Category: Haunted Places

By now, most people know what’s fact and fiction in the 1999 movie, The Blair Witch Project.

The Blair Witch.. didn’t impress me. Here’s what did.

Frankly, as an actual ghost hunter, the movie didn’t impress me. Sure, The Blair Witch Project was stylish in its own way, but a lot of it didn’t make sense to me.

I mean, in that era, only idiots went camping without a map they could easily read, and a hiking compass, and…

Okay, that’s the tip of the iceberg. I won’t even mention the ending, which made no sense and had no real context.

Despite that, I felt drawn to the location where it was filmed: Burkittsville, Maryland.

There was a certain vibe… an odd energy that seemed to lurk beneath some scenes in the Blair Witch film.

Even today, few seem know the actual haunted history of Burkittsville.

It has layers and layers of paranormal and unexplained phenomena, going back centuries.

The tension may have started with a feud.

The town began as “Dawson’s Purchase” in 1741. In the 1790’s, Joshua Harley and Henry Burkitt arrived in the area. From the start, they competed to control and eventually name the town.

Although Burkitt owned three-quarters of the land by 1810, the competition seemed concluded in 1824 when Harley secured the official Post Office as “Harley’s Post Office.”

However, Joshua Harley’s death in 1828 left Burkitt with the last word. He named the town Burkittsville before he, too, died in 1836.

The participants in this 40+ year rivalry may haunt the town, but there are far better explanations for Burkittsville’s ghostly spirits.

In fact, paranormal events and tragedy cover more than 100 years of Burkittsville’s history.

Even earlier, a genuine monster was reported nearby. And, according to reports, it’s still there.

As early as 1735, nearby Middletown was settled by German immigrants.

According to legends repeated in the Middletown Valley Register in the early 20th century, the community was terrorized by a monster called a Schnellegeister.

The word means “fast spirit or ghost” in German, but neighbors nicknamed it the “Snallygaster.”

Whatever its name, its colonial reputation mixed the half-bird features of the Siren with the nightmarish features of demons and ghouls.

The Snallygaster was described as half-reptile with octopus limbs, and half-bird with a metallic beak lined with razor-sharp teeth. It can fly. It can pick up its victims and carry them off. The earliest stories claim that this monster sucked the blood of its victims.

It is disturbingly similar to the movie’s descriptions of the Blair Witch.

No one knows whether the Snallygaster caused the hasty sale of most of “Dawson’s Purchase” (later Burkittsville) in 1786, and the remainder in 1803.

However, George Wine, who bought the final acreage, did not live to confirm the purchase. His death may be part of the story.

The name “Snallygaster” was a joke to some in the 20th century, but the monster been documented in the Burkittsville area as recently as 1973.

Another 18th century German settlement, Zittlestown, a mere seven miles north of Burkittsville, was also plagued with supernatural events.

Like Middletown, residents feared a large and vicious animal-spirit which was rarely seen.

An 1880’s book by anti-suffragist Madaleine Vinton Dahlgren (widow of Admiral John A. Dahlgren), documented the troubles of that community.

That’s ample evidence that something terrifying lurked in the Burkittsville area. It was certainly an ideal location for the Blair Witch Project.

However, most of Burkittsville’s actual ghosts are men who lost their lives in the Civil War.

Learn those stories, from an unscrupulous Civil War gravedigger, to spectres of the dead who push cars uphill today, in The Real ‘Blair Witch’ Ghosts – Part Two.

First read The Real ‘Blair Witch’ Ghosts – part one

Any site that’s witnessed

• Battles

• Suffering, and

• Graves where the dead were not allowed to rest…

It may be haunted.

Where the “Blair Witch Project” was filmed has all of those from Civil War times.

By 1862, wounded and dying Civil War soldiers in this area were placed in as many as 17 makeshift hospitals. Some of those “hospitals” were actually Burkittsville homes and businesses,  including the town’s tannery.

Those soldiers’ ghostly voices are still heard throughout the town.

… But the site of Burkittsville’s tannery may be the most haunted.

The tannery was torn down, but the site is still haunted.

Anyone who parks his car there overnight may find the vehicle marked with footprints from soldiers’ boots, where the car was kicked or even trampled by the ghosts of marching men.

But there are other ghosts in the area, too.

