Frederick County In General

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The Blair Witch Project. "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found." This brilliant teaser and the innovative 1999 micro-budget folk-horror movie it promoted put Burkittsville, the nominal location of all the eerie events, permanently on the legend-tripping map. The movie, however, is fictional, and most of its principal photography in October 1997--everything in the woods, basically--was  in neighboring Montgomery County, specifically Seneca Creek State Park. Still, Frederick County locations are seen early in the movie, as Heather (in the banner above), Josh and Mike film themselves preparing for their fateful hike. Sites are listed here chronologically as they appear in the movie.

  • Germantown. This wasn't a filming location, but the now-defunct Circuit City at 21040 Frederick Road was where the filmmakers bought two RCA Hi-8 camcorders on Preproduction Day 5, intending to use them for most of the onscreen footage. They wound up relying largely on a borrowed CP-16 film camera, though they were unsure how it worked (see next item).
  • Burkittsville. Historic Burkittsville Union Cemetery (https://www.burkittsvillecemetery.org/), its gates downtown where Main Street crosses Burkittsville Road, was the site of Heather's opening monologue, with the countryside behind her and the tombstones and monuments all around. The first take of this scene, and of the production, was not auspicious: Loading the film backward created a nasty noise and a camera full of costly "film salad." Retake! The cemetery's Find a Grave page is https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/80816/burkittsville-union-cemetery
  • Knoxville. The Hillside Hotel (https://www.thehillsidehotelknoxville.top/), still in operation at 19105 Keep Tryst Road, was the Hillside Motel when Heather, Josh and Mike checked into Room 118 and filmed themselves hanging out, before and after a supply run to neighboring Hillside Liquors, also still in operation at 19119.
  • Adamstown. Stups Market, still in operation at 5550 Mountville Road, was the wooden-floored stop-and-shop where the crew filmed an interview with garrulous local Jim King, a retiree and occasional actor from Montgomery County who had been prepped for his "spontaneous" appearance.
  • Brunswick. The long-closed Mommer's Diner, 1 South Maple Avenue, was the Silver Rail Diner when the crew shot spontaneous on-camera interviews at lunchtime with actual locals who took the "student filmmakers" at face value. These included 17-year-old server Michele Hallex, plus Susie Gooch and her scene-stealing 2-year-old, Ingrid, known to fans as "the Blair Witch baby."

See Blazi, Matt. 8 Days in the Woods: The Making of The Blair Witch Project. Self-published, 2019. Blazi also leads occasional overnight tours of the locations: http://www.blairwitchexperience.com/

The ghosts of massacred Hessians. According to legend, an abandoned tavern somewhere on the road between Frederick, Maryland, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was haunted for many years by the screams, shrieks and sobs of a group of Hessian prisoners who had been massacred in an upstairs bedroom by drunken patriots during the Revolutionary War. Long after the building was only a memory, human bones unearthed there supposedly served as proof of the atrocity--though why the killers would have confessed their butchery is left unexplained, as is the location of the tavern. See Cannon, Timothy L., and Nancy F. Whitmore. Ghosts and Legends of Frederick County. Illus. Darby Pannier. Frederick, Md.: Self-published, 1979; reprinted, 1990. See "Ghosts and Legends," Page 33.