhat faded out, and witchcraft had--

was a thing of the past,

except in the rural areas.

And there we had a lot of superstition among the populations,

and people still practiced witchcraft.

Two examples come to my mind--

one being a 1786 case...

of the Blair witch of Maryland;

the other one being the Bell witch of Adams, Tennessee, in 1817.

Now, while both of these cases are interesting academically,

I find the Blair witch of Maryland the most colorful.

[ Josh ] What's your take on the Blair witch at this point ?

Do you think she exists ? I don't know. I don't know.

[ Heather ] This is Burkittsville, formerly Blair.

It is a small, quiet Maryland town,

much like a small, quiet town anywhere.

I'm Bill Barnes. I'm the executive director...

to the historical society here in Burkittsville.

I've been that for quite a few years and am known as the town historian.

And, I've tried to keep up with our history and make it...

be alive to the people that come behind me.

Burkittsville was actually founded on another old town by the name of Blair.

And it was founded here in 1734 to protect the western approaches to Baltimore...

from attack by the Indians and so forth.

But it died out because of a witch.

Her name was Elly "Kedwards,"

and she took a bunch of the children-- kidnapped them--

and carried them off into the woods, and they never found them again.

And the people became very afraid and they pulled up and left and abandoned the town.

And it stayed abandoned for 40 years.

[ Narrator ] Though records from this period of history are scarce,

this registry of the seafaring vessel The Reliant...

shows that a woman named Elly Kedward,

the woman history has labeled as the Blair witch,

did in fact sail from Ireland to Baltimore...

in the summer of 1769.

The Blair Witch story begins like...

all other witch stories-- with an old, haggard lady.

And in this particular case, she was a Catholic...

living in a predominantly Protestant community.

The story goes that she had bled a few children,

and by the pinpricks,

probably because of some sort of illness that she detected...

or something to that effect.

The children went back and reported it to their parents.

This is, of course, at that time an early sign of witchcraft.

She was tried, summarily convicted and banished.

The winter she was banished was supposedly the worst ever,

and no one knows what happened to her.

She was left by herself out in the woods.

What they did was they blindfolded her, took her out into the woods--

and this was in the middle of the winter--

tied her to a tree and left her,

where she soon succumbed to the elements.

The following year, the young lady who was her first accuser...

and most of the other children who were her accusers...

and children of the village vanished throughout the course of the winter.

By the end of the winter, over half the town's children had disappeared.

Immediately, the townspeople blamed these disappearances...

on Elly the Witch.

The people simply vacated the area-- they left.

They abandoned the community, and they never spoke about the incident again.

[ Man ] "As he related to me, he had lived in a small town 40 miles to the north.

"The place had been abandoned, he told me, as it had come under a curse.

"The well-built homes that still stood there were boarded up and empty,

"with no sign as to why their denizens had chosen to leave so abruptly.

"This man had heard that the town had been cursed by a witch.

"And he claimed he had seen a cemetery full of the gravestones of children.

But whether that is true or not, I could not say."

[ Narrator ] In 1809, a rare book about the occurrences...

surrounding the Blair Witch legend was discovered.

Entitled The Blair Witch Cult,

this tome is supposedly a collection...

of firsthand accounts that illustrate the effects...

of the infamous Blair witch.

And the book is filled with bloodletting,

all kinds of bloody gore, witchcraft, paganism--

Basically it's a pack of lies. Don't believe any of it.

But the people of the time did believe in it.

[ Man ] "The awful hag wrenched the boy's head from his writhing body,

"and defiled the church with his warm blood.

"It was then that I noticed a dog's teat had sprouted from her leg.

"She controlled the animals in the forest, even the trees...

"seeming to do her bidding.

"When she walked, she didn't touch the ground.

"And her followers made a horrible mulch...

of the countless dead littering the streets."

The Blair Witch Cult, by Anonymous, 1809.

It was about the Blair witch, and it was pretty true--

pretty factual book about what really happened here.

But the Maryland Historical Society wanted it back,

and they took it over-- almost over-- my dead body.

But I couldn't keep it because it did belong to them.

Thirty-eight years later, a chance encounter...

resurrected the abandoned township of Blair.

They were building a railroad through here, and the gentleman building the railroad...

was out ridin' his horse and got lost, stumbled up on an old road,

and it led into what was Blair at the time.

He had a friend named Burkitt, and Mr. Burkitt was a developer,

and he talked him into coming here and developin' this area,

and he named it Burkittsville.

The town was actually formed about 1824,

and right about a year after that, the crops had come in.

Wheat was mostly what the farmers grew there.

And the crops were in and they decided to have a picnic down on the local creek.

[ Woman ] "Tappy East Creek has been possessed by a demon.

"Since Ilene's horrible death, a fortnight passed.