Stories — loudly proclaimed as “fiction” by some Burkittsville historians — explain why the area may be haunted.

In one account, the retreating Confederate Army paid a man named Wise to bury approximately 50 bodies.

Mr. Wise accepted the money.

… But then he tossed the bodies in an abandoned well.

Shortly thereafter, he began seeing the ghost of Sergeant Jim Tabbs of Virginia, who complained to Mr. Wise about being uncomfortable.

Mr. Wise returned to the mass grave and discovered that the body on top was that of Sergeant Tabbs, and the corpse was face down. Mr. Wise turned the body so it was facing upwards.

He thought that would be the last of it.

He was very wrong.

Perhaps the spirits of these men revealed the truth to the local officials. Whatever the cause, the authorities confronted Mr. Wise. They forced him to dig up–and properly bury–the fifty bodies that had been left in his care.

Stories say the ghosts never bothered him again, but did they truly rest in peace?

Many other fallen Southern soldiers were left behind as a necessity of war. The good people of Burkittsville recognized that something must be done for the dead, so they buried them in shallow graves. The local residents expected that, once the fighting stopped, the troops would return to bury the men properly.

When the fighting stopped, no one returned for these comrades’ bodies. Finally most — and perhaps all — of the bodies temporarily buried in the older section of Burkittsville’s Union Cemetery, were exhumed in 1868 and re-interred in Washington Confederate Cemetery.

Was this sufficient to put their souls at rest? According to Troy Taylor in his book, Spirits of the Civil War, there have been odd and ghostly occurrences in the vicinity of those shallow graves. Many nights since then, eerie lights from long-extinguished campfires appear in the nearby open fields, and dot the mountainside.

However, the mountainside is also the source of a ghostly energy that visitors to Burkittsville can experience even now. Its history is one of the great stories of the Civil War.

At sunrise on Sunday, September 14, 1862, both the Union and Confederate soldiers expected to surprise each other with an attack. It was later known as the Battle for Crampton’s Gap, but the location is now called “Spook Hill.”

On that fateful morning, the Union soldiers carried only rifles into battle. They were able to travel faster than their Confederate counterparts, who were still pushing cannons uphill when the fighting began. The Union Army’s First Division, Sixth Corps, were overwhelmingly successful in battle.

Many Confederate soldiers died struggling with the heavy cannons. Their lingering spirits are the “spooks” of Spook Hill.

The site of this battle can be found at the edge of Burkittsville, near the Civil War Correspondents’ Memorial Arch, in Gathland Park. If you stop your car at Spook Hill and set it in neutral, you will feel the car being pushed by the spectral hands of the Confederate troops.

They are still struggling to push their cannons to the top of the hill, and achieve victory in the battle which they lost over 130 years ago.

In public, Burkittsville residents claim that this is merely an optical illusion. However, a local resident, Stephen, quietly assures me that the road has been tested using construction levels and transits. Cars do indeed roll uphill, though not as readily as they did before the road was recently repaved.

Others insist that the hill is magnetic, and that force is what pulls the cars towards the top. No one has successfully tested that theory yet.

If Spook Hill contains massive amounts of a magnetic ore, this would explain why Heather’s compass did not work properly in the movie, The Blair Witch Project.

Nevertheless, with ghostly campfires, bodies in dry wells and shallow graves, footprints at the former tannery/hospital, and the events at Spook Hill, the tale of what happened to three college students in The Blair Witch Project seems almost pale by comparison to real life.

For more information about haunted Burkittsville and vicinity, ask your local library for these books and videos:

• Spirits of the Civil War, by Troy Taylor, © 1999
• The Spirits of Frederick, by Alyce T. Weinberg, © 1992
• Ghosts & Legends of Frederick County, by Timothy L. Cannon and Nancy F. Whitmore, © 1979
• Video: The Unexplained – Civil War Ghosts, from A&E

Other websites related to Burkittsville, and Civil War ghosts:

• • Burkittsville, Maryland’s website – Sounds quaint, doesn’t it. Too quaint, for its actual history.
  • Mark Nesbitt’s Civil War Ghost Trails – with EVP!
  • Author Troy Taylor’s website, Ghosts of the Prairie

This two-part article originally appeared at Suite 101, in November 1999.