The township of Blair, Maryland is located in North Central Maryland, two hours from Washington, D.C.
Feb 1785: Several children accuse Elly Kedword of luring them into her home to draw blood from them. Kedward is found guilty of witchcraft, banished from the village during particularly harsh winter and presumed dead.
Nov 1786: By midwinter all of Kedward's accusers along with half of the towns children vanish. Fearing the curse, the townspeople flee Bair and vow never to utty Elly Kedward's name again.
Nov 1809: The Blair Witch Cult is published. This rare book, commonly considered ficton, tells of entire town cursedby an outcast witch.
1824: Burkittsville is founded on the Blair site.
Aug 1825: Eleven witnesses testify to seeing a pale woman's hand reach up and pull ten-year-old Eileen Treacle into Tappy East Creek. Her body is never recovered, and for thirteen days after the drowing the creek is clogged with oily bundles of sticks.
March 1886: Eight year old Robin Weaver is reported missing and search parties are dispatch. Although Weaver returns, one of the search parties does not. Their bodies are found weeks later at Coffin Rock tied together at the arms and legs and completely disemboweled.
Nov-1940- May-1941: Starting with Emily Hollands, a total of seven children are abducted from the area surrounding Burkittsvillle, Maryland.
May 25,1941: An old hermit named Rustin Parr walks into a local market and tells people there that he is "Finally finished." After Police hike for four hours to his secluded house in the woods, they find the bodies of seven missing children in the cellar. Each child has been ritualistically murdered and disembowled. Parr admits to everything in detail, telling authorities that he did it for "an old woman ghost" who occupied the woods near his house. He is quickly convicted and hanged.
Oct 20, 1994: Montgomery College students Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams arrive in Burkittsville to interview locals about the legend of Blair Witch for a class project. Heather interviews Mary Brown an old quite insane woman who has lived in the area all her life. Mary claims to have seen the Blair Witch one day near Tappy Creek in the form of a hairy half-human, half-animal beast.
Oct 21, 1994: In the early morning Heather interviews two fishermen who tell the filmmakers that Coffin Rock is less than twenty miles from town and easily accessible by an old logging trail. The filmmakers hike into the Black Hills Forest shortly thereafter and are never seen again.
Oct 25, 1994: The APB is issued. Josh's car is found later in the day parked on Black Rock Road.
Oct 26, 1994: The Maryland State Police launch their search of the Black Hills area, an operation that lasts ten days and includes up to one hundred men aided by dogs, helicopters, and even a fly over by a Department of Defense Satellite.
Nov 5, 1994: The search is called off after 33,000 man hours fail to find a trace of the filmmakers or any of their gear. Heather's mother, Angie Donahue, begins an exhaustive personal search for her daughter and her two companions.
June 1995: The case is declared inactive and unsolved.
Oct 16, 1995: Students from the University of Maryland's Anthropology Department discover a duffel bag containing film cans, DAT tapes, video-cassettes, a HI-8 video camera, Heather's journal and a CP-16 film camera buried under the foundation of a 100 year old cabin. When the evidence is examined, Burkittsville Sheriff Ron Cravens announced that the 11 rolls of blacn and white film and 10 H18 video tapes are indeed the property of Heather Donahue and her crew.
Dec 15, 1995: After an initial study of the bag's contents, select pieces of the film footage are shown to the families. According to Angie Donahue, there are several unusal events but nothing conclusive. The familes question the thoroughness of the analysis and demanded another look.
Feb 19, 1996: The families are shown a second group of clips that local law enforcement officals consider to be faked. Outraged, Mrs. Donahue goes public with her criticism and Sheriff Cravens restricts all access to the evidence; a restriction that two lawsuits fail to lift.
March 1, 1996: The Sheriff's department announces that the evidence is inconclusive and the case is once again declared inactive and unsolved. The footage is to be released to the families when the legal limit of its classification runs out, on Ocotber 16, 1997.
Oct 16, 1997: The found footage of their children's last days is turned over to the families of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. Angie Donahue contacts Haxan Films to examine the footage and piece together the events of October 20-28, 1994.
July 1998: The Blair Witch Project will be shown to all to prove that the filmmakers story can be told.