"The creek has been polluted by a foul oil and an abundance of strange totems.

Mary Johnson, 1825."

[ Woman Chanting ]

[ Moorehouse ] There was an incident that occurred...

involving a young child by the name of Ilene Treakle.

This little girl was playing in a very shallow stream of water, and she drowned.

That creek was real shallow.

It was only probably six to eight inches deep.

A child could just wade across or crawl across there, really, it was so shallow.

Well, supposedly, according to the story,

there was 12 witnesses who observed...

a ghostly white hand...

come up out of the water and drag the child under the water.

That's all they could see. Nobody ever saw a face or body.

All they remember seeing was the arm and the hand.

And before they could get to her, she had went and pulled her down.

She went under the rocks and the mud, and everything was calm again.

[ Moorehouse ] But I have a problem with this story.

How is it that 11 people happen to be in the right place at the same time...

to simultaneously see this ghostly hand come up and drag this child under the water ?

The river is searched. Now, unfortunately you're talking about knee-deep water.

It's only two or three feet at the maximum.

Her body should have easily been found. It's never found.

I think that in the case...

of the Ilene Treakle story...

is that there's another explanation,

that perhaps it was something like parental neglect.

Someone wasn't watching the child, and the child drowned.

[ Narrator ] For the first time in recorded history,

a death is blamed on the Blair witch.

The news of it spreads as far as Baltimore, sparking this reaction.

[ Man ] "Dear Sir: I find myself forced to write this letter...

"upon the atrocity I found within your pages this Sunday past.

"I've never seen such callousness shown towards the death of a young child,

"especially one who was taken from this world in such a terrible manner.

"As to your humorous view of the beliefs of her parents...

"that she was murdered by a ghost,

"I remind you that there have been many reports of such terrible specters...

"witnessed in the nearby townships.

"Whether or not these wild tales are true is incidental.

"The fact remains that a young girl has tragically drowned,

"and her memory should not be tarnished by such wild and torrid speculation...

"over the manner of her death.

Sincerely, Eugene Robertson."

The river, according to what we've been told through written records,

then turns oily and has a bunch of stick figures...

floating into it for the next week.

No one can use the river for any kind of water, for food or drinking.

It's totally unusable.

After that the people wouldn't even go near the creek. They wouldn't fish in it.

They didn't swim in it. They didn't do anything in it.

Because it just scared them completely to death, and they blamed that on the Blair witch.

[ Man ] "May, 15, 1829: Delivered twin calves this morning.

"I'm moving the entire herd to the fallow pasture...

"because three cattle died from drinking creek water.

"I'm using the pond instead.

Lloyd Wellens, Farming Journal."

[ Moorehouse ] And the town again kind of returned to normal...

one more time.

"They went into the woods prepared to find death.

"What they found was a desecration of humanity...

"at the site which trappers have referred to as 'Coffin Rock.'

On top of the rock formation--"

There was a lady lived there in town when I was a boy.

She was 50 years old when I knew her,

and she told me when she was a little girl...

she had been walking in the woods one day, and this lady appeared to her--

and she wasn't walking; she was floating in the air, really--

and took her by the hand and led her to an old house back in the woods.

And took her down in the basement and left her there and said she'd be back.

And she left and the little girl sat there, she said, for several hours.

And finally, she got scared. She was able to crawl through a window...

and ran back to town.

But in the meantime, the town had started to search for her.

They sent out a search party to look for her in the woods.

But it's plausible here that this little girl...

was only telling a story...

of the Blair witch as she had heard it from, maybe,

her parents, her siblings or her friends.

But what is strange about this case was that the first search party...

that had gone out to look for the little girl had vanished.

[ Narrator ] When the entire search party failed to return,

another search party was dispatched to find them.

What they found was a massacre.

[ Barnes ] And that search party come up on Coffin Hill or Coffin Rock...

and found those men.

[ Moorehouse ] The first search party had been killed,

laid out on a flat rock in the woods.

They had been disemboweled, and on their faces, hands and feet...

were carved these strange pagan symbols.

[ Barnes ] And they were heavily cut in by the ropes,

so they were alive when they were tied up.

And somebody had disemboweled every one of them...

and cut some letters and stuff in their foreheads.

Very good-- It wasn't crude. You could read what was there.

It was all symbolic-type stuff,

and it scared them very bad,

like most it would anybody.

I couldn't have stood there very long.

Their bodies were in a severe state of decomposition.

So the search party goes back to get help,

and when they return, the bodies have vanished without a trace.

[ Barnes ] But they could still smell death in the air,

which where men die or women die...

that you can always smell that.

And there was no sign of them there.

Now, you notice there has been an interval..

of about 60 years in between these events.

And if we move forward to 1940, which is about 60 years,

we find another interesting situation...

happens in this very same area.

