I Took My Son “Blair Witch Camping”

As fodder for a devastating future memoir about my parenting, I recently took my son “Blair Witch camping.” By that, I mean that my husband and I drove him out to Burkittsville, Maryland, where the 1999 horror classic The Blair Witch Project was set. It’s an absolutely terrifying movie, presented as a found-footage documentary about a crew of film students investigating an evil presence in the woods. This summer happened to be its 25th anniversary. When we loaded up the car, Omari, age 17, asked us to bring salt—to ward off Satan, not to cook.

We arrived at our campsite in the gloaming, the woods suffused with pale light. At first, Omari made uneasy jokes (“Is the Blair witch a cougar? She’s old and she likes kids.”), then complained that the trees were too sparse to be spooky. But as the darkness descended, he grew attuned to odd noises: the pop of the fire, the creak of a tree. Dipping into the brush for a marshmallow stick, he returned feeling unnerved. “A lot of movies that involve the woods focus on the thing inside the woods,” he said, “but Blair Witch is about the woods. The woods start to get to them.”

The night before, we’d all watched the movie together, and Omari said it made him feel “really bad,” so he was no longer comfortable sleeping in the tent. I’d booked a cabin for just that contingency. When it came time to sleep, he grabbed the dog and scuttled inside while we solemnly wished him good luck. Somehow, we passed the night unscathed.

The next morning at the campground office, Omari spoke at length with the man at the desk, a youngish guy who loves ’70s horror. Apparently, lots of groups—many from Denmark—show up to investigate the real-life Blair witch; they’re devastated to learn that the legend from the film is made-up. It’s basically impossible to get lost in these woods like the film crew does, he explained. He made an elaborate map, actually, of where the characters were at each point in the movie, and its geography is literally unworkable unless the witch is rotating the earth under their feet.

Omari scoffed at the premise of Blair Witch camping—the movie is fiction, the campground was nice—but then admitted he’d only slept about an hour. At first, he blamed it on forgetting his pillow, and then he confessed he was scared. The trees were menacing, and the dog seemed unsettled. “To be clear,” he said, “I did lock the door and push a chair up against it. I thought I heard some scratching in the woods.”

This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Washingtonian.

Sylvie McNamara

Staff Writer