You've been working pretty hard and decide
that it's time for a vacation. Wisely remembering that time you let your
girlfriend talk you into going to Eastern Europe for a vacation and you ended up fighting
for your life against Valak, the Demon Nun, you decide that you're going to play it safe
and take your new, non-demon possessed girlfriend out camping right here in the good old U-S
of A. You pack up some basic provisions, head out into the woods and with the help of your
girlfriend you pitch a tent. After that you find a place to set up camp. The Maryland woods are prime Americana- fall
is coming to North America and the leaves are changing colors, turning from green to
different shades of brown and orange. The softly rolling hills look like carpets
of color laid out in front of you. You take in the sight next to your non-demon
possessed girlfriend and thank your lucky stars that you decided to take a nice break
from the world out here in nature, where there's no phone calls or fax sheets or evil demon
nuns that make you yeet your girlfriend out a window. As darkness falls though, you feel it. The familiar spine-tingling chill in the back
of your neck, the presence of something... evil. It's out there in the woods, watching, waiting,
lurking in the deepening shadows. You try to push the thought out of your mind,
convince yourself it's just demon PTSD, but then you see it- a strange stick figure hanging
from a tree. It looks sort of like that one drawing of
the naked man by Da Vinci, but made completely out of twigs and far, far more sinister. Then you spot another, and another, and suddenly
they're hanging from the trees all around you! With that you know you can't lie to yourself
any longer, you've picked the wrong vacation spot- again- and now you're in a fight for
your life against one of America's newest legends, the evil Blair Witch. How are you going to survive this one on one
match to the death? As always, to fight your enemy you must know
your enemy. The Blair Witch's true identity is that of
Elly Kedward, an Irish settler that moved to America sometime in the late 18th century. She settled in the town of Blair, which would
later be renamed to Burkittsville, in modern day Maryland, and became a member of the local
community. One day though some children accused her of
luring them to her home in order to draw blood from them, and soon she was being accused
of witchcraft because... well, because drawing blood from children is a pretty witchy thing
to do. Whether Kedward was truly a witch or simply
an amateur phlebotomist is unknown, though what happened next in the story of Blair,
Maryland seems to indicate that if Kedward wasn't a witch before, she certainly became
a real big witch after dying. A trial was held and because being a woman
back then was basically the entire burden of proof for witchcraft, Kedward was banished
from the village and sent into exile in the middle of winter. This was in effect a death sentence, as Kedward
could not hope to survive in the wild in the dead of a particularly nasty winter. Accounts on how this exile was carried out
differ, but some state that Kedward was dragged out of town and tied to a tree to die of exposure. Other accounts state that she was tied to
a wagon instead of a tree, though that seems like a waste of a good wagon. Yet other accounts say that she was hung from
a tree by her hands and had heavy stones tied to her feet so that while she died of exposure,
she would suffer a very agonizing stretching of her body. The town did its best to forget about Kedward,
until the next winter when half of the town's children vanished in the dead of night without
a trace. Amongst the vanished children were the original
children that had accused her of witchcraft, and to this day nobody knows if their accusations
of her trying to draw blood from them were ever real, or if Kedward's killing followed
the same tragic lines as the witch hunt of Salem, Massachusetts. In that town several women were accused of
being witches by young girls, and the accusations were completely fabricated. If Kedward wasn't a witch in life, after her
murder she became one huge pissed off witch in death, and her vengeance wasn't sated with
the killing of several children. The townspeople grew fearful of the woods
and believed that they and their village had been cursed by Kedward, which is a total witch
thing to do. They quickly moved away and the town was largely
forgotten until around 1825 when a group of people rediscovered it and thought, “It's
free real estate.” To celebrate all that free real estate the
villagers threw a celebration known as the Wheat Harvest Picnic, and at some point a
young girl named Eileen Treacle wandered away from the festivities and towards the local
creek. Accounts on what happened next vary, but several
eyewitnesses claimed that they saw a ghostly hand reach out of the shallow water and pull
the young girl in, drowning her. Terrified, the witnesses fled and Eileen Treacle's
body was never found. Several days later oily bundle of sticks clogged
the creek, making the water undrinkable and unusable for washing or cooking. Animals who drank the water became ill, and
a man from out of town who drank the water died shortly after. Fast forward to 1886, when an eight year old
girl named Robin Weaver went exploring in the forest around the town and ran into an
old woman. According to Weaver, this old woman's feet
never touched the ground, as she floated a few inches above it. The old lady was kind to her and Weaver followed
her to a house deep in the woods, leaving her in the basement and promising to return
soon. Now, we know what you're thinking- who would
follow a levitating mystery old woman to a dilapidated house in the middle of the woods
and politely wait in her basement as she asked you to? Well, it was a simple, far more stupid time. When Weaver's mother realized she was missing,
the local villagers organized a search party and scoured the woods for her. In the meantime with night falling, Weaver
herself began to have second thoughts about chilling in the basement of a weird old levitating
lady's house and crawled out of a window to run back home. It's difficult to separate fact from fiction
about what happened next, but when the first search party never came out of the woods,