[ Heather ] There are an unusually high number of children laid to rest here,

most of whom passed in the 1940s.

Yet no one in the town seems to recall anything unusual about this time,

to us, anyway.

Yet legend tells a different story,

one whose evidence is all around us,

etched in stone.

As I remember, Mr. Parr was an old hermit. [ Heather ] Right.

And he lived up on the mountain. He had a place up there. It'd been there a long, long time.

Sort of in the winter, I guess-- The fall or the winter 1940,

some of the young kids started to disappear,

and nobody-- nobody knew anything about why they were-- why they were disappearing.

Finally, one day old Mr. Parr come down into the market...

and said, "I'm finally finished."

And what did he mean by that ? I guess nobody knew at first,

but the police finally went up on the mountain,

and they searched his house and they found the bodies of seven kids from the area.

Wow. And those were the seven kids that were missing.

And then they brought them out of the woods one at a time.

It just was a terrible thing. It just tore the community up.

Each of them had again been disemboweled.

There was again reported strange markings of carvings on their hands,

on their foreheads-- ritualistic carvings, if you will.

Well, Rustin Parr admitted to this crime.

And in the court he said that...

the reason he killed the children is that he was doing...

what this old lady ghost had told him to do.

Now, it's possible that this man...

was trying to fit himself...

into the mythos of the Blair Witch,

but that's conjecture.

[ Narrator ] One child, Kyle Brody,

would escape from Parr's clutches.

He was able to give testimony, and it was his words...

that decided the fate of the Burkittsville Killer.

[ Gavel Pounding ] [ Man ] Order ! Order !

[ Man ] And ladies and gentlemen, I once again quote Kyle Brody:

"He told me to stand in the corner and face the wall.

"I could hear Emily screaming. He was cutting her.

"I looked. He was cutting a symbol on her face.

"Sometimes he would come up to me, 'Do you hear her ?

"Do you hear the woman's voice ?' I would cry.

"After a few days, he killed her. He cut her open.

"And after he took everything out of her, he left with her...

"and I never saw her again.

"When he came back, he told me not to be sad,

that he'd bring someone else back soon."

[ Narrator ] They burned Rustin Parr's house to the ground that night.

He was hanged four months later,

on November 22, 1941.

[ Gallows Doors Open ]

I had a tape one time of a television-- of a newsreel...

showing him where he was murdered--

he was killed for murdering those seven boys.

[ Man Over Speaker ] Why did you do it, Mr. Parr ?

I heard voices in my head. What kind of voices ?

A woman's. Whose voice, Mr. Parr ?

No idea who it was. Was it Satan ? Was it the Blair witch ?

Could've been. How did you kill the children, Mr. Parr ?

With knives. Were you alone in the killings ?

Yes. How did you get the children into the woods ?

Promised them things. What kinds of things ?

Candy. Did you kill other children that we don't know about ?

No. Over here, Mr. Parr.

Mr. Parr, why those seven children ?

That's what the voices told me.

Mr. Parr, the writings on the wall in your house, what do they mean ?

What were the writings on the wall, Mr. Parr ?

Did you write those ? Did you write on the walls ? No.

Who wrote on the walls, Mr. Parr ?

[ Man #2 ] You've been sentenced to death. Do you feel this is fair ?

Yes. Mr. Parr, do you think God has forgiven you ?

Yes.

Have you asked the priest for absolution ? Yes.

Members of your family been to see you ? No.

[ Reporters Clamoring ] Mr. Parr ! Mr. Parr !

[ Girl Gasping, Shrieking ]

[ Shrieking Continues ]

What ? Nothing. I don't know why...

you have to have every conversation on video.

Tape some ambience. We're making a documentary.

No about us getting lost. We're making a documentary about a witch !

I have a camera.

Doesn't hurt, 'cause we'll look back on this and laugh heartly. Believe me.

So we're working over there, and all of a sudden...

I hear kind of a commotion from the other side of the foundation.

And I hear, like, rocks banging together.

And we kind of ran around the side, and apparently what happened...

was that Pete was removing a stone, and a section of the wall just caved in.

Nobody was hurt. This was only--

This section of the wall by this time was only about four or five feet off the ground.

And so I checked and nobody was injured and I told them, clear this out a little bit.

And about 20 minutes later, Pete comes running up...

and he's got this dirty, old, like, a backpack in his hand.

By the way they had located those,

it appeared the stones had been there...

for many, many years and had not been disturbed.

So it makes you wonder how someone had removed those stones...

forensically-- in other words, stone by stone,

carefully not disturbing them...

and then putting them back in the same exact order...

that they were originally in the ground--

uh, makes you wonder why they were hiding them there.

