When the 10th Anniversary of the Blair Witch Project phenomena came and went, I wrote a short post about it where I described that my friend Timmy had found the partially burnt remains of Heather Donahue’s personal property in a “forest” that I thought was in Colorado.
Imagine my surprise when Erika, Timmy’s fiance, e-mailed me to set the story straight:
I was there with Timmy when the documents were found. It was actually almost exactly two years ago, not in 2002, as your entry states. We were in Joshua Tree National Park, which is about 2 or 3 hours outside Los Angeles. We planned to camp for one night, got stranded by a freak blizzard at the first campsite we hit after entering the park, and found the strange semi-burnt papers as soon as we got out of the car once the snow abated.
I can assure you that his story was absolutely true. I saw everything he saw. We saw her tax documents, bank account statements, letters from her mother, letters to men, playbills, yes, MANY headshots, and hundreds of fragments of journal pages.
The strange thing about all this, is that my friend who happens to be obsessed with my strange Heather Donahue experience, just found your blog site tonight, only 7 days or so after you wrote the entry on her. We’ve been talking about how we needed to find some resolve to this situation and to try to solve the mystery of Heather’s burnt stuff, but haven’t figured out how to contact her. The materials were actually FedEx’ed to the ranger station/Joshua Tree, CA police department. We never heard anything back from them, despite their promises that they would inform us when they had any new information. I don’t know if they even tried to contact Heather.
Yes, the whole Heather Donahue fiasco is so very very weird…Trust us, we wanted to keep all the stuff! Actually our number one motivation was to send it all in to Found Magazine, but I guess Timmy’s mom was the one who finally convinced us the law had to be involved just in case there was “foul play” so off it all went to the rangers!
Sadly, we don’t have any pictures! I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to us to take any. The weather was really terrible…it was cold and the wind was blowing 30-40 mph all afternoon and night, so I guess we were more focused on keeping our tent from blowing away!
The more I started researching Heather Donahue, the more I felt bad for trying to find the moment in her life when she decided to burn it all and start over. Like this bit from a 2003 interview:
It was quick–before I really even got a chance to say “hello” it was over. The backlash… (a long pause as Ms. Donahue takes a drink from a glass of water), um… I don’t understand the success of the film and I don’t understand the backlash. I have no idea what happened back there, it’s like driving by a car wreck. I was chased once in my car, been confronted and called names on the street, driven off the road–it’s been hard…There’s a lot of numbness in the world now, y’know, the more information we have, the more fragmented things become, and the more gaps there are to be filled with fear and anxiety. All this technology for connection and what we really only know more about is how anonymous we are in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know if I’m talking now about the success of the film or the fallout.
Her last project I know of was a movie called The Morgue released last year, and I hear unconfirmed rumors that she lives in Nevada City, CA and has a dog.
And her stuff might still be in Joshua Tree.
