Blair Witch- Half Century Tragedies

Elly Kedward, he said, had lived in a town called Blair, which, in the late 1700s, stood on the very spot where Burkittsville was today. Kedward was accused of witchcraft and banished from Blair. Exposed to the harsh elements, she died in the forest.
The following winter half the town's children disappeared. People said the town was cursed, a curse brought on by Kedward, the Blair Witch. The locals fled Blair. Peter Branwall Burkitt bought the abandoned land in 1823 and renamed the town Burkittsville.
In 1825, Eileen Treacle drowned in Tappy East Creek. Crawford had missed something in the letters and news reports: Treacle, Green said, had drowned in a foot of water. Pulled under by an old woman who looked remarkably like the extant drawings of Elly Kedward.
In 1886, another little girl disappeared. She returned a few days later (a little the worse for wear), but the five-man search party sent to rescue her vanished from sight, never to be seen again. Some said they had been disemboweled at a place called Coffin Rock.
In 1941 there was Parr. The connection to the curse there came in the last sentence of the Washington Press article: the voices Parr had heard, the ones that told him to kill the children.
They belonged, according to the hermit, to the witch.
Green poured himself a cup of coffee and took a seat behind Cravens's desk. Crawford grabbed the chair next to it.
"So roughly every half century," Green said, "something happens. The witch returns. At least that's what some people think: Barnes says those dates don't really work, if you look closely, there's always weird stuff happening in those woods, but--" he shrugged.
"Fifty years, huh?" Crawford remembered the date on that front page of the Washington Press. November 1941. And here it was 1991.
"I guess we're due for another visit," he said.

- Blair Witch: Graveyard Shift, chapter Five