Certainly not for someone to find them,

'cause they would stay there for years and years more...

if they hadn't have done that anthropology dig.

[ Man ] What I recognized real quickly were a couple of 16-millimeter film cans.

And there was also what looked like some videotape cartridges in there.

This had nothing at all to do...

with colonial period stuff.

And so, I called the sheriff.

Footage was found allegedly...

that was filmed by the three students.

I contacted the local color lab. We got it developed, and I reviewed the film.

And all I found was the students themselves,

some scary noises in the woods at night...

and a few examples of that,

but no concrete evidence on what happened to the students.

[ Footsteps ]

Listen.

Hello ? Hello ?

It's all around us.

This backpack was found...

in sterile soil, which is like the bottom of the site.

It's just-- You know, from there to the middle of the earth is just dirt.

The original house at the site had burned down,

and so there was a layer of ash that was like sitting...

in the interior of the house, like the basement.

So this knapsack had been in sterile soil...

with no evidence around it of disturbance.

Over the top of it was an undisturbed layer of ash.

And the whole thing was boxed in by...

basically a colonial-era wall that was undisturbed.

It was-- [ Stammering ] Even a forensic expert...

could not have put that thing into the site without disturbing...

the charcoal, the wall or the sterile soil.

It was as if it materialized. And, of course, that's not the language of science,

so I can't-- I just don't know what to say about this, really.

[ Sighs ] At the time that the footage was found, it was-- it was scary.

It was very, very eerie.

And it's not something that I'd really want to look at.

To tell you the truth, I-I've kind of avoided it.

Uh, I really don't-- I don't feel too comfortable...

with seeing the last few days of my brother's life on video.

I really just don't feel too comfortable with that. It's very eerie.

Well, when they found...

this videotape or film or recordings of whatever it was,

immediately the Blair Witch business emerged...

and people became superstitious.

And they said, well maybe this is connected to the Blair witch.

Well, I thought it was kind of fishy myself.

I looked at the whole thing as possibly a hoax or whatever.

But-- But it was still strange.

After reviewing the film I still thought it was a hoax.

Well, there's always that possibility, but, uh--

I-I think, like I mentioned earlier, I think it would be remote that it's a hoax...

because of the way the tapes were hidden, and...

the-the fact that it--

Just to view the tapes, they are very realistic.

And they do-- The tape is from a time period the students...

would have been able to have taped it.

[ Screaming ] Oh, God ! God ! [ Whimpering, Panting ]

[ Mike ] Hurry up ! I'm coming !

My boots aren't laced.

Oh, my God, what the [ Deleted ] is that ?

What the [ Deleted ] is that ?

[ Whimpering ] [ Shouting, Screaming ]

The case of the Black Hills disappearances has once again been closed.

The investigation was reopened last October after film reels and videocassettes,

supposedly belonging to the three missing film students,

were found by a Maryland University anthropology class.

Frederick County police officials declared today that...

the found footage was inconclusive...

and that all possible leads on the case have been exhausted.

Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams...

disappeared in 1994 while shooting a documentary film project...

in the Black Hills area near Burkittsville.

The three student filmmakers are still missing.

Uh, Burkittsville has only got myself and one deputy.

We did the best we could. We called in the county authorities early,

and we contacted the FBI later for more in-depth searching.

And I hate to publicly criticize someone in law enforcement.

I was in law enforcement for 32 years.

I just saw that there were things, maybe,

that could have been done that weren't done.

I did a very good job.

Well, it seems like that the-the--

That this-- something happens about every 50 or 60 years...

to make the Blair Witch theory continue on.

And I think that's probably what the cameramen are doin'.

They were hopin' to carry it on in some way, and maybe they did.

They may have disappeared. Who knows for sure ?

But, uh, it's just strange that...

it always happens almost in a 50-year pattern...

that she somehow surfaces or something surfaces that leads to her.

I think they knew the legend, but I don't think they knew the whole history.

I don't think they felt, uh...

any fear, but I don't think they felt any kind of respect.

I think to them it was just another project.

Uh, it was a way to get a grade.

And, uh, I think they met her.

And I think she met them when she was ready to.

And I think they're gone.

[ Sobbing ] I am so, so sorry...

for everything that has happened.

Because, in spite of what Mike says now, it is my fault.

Because it was my project.

Everything had to be my way.

And this is where we've ended up.

And it's all because of me that we're here now--

hungry and cold...

and hunted.

I think it's unexplained.

I think it remains unexplained what happened to them.

In my law enforcement career, I've seen people that have actually decided to...

disappear on their own and reestablish a new identity.

There was no reason in this case to do that and there's no indication that they did.

There's never been any evidence found...

to show that they're--

that they fell upon foul play, that they're no longer living.

Uh, so it's something in between,

or certainly, in the very least, something very suspicious.