a second party took off to search for the searchers. The men of the first party were discovered
dead at a large, flat rocky outcropping known as Coffin Rock. Some accounts state that the men had been
tied together to form a pentagram, and had been mutilated and disemboweled while still
alive. When the second search party came back with
additional villagers to collect the bodies, the corpses were discovered gone with not
a drop of blood left behind. Fast forward to 1940 and a hermit named Rustin
Parr made a home for himself in the Burkittsville woods. He soon became troubled by strange dreams
of an old woman with long, elongated limbs. Sometimes she appeared normal, aside from
her freakishly long limbs, while other times she appeared to be wearing a woolen shawl
underneath which her body was a writhing dark mass. The woman implored her to sneak into town
and abduct children, which he brought back to the same abandoned house Robin Weaver had
been taken to. After collecting several children, Parr threw
them a nice party complete with balloons and ice cream cake, then returned them home safely
to their parents. Just kidding. He tortured and disemboweled each child while
still alive, in the same manner as had happened to the Weaver search party. Promised by the woman in his dreams that he
would have peace from her torments if he walked into town and confessed to his crime, Parr
turned himself in and told police where to find the bodies along with one survivor. Parr was sentenced to death by hanging, telling
authorities the entire time that the woman in the woods had told him to do his evil deed. At last we get to the modern day, where a
series of really boring found-footage documentaries hinted at the evil of the Blair Witch, and
inadvertently kicked off a plague of terrible, low-budget found-footage horror films that
we have only recently begun to see an end to. So you're up against the Blair Witch herself,
and she's not trying to get you to kill children, but actively trying to kill you for intruding
on her woods. Also, she's really pissed off about having
been killed herself centuries ago, and being a real witch about it by refusing to just
let things go. How are you going to defeat her? The Blair Witch is supernaturally fast, and
though apparently not able to truly teleport around from place to place she can definitely
hustle- so trying to outrun her is going to be a no-go. She's also much stronger than the average
man, and can either pin struggling victims down or use witchcraft to hold them in place
while she tortures them. The most terrifying power of the Blair Witch
though is her ability to mind control others, either through outright domination of their
minds as when she killed three college filmmakers back in 1999, or through insidious demonic
influence like in the case of Rustin Parr. You're probably already having deja vu, and
most of our fans who've seen our previous You Versus episodes already know what this
means: your first step in defeating the Blair Witch is defeating your own girlfriend. Listen, we know you worked really hard to
get a new one after having to chuck the old one out the window of an ancient Romanian
castle when she became a thrall of Valak the Demon Nun, but as you should know by now evil
forces love to use the people close to you against you. And besides, we just told you about how the
Blair Witch got a man to disembowel several children- how well do you know this new girlfriend? How much do you trust her? Do you trust her with your bowels? We thought so- time to yeet this potential
witch straight off the nearest cliff. But try to make it only a small cliff, just
tall enough that the fall breaks her legs- once you defeat the Blair Witch you'll break
her evil spell on your new girlfriend, and you can probably rescue her when she's over
trying to put your insides on the outside with a sharp knife. Now it's just you and the Blair Witch herself-
no loved ones or friends or accomplices to turn against you. Now, we can't scientifically prove this, but
we're pretty sure that the Blair Witch's powers are tied to the woods that she haunts. We're forced to go off simple deduction here,
as unfortunately anyone who might know how her powers actually work rudely refused to
tell anyone before being horrifically tortured and slaughtered. We know that she can drown people in creeks,
and she can do that really creepy thing where she surrounds you in weird stick figure dolls. She's certainly a pro at gutting both men
and children- but here's the thing, every single attack took place in the woods. There are zero accounts of her ever entering
the town whose woods she's haunted for centuries. It seems her evil soul is tied to the woods
themselves, and that gives us one pretty good idea for how to defeat her- if there's no
woods, there's no more witch. You're going to start the largest forest fire
in history. You're going to make California's yearly global-warming
fueled fires look like a campfire. You're going to make Bambi, the Lorax, Captain
Planet, and Vice President Al Gore cry crocodile tears as every single tree in Maryland goes
up in flames. Some would call this overkill, but for us
we very much like our bowels right where they are, nice and safely tucked inside our body. If every woodland animal in Maryland needs
to die and global warming accelerated by adding trillions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere,
then so be it- just take a cue from the Boomer playbook and let future generations deal with
the environmental catastrophe. Right now you're waging scorched earth warfare-
literally- against an evil entity out for your blood. Congratulations, you did it. You finally defeated the Blair Witch and saved
the world from both her evil and hordes more of terrible found-footage horror films. Now time to celebrate by finding yet another
new girlfriend because you forgot you left the new old one laying at the bottom of a
cliff before you set the whole state on fire, didn't you? Hey, maybe the next one won't get possessed
by an evil force and go all murder-happy on you. If you liked this video and want to see more,
and let's face it, of course you did! Then click on this video which is funny and
entertaining OR this video which is entertaining and funny. We'll leave the choice of which up to you,
since we know you're smart and clever enough to make the right decision.
