The Blair Witch Project is the name of a collection of tapes filmed by student filmmakers Heather Donahue, Mike Williams, and Josh Leonard in October 1994. Shot in the forests of the Black Hills outside of Burkittsville, Maryland, the tapes are considered by many to be the most conclusive evidence of the supernatural in human history.[1] The film has been the subject of many conspiracy theories, debunking attempts, and attempts at authentication, and has been deemed by some experts to be “incompatible with reality.”[2][3][4]

Consisting of 81 minutes of footage from a [CP-16] film camera and [Hi8] camcorder, the contents of the film consist of Donahue, Williams, and Leonard attempting to create a student film project about the history of the Blair Witch.[5] The mix of footage covers four days from October 20 to October 23, from their arrival in Burkittsville, to the moments before their final disappearance. The tapes were discovered by an anthropology class from the University of Maryland in October 1995 buried underneath a staircase in the colonial-era house of Elly Kedward.[6]

The Blair Witch Project has been of considerable interest for decades due to the unexplained nature of its subjects.[7] As of 2024, Donahue, Williams, and Leonard remain missing, with the Maryland State Police maintaining an open investigation. Many investigators have been left baffled by the contents of the Blair Witch tapes, as much of the contents of the tapes are “simply unexplainable.”[8][9] Spokesmen of the Maryland State Police have shown definitive proof that they were searching known areas of the forest at the same time the students were known to be there. Further, the house shown at the end of the tapes is not known to exist in the area. While the tapes were found in the ruins of a known house, the complete structure shown in the tapes “does not exist in Maryland” according to Johns Hopkins historian Erin Barrow. How the tapes got to the ruins of the Kedward house remains a mystery.[10][11][12][13]

To this day, the Blair Witch Project tapes have been a source of great discussion by both believers and skeptics of the supernatural. Believers, such as UCLA’s John Harkin, consider the tapes to be “without question the best evidence of forces beyond what we know,”[14] while skeptics such as Dartmouth’s Jennifer Blasé have called the tapes “perhaps the most elaborate hoax in modern history, but still a hoax.”[15] The Maryland State Police maintains an active tipline for Donahue, Williams, and Leonard.